Cross-Cultural Experience

In accord with the mores of the day, I am a believer in the benefit of cross cultural experiences. Speaking of Accords, I just bought one, and it came with a three month free subscription to XM radio. Now I probably haven't listened to much contemporary popular music for several decades now, so I figured that maybe I should try to catch up a bit. XM 20 plays top twenty songs (somebody's top twenty) all the time, so it was a perfect occasion.

One slight problem is that they start their cycle every morning approximately at the time I leave for work, so by the time I get there, they have only reached number eleven or so, so I may be getting a biased sample. As it happens, it seems music may have evolved a bit in the last few decades, so I'm a bit vague on the precise genres involved. Most of it sounds to my untrained ear like a cross between rock and hip hop.

I should mention one little problem that I have with music: it tends to get stuck in my head. This is not so bad if the music involved is Papageno's magic bells from The Magic Flute, or even Abba's Cassandra. T-Shirt or Fall for You, not so much. Most of it, fortunately, doesn't seem to leave much of an engram, but there is also some stuff I like: So What, for example.

One oddity that those more in tune with the contemporary scene might clear up for me: the voices sound funny - I suspect that they are digitally altered. Is that right? I asked my friend Lou about this, since he is a bit more tuned in than I. He suggested that I should ask Dr. M.

So, Dr. M., if you are listening, did you forget to teach some important stuff during your post doc? Not that I didn't appreciate the fluid dynamics stuff, but what about the music?

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