I long most days for a voice of unnatural music.
Whether it’s a great tenor or soprano or the voice of Muddy Waters, I need music that bends a bright spear.
So when I turn on the radio and hear country music I want to throw myself onto stones by leaping from a great height.
The other night I couldn’t sleep and I went up and down the dial and thereby scoured the midnight static.
An adenoidal, sullen white boy was whining tunelessly about how he turned out alright despite the fact his mother smoked and drank and they never had seatbelts in the family car and no one in the lad’s fairy childhood was ever forced to wear a bicycle helmet–sweet Christ on a crutch, the fookin’ song went on and on…
And the voice, the voice, like melting plastic…
This is music to make your blood grow cold. And Americans listen to it and think its poetry.
I wouldn’t begrudge anyone his or her melting plastic.
Not gonna be the Grinch.
It was rather silly of me to turn on the radio.
Once, against all odds, I turned on a daytime television show, one of those talky celebrity chat fests and Lo and Behold there was the great tenor Placido Domingo singing “Panis Angelicus” and I was utterly uplifted both by the song and by the sheer improbability of the situation.
Then they cut to a commercial for Preparation H. Really. No joke.
S.K.
Planet of the Blind 