The Long Drive Home (Or How I Learned to Love J.Lo)
How I Spent My Thanksgiving Vacation:
In Wichita, Kansas (don't ask)
At Denny's, surrounding by screaming toddlers, eating turkey dinner with fat globule gravy and cranberry sauce that arrived in a plastic container (please don't ask)
Taking a quick dinner break before my boyfriend Nick and I crammed our food-stuffed selves back into the car for the rest of a long drive back to Minneapolis from Dallas, during which we listened to as much pop radio as we possibly could.
Okay, the music--that, you can ask about. What is it about taking a long road trip through America's heartland--or through the breadbasket or the dustbowl or the chickenplatter or whereveryouare--that is so condusive to listening to J. Lo? For some reason, when I'm driving through Oklahoma City, I actually believe her when she insists that even though she's got an engagement ring the size of her well-shaped ass, she's "still Jenny from the block." Exactly which block, P. Diddy's still trying to find out. But at least we know it's in the Bronx: When she gives her shout out to her hometown, it's all you can do not to yell along with her. (Even if your own "block" is in the very hip town of, uh, Portland, Oregon.)
Out on the road, we couldn't listen to any of the CDs we brought along: The last time I listened to Oval, it was snowing outside and the crackle of the CD was almost a specific interpretation of what was going on outside. It was perfect. But here in the car, it just sounded like bad inter-station static. Nick pointed out that, during a road trip, the radio seems even more "experimental" and jarring than our CDs: Every time a song ends and the DJ comes back on the air, there's some sort of ear-busting crash of explosive sounds before a booming alto voice comes in with the ridiculous call letters: "KRZY... music so good, you'll go INSANE!"
In fact, everything sounded more experimental on our trip. The Neptunes' production of Clipse's single was suddenly the most outlandish hip hop beat we'd heard since "Get Ur Freak On." It's funny, Nick and I talked about how people like Pita and Fennesz used to be the epitomy of experimental music, and now they're releasing CDs that sound the same as their then-groundbreaking work circa 1994. And now it's these hip hop artists who are bending more traditional sounds into something confusing and amazing.
Clipse, Eminem, J.Lo, even friggin No Doubt sound amazing when you're in the car. Driving past greasy McDonalds and generic billboards and tired hitchhikers and empty hotel rooms and roadkill skunks, you can't really concentrate on anything except sound. Sometimes NPR will just give you nothing but sad stories about bad priests, so you end up listening to music. It's what keeps you awake on road trips, what passes the hours when you've got something like 17 hours until you're back home, what connects you to the other cars on the road who are probably listening to the same thing on their radios. It's our decade's version of the two lovers staring at the same moon from separate faraway places. It's a cliche. And after a long, hard weekend of being stuck by myself out in Dallas, Texas until Nick came to get me, it's the only thing that got be back home.
4:49:56 PM 
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