Musak

Normally, when wandering around shopping malls, the musak that is playing softly in the background is almost instinctively ignored, as if the human brain has the capability to discern "music" from "musak" and is able, when confronted with the latter, to selectively tune it out. China is no different - the shopping malls here have musak, and quite often it is Western music, especially Britney Spears and the ilk. This past weekend, however, I got quite a different taste of the musak. While doing a little grocery shopping, the local department store had some rap musak going over its speakers. It was very loud,  and while I'm not sure who the artist was, maybe Akon, maybe not, I definitely noticed it. It wasn't the quality of the musak that stood out to my ears, but the lyrics. As the rapper was doing his thing, he continually dropped F-Bombs, and used very "colorful" language to describe certain parts of the male and female anatomy. As I stood there in the middle of the noodle aisle with a stunned look on my face, I looked to my fellow Chinese shoppers for some confirmation. I mean, if this was playing over the loudspeakers in an American store, people would be either laughing or getting angry. My fellow Chinese shoppers were more interested in looking at the packages of noodles, and had no noticeable response to this situation. My first reaction was to wonder how they could be so unaffected by this, and then I realized, they have NO idea what this guy was singing about. Ha! I laughed at myself and pictured the Chinese worker, who at the beginning of the day was assigned the task of picking out the musak for the day, and he stumbled across the Akon album, realized it was English music, and happily stuck in the CD player on repeat. It made me think of the classic tree falling in the woods paradox - that is, if someone says a swear word but no one understands it, is it still a swear word?