Music tourists

We drove from Idaho to Oregon on Friday and since we didn't have any CDs to listen to in the rental car (except for the non-skipping half of The Man From Snowy River soundtrack), we decided to be music tourists. The only time I ever hear popular music in the UAE is when I'm in H&M or at spinning class, so...yeah. Twelve hours in the car was the perfect opportunity to listen to some American radio. At one point near Boise, we actually said to the girls, "Listen, girls! This is the kind of music that Americans listen to!" Like I said: music tourists.

So what did I think? Well, a lot of the songs sound the same to me. And I'm not the only one who's noticed.


Apparently, you have to overproduce everything these days. You can't just, oh I don't know, play the guitar and sing? Or xylophone, as the case may be. The last thing that song needed was jazzing up.

The most-heard song was Call Me Maybe, by far. Call Me Maybe is the almost-perfect Best/Worst Song: the song that you love but also hate but also LOVE. My personal favorite Best/Worst Song like that is Party in the USA (and I found out a few weeks ago that Ira Glass agrees with me). We also heard a lot of Payphone by Maroon 5, and that song about "the sun goes down, the stars come out." That and the other songs sure are catchy, and it made for fun - if a bit homogeneous - road-trip listening. And now I feel like I know a little bit more about American music than I did before.