Hatins'

I have a confession for you, dear reader (and the singular may be oddly appropriate, as I am sometimes my only reader), one that has languished deep in my heart for many years, and that only now will I exhibit the temerity to unveil: I don’t much care for loud music; usually, I find it a bloody lot of racket that gets on my nerves and inhibits my ability to think clearly. That’s right: all this time you thought that I was a hip, cool longhair (or not, probably having never seen me and/or given the matter no consideration at all), and now you find that, well before my time, I am a stodgy old man who deeply appreciates peace and quiet and solitude. I rather like hearing the clamor of mosquito wings and distant generators; such offer me the comforting illusion of knowing what the bloody bejesus is happening.

But what can I say? I used to try to read and study to music, before I realized how utterly distracting it was, and tried to sleep to music, before realizing that everything written outside of Simon and Garfunkel occurring after the year 1900 just keeps me awake instead, and tried to work to music, until I got that it just made me pay less attention to what I was doing, ultimately concluding that I prefer the noise and rhythm of the everyday environment in almost any social situation.

Now, this probably reads a bit queer, as it certainly writes a bit queer, so perhaps I should clarify the premise: I quite like (especially of recent) making music; I quite like listening to music in specific contexts that I have freely chosen, like going to see a show or agreeing to listen to a novel new CD (or classic old one) with friends on a road trip, or at a party. But I’m very discerning with what I listen to, and to when it’s listened: this pervasive idea of music being the ubiquitous and requisite background noise to one’s life just, well, strikes a bad note with me. The radio would be the primary bitch-target: it sucks, no matter what genre one prefers, unless a lass or lad has a college or indie station from which to pick, and even then there’s not much guarantee. And I don’t, and mosta y’all don’t either. This supposition is fundamentally true, or else the need for CD burners and other individual sub-selection to reduce the generally horrid broad swaths of publicly-broadcast music never would have come into existence: partly we tailor and reward our individual tastes via mechanized recording because we are individuals, but partly (or perhaps concurrently) we do so because any commercial station attempting to please a large audience will usually displease any of us with its unselectivity and general administration of drivel.

But I’ve wandered afield: I do, in fact, love the music that I love (Stones, Pixies, Bowie, Beethoven, Wagner, Lucinda Williams, Jonnie Cash, Willie Nelson, B.B. King, Muddy Waters, whateverthehellelse) when and where I have the time to relax and love it. But live music in bars, unless I was specifically there to hear it, just interferes with conversation—and I generally love conversation a lot more than music. When I’m out in public, I’d rather hear the din of traffic or the crash of the ocean; the buzz of streetlamps or the cadence of the crickets and the cicadas; the whistle of the breeze or the cacophony of background human chatter. These things are themselves musical and rhythmic and, frankly, noisy enough—plenty of evidence that our sphere is one of life and motion and not a dead, silent space in the cosmos.

Has this address (particularly that last paragraph) been clichéd and pedantic and trivial enough? Probably that and more so. But the intention that informs it is sincere: there is precious little quiet left in the industrial world, and all the noise for the asking. The societal dependence on electronically supplied music seems to me just another symptom of a restless place, a place that doesn’t pause to hear heartbeats and breathing, that can’t intuitively process aural information rather than be dragged off into a cacophony of iPods and car-systems and, well, noise. For chrissake can’t anybody understand the relaxing benefit of reflection?

My protest is my own, and unquestionably anachronistic and ridiculous, but, hey, you’ll have that. I am, in the terms presented, just a music hater, in the same sense that I’m a TV hater: physical reality provides a deeply entertaining, base sensory context, with nary an additional industrial sound needed to improve it. I’m all happy for light bulbs and modern civilization and all, but…Could you please turn that goddamn radio down? I’m trying to think here.