Ray Finkle and a Clean Pair of Shorts is a tumblelog.

And that’s where the song implicates us. The line says we’ve discarded this notion of America. Not the false vision of small-town purity in Reagan’s “shining city on a hill” speech, a boastful corruption of the sermon by John Winthrop from which the phrase is taken. What we’ve left back there in the dust through cynicism or disappointment or weariness, is the belief in America as a shared enterprise, as a constant tension between hard reality and unrealized dream. The people and the towns in this video are under a spell. It’s as if they are living among the replicas of America in a land where the very idea of America has become something childish we have to put aside in order to become adults.

Just as bloggers have two basic options - write original content or become a central link warehouse - musicians now can either mold the musical blocks for other “secondary” artists or build the “spaceship” from the publicly available kit. But these are not equal options. I doubt that anyone will sample Kanye’s “Stronger.” It’s a dead-end, a cultural vasectomy.