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Dechets Versus Beauty
The importance of feeding our minds and hearts
I really love the grungy gym I go to at the top of Lausanne, high above the city and the lake below. It’s got everything I need because it’s owned by a professional body-builder. Even though I’m ancient now I still push myself and lift more than most guys half my age. Forcing myself to work hard results in my body releasing more HGH which repairs tissues and keeps my body supple and strong.
But… the gym owner has atrocious taste in music.
It’s endless noise. Apparently the genre is called “rap” which I assume is an acronym for Repulsive Aural Pollution. It seems simple to create the lyrics for rap songs: one merely writes on scraps of paper the following words: motherfucker, nigger, shit, bitch, ho, jimmy choo, aston martin, kill, bro, money, drugs, and then add several more motherfuckers, fuck, and niggers. One pastes these scraps of paper at random on a board and proceeds to read them while a friend bangs a rock or two together in the background.
This saddens me immensely. It is the noise of deprivation, akin to watching a small and very unhappy child smearing feces on a wall.
The world is not bereft of beauty. If you want to listen to someone whose life was hard yet who creates astonishing sounds, listen to Baaba Maal or Toumani Diabaté or Louis Armstrong.
