Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself

On Pedestrian v. "Serious" Art:

p. 198-200

Living in Bloomington: one of the things that I do, I mean, you have to listen to alot of shitty country music. 'Cause that's like pretty much all there is on the radio, when you're tired of like, listening to Green Day on the one college station.  And these country musics that are just so--you know, "Baby since you've left I can't live, I'm drinking all the time" and stuff.  And I remember just being real impatient with it.  Until I'd been living here about a year.  And all of a sudden I realized that, what if you just imagined that this absent lover they're singing to is just a metaphor?  And what they're really singing to is to themselves, or to God, you know? "Since you've left I'm so empty I can't live, my life has no meaning."  That in a weird way, I mean they are incredibly existentialist songs.  That have the patina of the absent, of the romantic shit on it just to make it salable.  But that all the pathos and heart that comes out of them, is they're singing about something much more elemental being missing, and their being incomplete without it.  Than just, you know, some girl in tight jeans or something.



Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself by David Lipsky