The stereo isn’t very big. It fits on top of the toilet tank in our bathroom. Listening to music in the shower was my idea. My roommate liked the idea enough to put the stereo on blast when he was in there.

He got out of the shower, and I didn’t give him enough time to make it back to his room.

“Dude that was seriously rude,” I said. He thought I was pounding on the door because I wanted inside. That was simply not the case.

“Just because you like that music doesn’t mean everyone else in the apartment wants to hear it, too,” I said. I came up with that line awhile ago and I’m starting to wear it out.

“Hey, that sounds like shit from my room,” used to be my go-to phrase until I was accused of having poor people skills.

There is no noise back in Clearfield County. The common things there are all silent: trees, hills, roads, smoke. I went to bed listening to myself breathe as a child. I stayed over at friends’ who insisted the television be left on. I would go home tired and angry in the morning.

College brought new and louder ways for the people around me to make noise.

Part of me really does think subwoofers are actual attention-getting devices. People want to be noticed and compression waves get it done. It takes an ego to make your neighbor’s walls shake.

I’ve typed papers while feeling the vibrations from Soulja Boy Tellem’s latest song of sexual misconduct. I can’t hear the bad rhyming—just the bass like a whale’s irregular heartbeat.

Music makes me tingle. The best note progressions from my favorite songs send me into the impalpable space that addicts spend good money everyday to go to. My eyes, they roll back.

But “superman[ing] that hoe” doesn’t do the trick.

Bass-hating wouldn’t be a dissenting opinion among the white population if it wasn’t for Honda Civic drivers and death metal. My fascination with the cadence of language extends to rap and hip-hop, but I maintain death metal is not music. Those albums sound like car accidents.

There is the argument that some things are really about disregarding taste entirely—pornography and Abercrombie and Fitch are good examples. We think these are things we do just for fun, but people throughout history have worked very hard to prove that the good entertainment is also good art. Anyone catch Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers at the Super Bowl?

They didn’t have to “superman” a soul.

I used to be an apologizer for bad music, said it was OK to listen to it as long as you knew it was bad. I take that back because too many people are irresponsible. They actually don’t know what’s garbage—Soulja Boy Toldme.

I don’t always fantasize about the silence of Clearfield. Now going to bed without Dylan’s “Blood on the Tracks,” playing softly from my laptop feels like I’ve made an appointment to go to sleep. And it’s fine if some people think Bob Dylan sounds like turds, but I don’t make those people listen to him. That’s called “people skills.”