In the skateboarding section, German punks roll to American rap, ranging from tame FM staples to gansta rap standards. When I first arrived, I was treated to Public Enemy's "He Got Game," a likable tune, at least in the version played over American radio. Funny thing, though: In Germany they play the unedited versions, replete with curse words and sexual imagery unfit for a teen hangout, and passing strange at a children's amusement park. But, of course, they don't understand the words--one American's obscenity is, apparently, another German's lyric.

On the way home from Blaubar's, we stopped in Fischen, a beautiful Alpine village with a darling store selling wood carvings of Biblical characters. In such a store, one is so taken by the statues that it's easy to forget one's surroundings--which is for the better, in this case, since even in this little alcove of Christian peace, a quiet but immutable hip-hop bass line whispered from hidden speakers.

American pop music is cruel retaliation for measles, small pox and other emigre diseases stowed in the ships of 17th century European explorers. Pop is more easily communicable, needs no ships and seems impossible to quarantine. After all, what self-respecting group of teenage boys could resist what Bloom calls a "nonstop, commercially prepackaged, masturbatorial fantasy?" The trouble is, it's not just German teenagers who are infected. My family's hosts were mature adults, the owner of the store in Fischen was an elderly Christian soldier who did not seem prone in the least to indulgence in nonstop masturbatorial fantasies. For whatever reason, though, Germans seem to have left Franz Schubert for Fiona Apple, and it's a shame.

Hugh P. Liebert '01 is a social studies concentrator in Eliot House. His column appears on alternate Tuesdays.