After a vacation break, RFB is back in business and can happily report that the U.S. is still in a deeply bizarre place.

Rather than diving straight into the mind-melting prospect of a giant military parade for a person who consistently insults or ignores troops, tramples on the country’s founding documents, and whose staff treats the handling of classified information like middle schoolers excitedly texting about the next day’s outfits, I’ll just focus on some music today.

It feels important to highlight the significance of original, creative work in the face of a media landscape that is quickly morphing into something one might expect from Nort Korea.

I listened to two artists quite a bit on the aforementioned vacation break: Lady Gaga and Sharon Van Etten. I also saw Van Etten perform in Asheville recently.

Lady Gaga’s latest album, “Mayhem,” is a blast from start to finish, and it’s fun to hear the melding of influences throughout. ABBA, Michael Jackson, Taylor Swift, David Bowie, Madonna…the list goes on.

So we’ll highlight “Garden of Eden”

A brief tangent: in my MFA days, I was dismayed to hear fiction writers speak dismissively of what they called “airport fiction,” or genre fiction, as if the readers of such works were somehow less important than people who preferred something that is, in itself, a genre: literary fiction. I still don’t understand why there’s a need for that kind of differentiation, but like other attempts at categorization, I think it says a lot about a person’s desire to set themselves apart.

Anyway, that’s all to say I don’t mean it as an insult when I say that I see Lady Gaga occupying a pretty clear pop music space with “Mayhem,” and I’d put Sharon Van Etten more in the indie rock/folk space that some might consider to be more artful or to have more depth (with the tradeoff being less accessibility).

I’ll use “Tarifa” as an example – a song that’s more like a poem, without a catchy, recognizable chorus like “Garden of Eden.” A listener has to do a little more work to decipher a song like this, but ultimately, it’s worth it.

There you have it! Two creative works to wrap up the week, each with their own place, each offering some escape from our new Bizarro World.