Please accept my excuses if, from time to time, this column breaks down into angry cap-locked bellowing. It is being written on a train. Like many people born in the 20th century, I have, until recently, greatly enjoyed this mode of travel. SHUT UP! Why learn to drive a filthy motorcar when you can sit on a tolerably comfortable seat and read a nice book, consume “coffee-style beverage” or peer criminally into citizens’ back bedrooms. TURN IT DOWN YOU LITTLE . . .
Until relatively recently some moderate degree of quiet could be expected. Travellers planning to catch up on their Turgenev would do well to avoid trains to or from cities hosting Linfield Football Club. Late-night commuter trains rarely resembled Belle Époque salons. But a train wasn’t a bad place to spend three hours (or longer if you lived somewhere other than an outlying Atlantic island).
The advance of portable electronic devices that make noises – particularly R&B noises – has shattered that comparative peace. Allow me to be more specific. The objection to “headphone leakage” always struck me as overly pernickety. You are on a bus. You are on a train. You are on a tram. Such things have engines. Some of them drive through noisy city streets. At least one rattles along a track. The faint, barely discernible beats that emerge from headphones can barely compete with those background noises. You, sir or madam, are getting annoyed for the sake of getting annoyed.
Menace
Over the past five years or so, however, a new, more serious menace has emerged on public transport. IF I HAVE TO COME DOWN THERE YOU’LL SOON BE DIGESTING THAT PHONE. Stupid young people (and they are almost exclusively young) have decided it is now acceptable to broadcast tinny versions of popular tunes to every person unlucky enough to be sitting in the same train carriage. Something similar happens on buses and trams, but, to generate proper apoplectic fury, you need to spend a full three hours trapped with the low-fi, telephonic mash-up of Katy Perry, Taylor Swift and that video we shot of us showing our arses to the bouncer. Quite often the various tracks are broadcast simultaneously from different corners of the carriage. Mixed in is the low-level chatter that emerges from various tablets as assorted idiots watch TV episodes and popular films without the use of headphones. Dante didn’t know the half of it.
Obviously, there are much worse crimes than playing bad music on poor speakers in a public place. Indeed, I would impose only minimal custodial sentences – a week or two in a cushy prison – for anyone caught offending in this manner. The wonder is that none of these sociopaths seems to realise they are doing anything wrong. When Sony launched the Walkman in 1979, it came with headphones, but without any sort of speaker. This was, to use the brand-neutral term, a “personal stereo”. Nobutoshi Kihara and his engineers designed the device to allow polite, private commune with the user’s own recordings. It would be an act of extraordinary vulgarity to impose your musical taste on any passing stranger.
Outrages
The current outrages came about by an accident of technology. The speaker on the phone was originally designed to allow greater freedom when carrying on calls. To be fair, nobody in Apple or Samsung envisioned a world in which blameless commuters would be subjected to endless public broadcasts of death metal. But the breaking down of personal boundaries in public spaces has contributed to the phenomenon.
Behaviour in cinemas has been in decline for some decades. At some point in the home-video era, the convention that demanded quiet when watching films seems to have gone the way of tipping hats and passing port to the left. In the current era, cinemas have taken on the quality of poorly maintained pigsties. The masses scoff, rut and snort, only occasionally looking up to note adventures on the screen.
One could be forgiven for deducing that all standards of decency are in terminal decline. This is not the case. We are less likely to be murdered in our beds. We are more inclined towards tolerance of those who differ from us in sexual inclination or religious belief. All in all, the sane chap would rather put up with the odd stray Rihanna track than return to a time of Dickensian cutpurses and rampant smallpox. Maybe the new arrangements speak of greater willingness to connect with strangers. Could it be a good thing?
No, it couldn’t. Your right to blare music conflicts with my right to sit in blessed peace. Public blasting is, thus, not a social act, it is an inherently antisocial act. TURN IT DOWN, YOU PILLOCK. They invented headphones for a reason.