The land of McMusic

We are "lucky" enough to live in a country where consumer choice reigns, the customer is always right and if you can't buy it at the big box store, you probably didn't need it anyways. Our foods are grown ultra fast, ultra big, ground up, then pressed into uniform shapes in a grotesque caricature of the form it used to take. What we eat, breathe and learn for the most part is churned out factory line style and we happily devour every delicious morsel of it. I'm not preaching doom and gloom for us, nor am I pleading for the Amish life. I'm just saying *it is*, and some of it is rather addicting.

 The same fast food mentality goes for our airwaves. Music is vastly different than the way it used to be proposed to the masses. Real instruments have been traded in for synth, real vocals are tweaked with autotune, and the words are sometimes best left unexamined for fear that they may be the lyrical equivalent of Styrofoam. In the past a song would be played on the radio, people would not know the artist and have to wait for the DJ to play it again or wait until they caught the name of the artist and then request it, or buy the single. On *tape*. Now, only a few bars into the tune, one can whip out their smartphone, pull up an app and have the title, artist, song, and newest album, video and 100 parodies downloaded all before the chorus even plays.

 I am a fan of the digital age. I have been known to prefer the beat of popular dance songs to the serene plucking of harps, but you know sometimes the playlist at our radio stations needs to be shaken up a bit.

 I had the opportunity to watch my daughter in a dance recital and one of her friends choreographed a dance to a (at that time) new song. It was a *beautiful* song. The song was so poignant, harmonized by a well known artist and a new up and comer. I couldn't get enough of it and it was promptly lodged directly into my mental loop, to be played and replayed to the point of distraction.

Loud and proud.

Oh again? Don't mind if I do.

 When it came on the radio (as it was bound to) the conversation in the car would stop and Sy and I would bellow it out at the top of our lungs. This went on for WEEKS! Those weeks stretched into months. Each consecutive exposure to the song was wonderful! Until the inevitable happened.

One day, all four local pop stations were playing it at the same time. I had officially had too much of a good thing. After that, each time I heard that song, it corroded my brain just a little bit. Synapse by synapse it was napalming its way through me until when I heard it, I shuddered an involuntary quake and wished for it to be over. But on and on it plays.

Its..... everywhere.

 True to how consumerism has shaped me, I was done with it. Like a junkie looking for something to satisfy the itch, I  flicked of the radio station and it was passed over. Onto the next!

Its a catchy tune. Catchy like the plague.