I heard Kanye’s Heartless and Akon’s Right Now (Na Na) back to back driving back from Ann Arbor to Detroit today. Right Now seems pretty generic while it’s been well-documented that Heartless is a personal track with a definite, specific referent. I imagined that if I was Kanye, I’d be pretty embarassed to hear a tirade on the radio against a girl I knew in real life. At some point, though, the song, i imagine, has to turn into any song on the radio like Right Now (Na Na), even for the song’s creator who injected lots of personal feelings into the process. There’s got to be some theraputic power to turning a personal tragedy into a generic emo breakup anthem. And more than that, there’s gotta be something really satisfying about reaping the benefits of turning angry feelings into a cash cow.