Comment Archive:
Thursday 13th October 2005
Pumping Down The Volume
Now don’t get me wrong I love loud music. I find it absolutely exhilarating. When it’s my music. When it’s something I’ve chosen to listen to and when I have the power to control the volume and to turn it off entirely the moment the whim to melt my eardrums with high decibel sound waves has subsided. The point is a great deal of my enjoyment comes from being the boss of the situation. It’s me making the choices. I’m sure it’s a little acknowledged fact that there is no one who ever enjoys the music at a nightclub more than the DJ. They’re his tunes and largely - aside from a need to play tunes that get the floor heaving with booty (performance related pay, mate) - he plays what the hell he likes. Choice. Choice is an essential ingredient in the human emotion/sensory faculty we like to call "enjoyment".
Take that choice away and one’s experience of loud music (or indeed anything at all) becomes instantly negative. Nobody likes to be force fed or forced to do anything and we justly vilify those who impose their selfish whims upon ours. Hence the intelligent members of society - those who have grasped this simple and indisputable fact - tend to exercise their pleasures in ways that don’t interfere with those of other people... and the less intelligently enlightened tend to inflict their appalling indulgences on the world immediately around them to the displeasure of all.
Ok. Maybe I’m being a little unfair here. After all it’s not really about intelligence or stupidity - you can’t really judge a person’s intelligence by how loud they play their Boyzone CD’s (well maybe you can if they’re playing Boyzone) - it’s actually about sensitivity and social awareness and these commodities tend to be rare at the best of times but are nigh on impossible to divine in the young and enthusiastic. And by young and enthusiastic I mean those teenagers and twenty-somethings who plague society with their stupid need to follow fashion trends and to pollute the airwaves of their neighbourhood with their appalling tastes in music.
Sorry. I did try my hardest not to slip into my usual curmudgeonly vein of anti-youth cynicism but you know what? It’s just too enjoyable and at the end of the day you know I’m right. Let’s be honest. When you’re out and about in town, going about your business, maybe buying a nice stick of asparagus for your tea, and your ears are suddenly assaulted by a Ford Cortina that’s been converted into a mega decibel hi-fi on wheels your first reaction - and this may came as a bit of a shock to the drivers of the cars involved - is NOT to think "Oh how cool, that music is so loud I can no longer hear my own thought processes and I just love being forced to listen to crap American R & B nasally arse twaddle, how I wish I was good mates with those people so that I too could ride in their pimp mobile and have the world stare admiringly at me and my CD collection" No. Your first (and may I say completely sane) reaction is to expel air in sheer annoyance if not barely suppressed rage and wish to yourself that the baseball cap wearing twats hanging baboon-like out of the skoda / BMW ringer before you would suddenly and inexplicably shove their in-car stereo and sub-atomic woofers so violently up their collective bumholes that their teeth vaporize. Or is that just me?
Somehow I don’t think it is. To the people in these cars I say this: people stare at you not out of admiration but out of sudden unreasoning hatred and contempt. Even if you’re playing a song that we like we still hate having it forced upon us at a volume that we didn’t choose and at a time that we didn’t choose. We don’t think you’re cool. We think you’re anything but. As strange as it sounds, sometimes we just want to have peace and quiet or even just to be able to listen to the street noises or the sounds of the environment that surround us. And we all have a right to exercise that choice and we object strongly when some nerd who likes REO Speedwagon or Shania Twain or DJ Spudkilla thinks he can ride roughshod over that right.
The point is this; the type of music you’re playing isn’t important. How you’re conducting your enjoyment of your music is. The answer is simple. If you like to listen to loud music then fine - I think we can all empathize with that need every now and then - but go somewhere where the effects of that music can be confined, where it doesn’t impinge on the external world. Or get yourself an iPod. Geez. It’s hardly rocket science. I almost feel like I’m back at school having a class debate. It’s so simple.
Except that there is a socio-political issue buried here.
Ooh. Gonna get serious now. When I first began muting the idea for this month’s Comment it was pointed out to me that a lot of the people who drive these rock stadiums on wheels are young Asian lads. Young Asian lads whose culture in some cases forbids them from drinking alcohol and going on the razz like other lads their age take great delight in doing. Hence pimping up their cars and installing boot sized stereos whose sound output could level Kilimanjaro has become their own alternative youth culture... a safe act of rebellion and male bonding which is absolutely essential in any society. This argument I accept freely.
But that argument does not negate my own argument above. How you conduct and experience your pleasures is the keystone to a happy, peaceful, well integrated society. And this keystone is not confined to social conditions or any single idea of race or status. We all live in a society and we all - whether we like it or not - have to live alongside each other and learn to interact in a way that benefits all of us. It’s called working toward the greater good - as opposed to working toward the greatest unhappiness. Again it’s hardly rocket science.
But let’s look at the issue from another point of view. Is playing loud music in your ridiculously customized Capri such a bad alternative to the mainstream culture of laddishness and binge drinking? Isn’t alcoholism just as detrimental to the general contentment of society? Isn’t binge drinking also an example of an individual exercising their pleasure to the detriment of all? How many times have you had to take a longer route home at night to avoid gangs of beered up buffoons intent on violence and destruction? How many times has your own enjoyment of a night out been spoiled by slack-jawed yobs who feel they have to neck down 15 pints of lager before they can consider themselves to be having a good time?
Clearly the fundamentally problematic issue of how we take our pleasures isn’t confined to merely one type of outlet. It doesn’t matter whether it’s music, alcohol, tiddly-winks or dwarf tossing - if you’re destroying or curtailing someone else’s happiness then you are failing your fellow Man. You are working against a happy, peaceful and well integrated society. And if that gives you pleasure then you’re either a berk who should be publicly lampooned by your friends, family and work mates or you’re an unsavoury socio-path who should be made to live in isolation in a leaky shed somewhere on the Outer Hebrides with only your Leo Sayer LPs for company. Perhaps both.
Like I said. It’s not rocket science...
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