Over the summer, I worked at the Hilton hotel in Minneapolis performing mindless tasks under mindful eyes.
Aside from weathering phone calls from people outraged by Paris Hilton's latest interview on Larry King, I also sat through endless hours of top-40 radio. KDWB, which has been dishing the city with current top pop tunes since 1959 (and therefore, certainly must have seen better days), was constantly playing, and no matter how many times I would test the patience of my co-workers by changing the frequency, it would always migrate back to the same within minutes.
Now I like the novelty of a good pop hit just as much as the next guy, and it's easy for me to find amusement of some kind in practically any song ever made.
But too much is too much. It seemed as though my co-workers could never get quite enough of the same derivative songs repeated into the black hole of endlessness, hosted by manic DJs with their vague promises of vacation giveaways that were just a lucky phone call away. On the stations I chose, the songs were always too weird"" and not repeated (nearly) enough. The DJs were ""boring."" So I relented, and eventually, I learned to love it.
Of course, I went through all the natural phases before I finally settled on the bliss of acceptance. First and foremost came excruciating pain, which must have hit around the 15th repetition of Avril Lavigne's ""Girlfriend"" within one single day. Several days later came unexpected humor, when ""Party Like a Rock Star"" came on for the umpteenth time - with its nauseatingly Guitar Hero-esque riff spinning crazy circles in my mind - and as I watched people tap their toes, I finally became completely drunk on my sense of unabashed alienation.
My co-worker Steve detected and shared in my distaste for the song, even as he hummed along with it under his breath, and pulled me aside once and said: ""I feel like you and I know a lot about music, not like these other people. What do you think of Alanis Morissette?""
Finally, when KDWB was doing a promotion called ""Lose the tip of your pinky for Gwen Stefani tickets,"" and I had plundered the philosophical depths of lyrics such as ""You're way too beautiful girl / that's why it'll never work,"" I became desensitized, and let me tell you: It felt wonderful. I zoned. I completely spaced. I thought about the end of the music industry and the end of the world at large, and at least for a brief second, I managed to stop caring about everything.
On my way home from downtown that day I blasted the new White Stripes disc in my car so loud that a cop pulled me over. ""Son,"" he asked, ""why are you so angry?""
""Excuse me?"" I replied, completely mystified.
""Well it just seems like you've got something to prove there with your radio turned up and your windows down like that."" I thought for a second about explaining the necessity of the loud music - something to blast myself out of my disaffected daze - but considering this cop resembled the evil shape-shifting one from ""Terminator 2
