can’t wait to get on the road again
Philadelphia (2 trips)
NJ
Banff
Niles, Michigan/South Bend, Indiana
NC
the hills of WV
Charleston, SC (2 trips)
accomplishments
added more dents to my automobile
delivered pizzas
survived multiple attacks from the sunrays upon my skin
forgot the words to a wedding song and butchered the song
increased my running endurance by one mile (ten was the goal)
I count it one of the bitter ironies of life that my coworkers (at my second job) have a fondness for rap.
Fifty Cent, Tupac (yeah, I thought he was dead too), and the scores of rap artists who have affixed the Lil’ prefix to their names—they all are making me cynical about the state of the arts in the culture.
Downhill goes the public taste, happily bouncing along in its proverbial handbasket. Entropy is doing her dirty work on public taste, it seems. As the bank accounts of rappers and boy bands grow exponentially, the great pieces in the Western musical heritage are relegated to ice-cream truck jingles and the few devoted piano students.
Well, having now recovered from my lapse into nauseating nostalgia, I’ll have to acknowledge that popular music has probably always captured the lowest common denominator, and not much more. That’s what makes it popular. For every Mozart and Tchaikovsky and Rutter, I suppose there were countless popular musicians whose bland unmemorable drivel lies forever buried in musical archives, never again to be resurrected (or so we hope). Only a select few can transcend time and changing culture and actually be remembered. Future generations will be spared the popular drivel of today, and will instead enjoy the drivel of their own, as well as the select few musical creations of our generation that will manage to transcend time and changing cultures.
So it’s with a fresh hope that I declare that Fifty Cent and Britney Spears will go the way of the Swinging Blue Jeans and the Buggles. Forever plunged into obscurity (and rightly so).
I write today to extend a hearty welcome-back to Joseph Apple, the chief editor of and a contributing writer to the Rivertree. After a summer of gallivanting about the South Carolinian countryside, installing aluminum siding on houses, he was married. He promises to start blogging again and to never desert his readership again.