# 4 – A Song of the Trip

So, the song of the trip for a few of us has to be the Black Eyed Peas song “Boom Boom Pow.” There’s really nothing to the lyrics that has any sort of meaning about the trip, it’s just that we always seem to dance like crazy when the song comes on. On a couple different occasions, Rashina and Cory have been split up in different cars while driving around one of the cities. I’ve been on both sides of the coin, where we will get a text from Rashina with only a radio station number, to which we switch to it and are exploded with the sounds of the song. Really, we heard it in the car one day while driving, and none of us had danced in a while, and so that became our theme song without us really knowing it. It was fantastic. Really this song kind of demonstrates our incredible wanting for dancing all throughout the trip.

The song itself was only a song for part of the group. Not really everyone joined in, which is the essence of what Whitman is saying in his poem. Not everyone had to. Many other people’s songs were really in speaking about life, about pop culture, about religion, about the trip, about friendships…and this ran the gamut of the class. All of us were pretty different and had different interests, each singing different songs and granting different perspectives. A grand American experiment.