It was during a recent MRI that I discovered how much my relationship to music has changed.
I’d just been informed that this imaging session would include the use of a contrast agent, gadolinium, which was unexpected. I’ve had MRIs with contrast agents before—specifically back during our search for the cause of my TIA—and I find them annoying, not only because of the (admittedly slight) discomfort, but also because stating that “Heavy metal is in my blood!” is never as funny spoken out loud as it sounds in my head. And so, I was a little off my game, what with the plastic shunt in my arm, the supposedly noise-canceling cans over my ears, and my head deep inside the tube upon which angry ogres would soon begin to pound with ill-tuned hammers, when the technician spoke into the cans.
“Would you like some music?”
“Sure.” Music is almost always a good idea.
“What would you like to listen to?”
It should have been a simple question, and there was a time when it would have been a simple question, back in the day when I actually bought albums and played them so often that, even today, if I were to hear Jethro Tull’s Thick as a Brick, I could tell you the exact spot where my LP used to skip. But I don’t buy albums anymore. I stream them. More to the point, I rarely queue up specific albums, but rather I stream individual songs, lists of similar-sounding tracks, all curated by an algorithm. I don’t even know the names of many of the artists I listen to; their songs play past without my knowing who they are or the albums they’ve released. (That is, of course, if they release albums, instead of a long parade of singles and EPs.)
This simple question caused my brain to seize up. I tried to think of one of the artists I do know, but I also needed one whose name was easy to relate from the inside of a torpedo tube. The only names I was able to recall would either require that I spell them out—Halestorm, Les Friction. Ursine Vulpine—or were names that I didn’t even know how to pronounce—Nemesea, SVRCINA—so, instead of simply pulling up one of the clearly-named bands from my youth (Genesis, Yes, The Beatles), my brain went to its default, the music to which I was first introduced.
“Classical is fine.”
Turns out, J.D. Vance isn’t the only one who finds listening to classical music unusual, because as my little cubbyhole began to hum and whir and thump and bang, my technician treated me not to Mozart or Beethoven or Bach, but to orchestral renditions of popular songs—at least I presume they were popular songs; I only recognized one of them—which is rather like watching a very self-conscious person try to dance for the first time.
Thankfully, the supposedly noise-canceling cans over my ears didn’t, so the music was mostly drowned out by the MRI’s percussion section, and I found my toes tapping to the ogres’ hammers rather than to the milquetoast rendition of Sia’s “Chandelier.”
Thus, my Twenty Minutes in a Tube ended and I was released from my purgatory, free once more to return to my scattershot playlists of jumbled songs from artists I cannot name.
Progress? I’m not so sure.
k
A year ago, I 
Kurt R.A. Giambastiani 