The Playlist and The City

The music was good but it was everywhere. It spread – like thin plaster across the city – a coat of mud upon the horns, the joy, the traffic of daylife. It robbed the streets of their texture, their context, their sense. It was music in tune yet out of place – an invisible yet tangible wall. It muted strange languages and the monologues of the indigent. It drowned airplanes and taxicabs and the groan of the uptown line. It stuffed the strained and emergent city into the overwhelming stench of the afternoon sewer – a fog to navigate and clear – too remote to be real, too present to be a dream.