Rush Limbaugh and the Power of Music

Do you listen to the words in any of the music that MTV, iTunes, and Clear Channel feed you, or do you just like "the beat" or think that "he/she has a great voice"? I agree, lyrics are overrated, as are words in general. I barely know how to read or write, but thanks to the miracle of voice recognition software, I can still successfully operate a blog that people can listen to using other software intended to help blind people access the Internet. Sometime, though, words can be dangerous, which is why God/America created music.

Take the song "Unfaithful" by Rihanna, for example. To be fair, this song was not written by said artist, but by a group of corporate hacks who's goal is to sell as much homogeneous garbage as possible (and who are apparently very, very good at their chosen profession). That said, every time I hear this song at the gym, I feel a strong urge to reach down my throat and rip my own spinal cord out through my mouth to stop the unbearable agony that this song causes me. This is because I have a rare medical condition that leaves me unable to ignore song lyrics, and so I am forced to actually think about what she is saying. In case you are morbidly curious, the song is about how painful it is for her to see her boyfriend destroyed by her ongoing affair. Right.

Back to my main point, though. If you actually read the lyrics to this song, or listened to someone read a transcript of it, you would probably not survive. Your mind simply could not handle the stress of such banality, and your brain would be ripped apart like the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in a hurricane. This is why you simply listen to "the beat" and "her voice" every time you watch the video, play the song on your iPod, or request it for the fifth time today on the radio. If the music was not there to protect you from the words, there would be dire consequences.

Still don't believe me? Well, that's convenient, because I have created a demonstration to prove my point. What I have here is an excerpt from Rush Limbaugh's first radio broadcast after completing a drug treatment program (that's right, it happened). Normally, this would be impossible to listen to, and it might even be dangerous. The clip has been edited, however, and set to the intro from "None Shall Pass" by Aesop Rock (a great song available for free download here), rendering it magically tolerable. Just listen.

If you were to listen to this excerpt in its original form, you would need a week long drug and alcohol bender to erase it from your brain before you could function normally again. Thanks to Aesop, though, it's still not good, but at least you're distracted from the words. And that, my friends, is the power of music.

Note: This post violates multiple copyright laws, and uses a good song is a way that would almost certainly not be appreciated by the artist (my apologies to Aesop Rock and Definitive Jux Records). It does, however, mock Rush Limbaugh. And that, I think we can all agree, is what really matters.