More so they hide the electricity lines underground in Europe, neat little veins beneath the cobblestones, invisible arteries of light. I forget to notice it in Toronto until I look up and see the tangle, the web of black wire scribbling across the sky like a nervous breakdown, the visual pollution stitching itself through the maples. Branches amputated by city workers, chainsaw surgeons of the century-old limbs. Civilization, humming with its own haircut.

And then I think, what bugs me more, this or popular songs built from loops, the click click drone of automation turned melody? Maybe it’s the same disease, economy of gesture, the gospel of efficiency. I know money is part of the story, the cheap convenience of sitting alone with a glowing screen instead of sweating with a band, the drummer’s jokes. The loop is a friend that never argues.

Pow pow boom boom, goes the voice, maybe interesting for six seconds, but the song is four minutes long, and by the end you’ve heard the machine teaching you patience. I had so many students these last seven years who were hooked on novelty, hypnotized by the new, applauding the air guitarist as if he had invented flight. Where are the fingers, I ask them, the strings, the sweat, the timing that can break your heart?

So much of the Idol culture is loop music, unbending repetition dressed as revelation. They gush about these songs, pilgrims at a shrine, and I nod, the old heretic, thinking it feels like awarding Monsanto for a new red wine made without grapes. Maybe I don’t get it. Maybe I’m not supposed to get it. Still, I look up at the sky-wires and think of Jimmy Webb, not underground but fully exposed, writing Wichita Lineman out there among the poles, humming electricity into art.