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Comment by shwaj | Hacker News Reader

“… when I sit in the driver’s seat – categorically the best place to listen to music alone“

:eye-roll: I suppose, if you don’t mind road noise. Can’t stand this overwrought writing style.

There is something special for me about listening to a certain song late at night speeding on a damp muggy highway when the world is empty but somehow menacing, with nothing in the whole universe other than me and the crickets and the electric promise of a coming dawn full of opportunity.

For some subset of the last generation of american youth (and maybe this one? I am too hopelessly old to know now) the personal automobile had a kind of almost shamanic importance and the CD collection was a not insignificant part of that.

The 'best' music is not the music that is most accurately rendered. It is music in the time and place where it most properly induces the distilled current of its meaning into your soul in a way that you feel its echos 30 years later.

For some people, that is in fact in a car.

I don’t have a problem with any of that. I don’t fetishize cars quite like you describe, but I do enjoy being on a 3 hour drive because I know nothing is going to interrupt me, and usually I’m listening to music while I do.

My issue is the debasement of the language by a professional writer. This use of “categorically” is akin to “I was, like, literally starving”, and for whatever reason this grates on me. I stopped reading immediately.

I don't think hyperbole automatically counts as debasement of the language.

It's like the loudness war but in language.

>There is something special for me about listening to a certain song late at night speeding on a damp muggy highway when the world is empty but somehow menacing, with nothing in the whole universe other than me and the crickets and the electric promise of a coming dawn full of opportunity.

You are paraphrasing the lyrics to Golden Earring "Radar Love".

  I've been drivin' all night, my hands wet on the wheel
  ...
  The radio's playing some forgotten song
  Brenda Lee's "Coming On Strong"
  The road has got me hypnotized
  And I'm a-speedin' into a new sunrise

Ironically, there is a nonzero chance I would have had this album in the zip-up polyester companion to this threads namesake!

If the road noise is overpowering your music, you've got it too low.

Some music works better with road noise. If you listen to electronic music, road noise doesn't matter much, but I guess it would matter a lot if you were listening to something orchestral because you can easily hear things out of place.

Or you need to get the bearings replaced.

maybe not categorically, but potentially the best place for that person.

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