During the Harvard and Princeton Glee Club concert this weekend, the guys with the orange bow ties sang a lovely Franz Schubert hymn in German, which stirred fond memories of my family's trip to Germany this summer.

After a few weeks at a middling Washington internship and a quick shot of my small, charming, but proudly parochial hometown, I was really looking forward to the trip. I thought a few weeks amidst the ghosts of Schubert and intellectual giants like Nietzsche, Weber and the rest would do me good. I didn't suspect that when I left for Germany the Backstreet Boys would come with me.

Sad to say, in the land of Bach and Wagner, they're Living la Vida Loca. American pop music--the same medley of teeny-bopper anthems that fills the US top 40--is everywhere in Germany.

Maybe pop music's prominence shouldn't have surprised me. At least, Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind should have dulled the shock. Bloom wrote that "rock music has one appeal only, a barbaric appeal, to sexual desire--not love, not eros, but sexual desire undeveloped and untutored." Because sexual desire is universal, pop music "knows neither class nor nation." Consequently, pop music is a sort of teenage Esperanto: Every pubescent youth, regardless of nationality, should be attracted to the "masturbatorial fantasy" it promises.

That Bloom was right, at least regarding pop's uncanny ability to transcend nationality and culture, is revealed by recent international adoration for the likes of Michael Jackson and, God help us, the Spice Girls. But reading Bloom is poor preparation for how completely American music has infiltrated Europe.

In Germany, my family lived in a quaint Bavarian hostel overlooking mountains which would impress even the Ricola house band. Each morning, we would sit to a breakfast of cereal with milk from a cow we could see through the window, bread with cheese made in the neighboring town and conversation topped with the mindless thumping of music from home. Our hosts, Christoph and Jutta, were warm country folk, with an agreeable predisposition to sausage and beer, but, alas, an ugly fetish for American music.

This much can be said for Christoph, though--he was a manly man par excellence. In the Bavarian Alps men can be men, because they won't make it there if they're anything less. As befits a man of his timbre, Christoph boasted a heady admiration for America's paragon of manliness, the Old West cowboy. We were chatting about Westerns and cowboys one day in broken English--my German goes no further than "bier" and "bratwurst"--when he told me of his son's "cowboy coloring book." I was encouraged, to say the least, that America had given this exemplar of the strenuous life an untainted character worthy of his children's admiration (I never saw his son without a red John Wayne neckerchief). But then Christoph sang impromptu of the "Wicki-wicki Wild Wild West," paraphrasing Will Smith and breaking my heart.

Towards the end of our trip, we visited Captain Blaubar, a blue-bear pirate who, as luck would have it, has his own amusement park. Blaubar's assistant, Heimblud is a tall, lanky weasel--an absurd caricature of Mickey Mouse who proves, once and for all, that all rodents are not created equal. The park itself is an odd collage, including a petting zoo, cow-milking competition, and a half pipe for skateboarding teenagers.