I don’t like earphones, I want to hear what the world is sending my way. As a result, I hear a lot of other people’s music.

My main venue for passive listening has been my gym. I’ve been through three in the last decade, following my trainer west down 14th Street as one after the other closes. Now we’re in a snug little basement next to the Salvation Army Temple. For the longest time the fare here, and in its predecessors, was rap, reflecting the tastes of most of the body builders. I heard Diddy when he was Puff Daddy, mourning the Notorious B.I.G. When I ask what rappers are out there now, my trainer shrugs dismissively, but time rolls him along as well as me; I wonder what his son would have to say.

For the last year or so different taste-setters have prevailed and the rap of my workouts has been replaced by two alternatives. One is dance music — quick beats with hooks as direct as vaccinations. The affect of the vocalists is unmitigated yearning. The men yearn to triumph; the big male hit of the last few months sounded like Anthony Weiner, if he were a young black man (Congress is where white geeks and freaks get to be young black men). The women in Danceland yearn for self-abasement. If they express their abjection with enough fury, maybe Anthony Weiner will notice them. Why can’t you see me? I’m right over here, one song keened again and again. Occasionally for variety the sex roles switch: There was a track of predatory girls on a club crawl; its counterpart was an earnest young man begging Don’t let me go. A quick Internet search would tell me who these singers are, but I prefer to let them brag and suffer in anonymity. It would be embarrassing to make their acquaintance, like seeing in a hallway the people who were fighting in the next hotel room all night.

My gym’s other alternative to rap is the Eighties channel. This seems to me worse than dance music, probably because the songs, less sharply targeted, try (and mostly fail) to stand on their own as robust compositions. The production tricks of the past are always indistinguishable to the listeners for which they were made, obtrusive to their successors. Eighties music sounds calculated and a little metallic, without even the pleasures of excess. Was this the music that beat the Evil Empire? Most striking to me is the hostess, Martha Quinn, formerly with MTV. I think she interviewed me once, when MTV wanted commentary on some political event. Michael Dukakis is a dot in history’s rear-view mirror, but she sounds as perky as ever.

The Eighties channel — like its friends, the Sixties, Seventies, and Nineties channels — illustrates a great truth: Rock music has a death grip on our lives. Despite a thousand tiny developments and variations, it does not change much, and it will never go away. Do the subtraction: The Eighties were 31 to 22 years ago. I first started noticing what was on the radio in 1965, when I was ten years old. The same backward leap then would have taken you to 1934–43. “Stars Fell on Alabama,” by Guy Lombardo, was a hit in 1934, “Pistol Packin’ Mama” by Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters was a hit in 1943. When I was ten years old there was no place in the bowels of the Smithsonian Institution, much less on the radio dial, where you could have unwound those songs from their shrouds. Yet the American Association of Rock Persons marches on — rockers with walkers. Dear Martha, will you still be doing your thing in 2033–42?

Rock’s autoerotic necrophilia (there’s something Anthony Weiner never thought of) has germinated a poisoned flower. The day it ever blossoms in my gym is the day I let my body go to hell. I first encountered it at another regular way station of mine, a delightful upstate fish restaurant. The owners are purveyors to the Hudson Valley, but they have their own retail counter and their own eatery, decorated with leaping sailfish and sad prowling sharks. It was on their sound system that I experienced a station devoted to Sixties covers.

Theft is one of the arts, and covering was old when dirt was young. Handel covered; the Puff Daddy eulogy I mentioned above sampled “I’ll Fly Away,” the classic white Gospel song (sampled it without permission, in fact — in 2000, the heirs of Albert E. Brumley, composer of “I’ll Fly Away,” successfully sued Puff Daddy and his friends). What is so disturbing about the Sixties covers is their closeness to the originals. It was sometimes hard to tell the difference at first, especially if you were not paying attention. The producers seem to have sought singers with similar voices, and directed them to follow the decades-old phrasing; the arrangements are almost identical.

Which is to say, nothing like. They are Madame Tussaud songs — detailed, accurate, and lifeless. Every corner has been blunted, every edge dulled; every little twitch of energy has been muffled, doused, asphyxiated. The covers are negative exercises in performance and songwriting. Just as Ezra Pound’s tweaks to “The Waste Land” show how to make something better, the little changes in Night of the Living Sixties show how to make anything lifeless.

Give me someone’s own voice, even when he is covering. My best friend in the country is a fan of Meat Loaf. I heard he was on Celebrity Apprentice; he could have been Secretary of Commerce in a Trump administration. I know from seeing a TV show on him that he was in the casts of both Hair and The Rocky Horror Picture Show — a man for all seasons. His music is certainly distinctive. When my friend comes barreling down the dirt driveway in his van, with Meat Loaf pouring out of the windows, I know who has arrived. The returning silence is sweetened by contrast.