Hard Times With Soft Rock

The fickle finger of fate spun my radio dial, then cruelly ripped the knob off the faceplate.

The finger was actually on my friend's drunken hand, but we knew it was fate when the needle landed on the local housewife mellow-rock station. They play the kind of music you forget even while you listen to it, the schlock that blends into the background of your life and stays there - mercifully camouflaged in the soundtrack of wasted youth - if it weren't for the fatigued repetition of last decade's hits. It's not lack of cock that makes housewives desperate: it's this music filling minivans with the same darkness that creeps through lost minds as they slip into aspirin comas and lukewarm bathwater.

It fills my car like a fog and I turn the windshield wipers on under a brilliant sky, but the suffocating dullness is inside the windshield, soothing me like a lethal injection. It doesn't hurt, it's not sharp like whiskey stealing your soul or burning like smoke hitting the back of your throat, but it's there and the beast is patient. I listen to the Backstreet Boys, Jewel, Prince, Human League, music from the last fifteen years and straight out of the forgotten back drawer of the recording industry's filing cabinet. "But I like Jewel," some might say, "and Dido's hot." Yeah, she is, and she's got a pretty voice, but without Eminem punctuating her refrains she gets a little tedious while I'm trying to cruise around town. No one respects the old factory system pumping Bad English, "When I see you smile." There's no thumping bass in "100 Years" by Five For Fighting.

And under no circumstances, outside of the very narrow world of back closet perversions, should a grown man be observed rocking out to Avril Lavigne.

The obvious solution is to pop a CD in the dash and return to homeostasis. All things being equal, burning a mix of MP3s is the cheaper alternative to fixing the knob. It makes sense. So do a lot of things we never do, like quitting smoking, or not driving so fast, or wearing different socks when the ones we have on work alright. Whoever can explain the concrete wall between "should" and "do" will hit upon the greatest psychological breakthrough since Freud coined the phrase "anal fixation."

Do The Cranberries still record music?

I was rolling south through the city's colon when a red light stopped me and a tricked-out Honda sailed alongside. The windows were down, the system was up, and the three guys crammed inside stared me up and down. It was the social sizing up that a fat kid gives a hamburger, or a snowboarder gives a hill dusted with fresh powder. I looked like fun, and they looked bored, the light freezing us in a pregnant moment ready to burst into violence. They turned their system way past healthy levels, their rusty exhaust system vibrating like a tambourine in a Southern Baptist choir, the bass concussion pushing my aerial back and forth with invisible punches. They lured me into a game of Break the Eardrums like cold blooded professionals.

I answered with my own system, door-mounted three inch speakers straining under the impossible treble of Kelly Clarkson screeching "Since You Been Gone" They tweaked the bass to drown Kelly and their laughter. Other drivers rolled their windows up as their vehicles began shaking like toys in an earthquake. I spun the volume knob, staring them down with my coldest gaze when they dealt the killing blow…

The assholes shut off their music. Completely.

I was left in a pack of heavy traffic, windows rolled down, speakers in their death throws blasting "Since You Been Gone" for all the world.

I fucking hate soft rock.