Spending time in country really puts in perspective the leftist cultural politics that are all the rage in the States, which if you’re me, and I am, you already found pretty tiresome and not even to exhibit the level of critical acumen of a decent undergraduate essay that you’d give a B if it weren’t for grade inflation. For example, while taking a shower and listening to Rachmaninoff’s sublime and pretty over the top emotionally 2nd piano concerto this morning, I was struck by just how incredibly difficult it must have been to create a work of such complexity and sublimity and over the top emotion. And because my mind never just stops there, I think of a lot of the music that’s made today that is held in really high regard as being brave and unique but which isn’t very complex or sublime or emotional, relatively speaking, and which it occurs to me is really a kind of retreading of what Gil Scott-Heron was doing in the 1970s with “Whitey on the Moon” and “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” which I think really was unique and socio-culturally complex if not musically complex or sublime or over the top emotionally like my man Rachmaninoff’s stuff. And then I get to thinking of the backlash to Quentin Tarantino’s claim that the music we usually think of as being right up there with Rachmaninoff’s is “ghetto” compared to the music of Ennio Morricone, who Tarantino really digs, and which would have been taken as a pretty progressive remark if the cultural politics in the States hadn’t gone so haywire at some point. And so instead of the culture sections of the leftist online news organs running pieces on the life and music of Ennio Morricone, they run pieces about how “problematic” Tarantino’s remark is by journalists whose parents’ hard-earned college savings money was clearly wasted on their extremely costly small liberal arts college educations because they clearly didn’t learn a goddamn thing. None of this is meant to suggest that Childish Gambino is not without his charms.