Acid Rain
Crank Dat (Soulja Boy)
Why would anyone listen to the latter when the first song even exists? Most people I've run in to most likely say that they would listen to Acid Rain if they were in the mood for an intellectual, conscious musical experience, but they're just listening to "Crank Dat" because...X. (X being the beats, the whiny, prepubescent vocal stylings, etc.).
If you asked most people my age if their organized sound of choice was art, they'd laugh. And most of them would probably admit that it doesn't even qualify as music. It's just what they use as background sound. What they don't seem to notice is that, even if it isn't art, it still has a quality of being art in so far as it alters your mood and gives you spiritual energy to get through the day - things that are actually required for human life, in my opinion. But, since their "music" is deliberately chosen and enjoyed unconsciously, they don't know how it's altering them, and this seems very dangerous.
Of course, going through an extensive process of reasoning and introspection every time you choose a track would be impractical and impossible. Most of the choices we make need to be done without a perfectly sound and elegant proof of their justification, there just aren't enough hours in the day to do otherwise. But the way to avoid this isn't by taking the drug addict's way out and picking whatever yields the most raw satisfaction at any given time (which very well may be "Crank Dat"), but by establishing a principle of action that can be used as a basis of action without going through its verification every time it's used.
And that's just what's going on when I choose to listen to Liquid Tension Experiment (a classical piece would have probably demonstrated this a bit better, but I happen to be a metalhead). People who wheel their ipods over to Crank Dat never established a principle for why it would be in their interest to listen to rap (as evidenced by the fact that their listening to it in the first place) because they think there's a safe alternative to living consciously. But, thankfully, there isn't.
