Politics & Power Quote by Carla Bley

Bley’s complaint isn’t tourism snobbery so much as an artist’s diagnosis of a culture that’s been industrially smoothed. The target isn’t “America” in some grand patriotic sense; it’s the sensory monoculture of mid-to-late 20th-century U.S. life: standardized highways, standardized restaurants, standardized aesthetics. When she says it “tastes a bit like airline food,” she’s using the perfect metaphor for mass-produced convenience that’s been engineered to offend no one and delight almost no one. Airline food isn’t simply bad; it’s pre-processed neutrality, flavor designed to survive altitude, time, and lowest-common-denominator palates. That’s her subtext: the country has made itself transportable, franchised, and therefore predictable.

Coming from a musician who built a career on sly composition and improvisational risk, “not exotic enough” reads less like colonial yearning and more like a craving for friction - the small shocks that wake up perception. Exotic, here, means particular: local quirks, regional smells, the sense that you’ve arrived somewhere with its own rules. Instead she hears the same soundtrack everywhere, a nation scored by the hum of cars and the sameness of menus.

The intent lands as cultural critique dressed in a throwaway gripe. It’s funny because it’s blunt, but it’s also a little bleak: America as a place that’s perpetually in transit, eating food that already tastes like it was made to be eaten while moving.