As I drove home from

As I drove home from the rave, this song by Nine Inch Nails, called "Broken," came on the radio. It's an amazing song. It's enlightening and at the same time it's terrible -- it assaults you with sounds, as though you'd put a conch shell up to your ear to listen to a jet engine warming up. As you listen to it, it undoes all the music you ever heard before. It erases it. Every once in a while it's good to listen to "Broken"; it's hypnotic. But if you listen to it over and over again, you'll fry your listening gene. Built into the enlightening quality of it is this power to remove the ability to hear it.