Cotton Candy for My Ears

I'm sitting in a car on the side of the road near Hebron, North Dakota.  The temperature is slowly creeping towards the record 105 heat index predicted for today.  The asphalt trucks have stopped for now, so I get a quick break from the heat.  They're paving highway 139 in Morton County, and I drew the short straw landing a two-week stint in the prairielands of western North Dakota.  But that's not important right now.

I'm tuned in to 92.9, “Y93 the Hits,” letting the hooks that blare across the airwaves sink deeper into my cerebral places.  I know they're deep because they stay even after the radio is off, cooing and crooning those irresistibly catchy melodies until I'm reduced to pre-pubescensce, singing along with Justin Bieber at the top of my lungs about how I would treat you if I was your boyfriend, babe’.  And you know what? I love it.

Here's the thing... I like to think of myself as a somewhat level-headed, rational, well-educated human being with a penchant for life's deeper mysteries.  And everything about these tunes seems to feed the superficiality and instant gratification of the insatiable masses.  How shallow does that make me?

Not to plumb the depths of the treasures hidden within the deepest recesses of pop music, but at least hear me out.  There is a reason that people--en masse--react so similarly in such great numbers to particular voices.  In essence, there is a reason that things become popular.  Though these reasons are many and the sea of intangibles vast, there is a universality hidden (you don't have to dig too deep) beneath the surface that makes these shared experiences--so often at the heart of pop culture--cry out to us.  Is there truth here?  Absolutely.

We all want to be loved, and we all feel anger and pain when that love is lost.  We are all trying to find our identity; our purpose...and our very bones scream for meaning.  It's an uphill battle; two steps forward and one step back; life knocks you down, and you get back up again; love hurts... and all of those other laughable bumper sticker cliches that we come to find weren't actually too far off.

In the immortal words of Miley Cyrus: 

"Every step I'm taking
Every move I make feels
Lost with no direction
My faith is shaking

But I gotta keep trying
Gotta keep my head held high."

There is truly unspeakable comfort in knowing that we are not alone on our journey.

Now don't get me wrong. There is art and there is trash, and opening our minds to a full-frontal sensory assault of hedonism is deadly.  Life does have levels...or maybe it would be better to think of them as layers; unfounded hierarchy really has no legitimate king.  Believe it or not, though, I agree:  There are better things to be concerned with than trying to determine who let the dogs out.

I'm just saying, the human experience is universal, and none the less real because it comes from common, sometimes inarticulate lips.