Loud Music, Noise, and Environmental Alternatives

Don't get me wrong: I like to listen to loud music. I don't like all types of music, but I like many, and I do like hearing the subtleties that only close proximity (when it's live) or high volume (when it's recorded) can provide.

Music, after all, is a craft. Singers, musicians, composers, producers—each spends a great deal more time practicing than performing in order to hone and perfect their craft. So even though I cannot name what precisely marks the difference between average and more accomplished musical performances, I'm pretty sure I can recognize when something more than average is happening. I'd like to think, too, that I understand why an author would want to put in differences, subtleties, nuances, or whatever you want to call it (i.e. to stylistically differentiate from others in a highly conventionalized practice, to experiment—innovatively, curiously, and playfully—with what one does and does not know, or to push to the boundaries between what is and is not acceptable in that practice). That said, I hope you don't think me a prude for saying I typically hate other people's loud music.

Let me correct that: other people's indiscriminantly loud music.

Not that people don't have good taste in music, and not that they're not sophisticated people in many other ways (I feel like I'm going to dig myself into a hole, but here goes....) But sometimes people just need to turn it down.

I'd like to think that this rant isn't entirely subjective: I've seen trends in people's tastes for loud music, and I suspect others have seen the same. An obvious one is blaring in order to be seen: teenage boys in their glowingly-modified Honda Civics, their middle-aged counterparts in their own shiny-chromed convertibles... even hawgs on their choppers (choppers on their hawgs?) who all want to announce, in one way or another, their presence and be seen being who they are (or who they pose to be), by using the sound systems in their vehicles primarily as noisemakers. The music is thematic to some degree but, much like a national anthem, is rarely attended to, enjoyed, or studied. It's something for believers to salute; something for the rest to jeer or sit through, patiently until it's over, or when it drives away.

A less obvious trend is loud music played by those who need a constant background track to their lives. Campus bars are notorious for this: music so loud it drowns out conversations. These are places where one would assume studious conditions would be a requisite to conversation (this is an academic institution, isn't it?). Often, beer and wings can be found in place of stimulating conversation, even though they could, in fact, go together rather nicely. A counter-argument, I suppose, is that there's a certain amount of anonymity in a noisy room, where one can try on a variety of theoretical hats without fear of blurting out something embarrassing or, worse, self-implicating in a room suddenly fallen silent with no soundtrack to shield a person from questions of "who said that?!" My counter- counter-argument to this is that maybe we should be held more accountable for the things we say, in recognition that we're probably not all Leopold's or Loeb's in our hearts, even if we're fumbling with words in quite horrifying ways. The background music is padding, then, in a place where sharp corners might be better left open a little more, where thought might be usefully directed at the structures that endanger, and where theorizing about what, collectively and individually, can and should be done about them.

Radios blaring on a back deck, in a garage, or in another room are similar: noise machines to drown out conversation, albeit in our more mundane lives. Here they're more than this, however, since the conversations are fewer. An owner's habitual practice of switching one on, typically on weekends while tinkering or doing chores, makes me think that she'd would rather be somewhere else, in some alternate symbolic or mediated universe parallel to our own: in a commercial for Hawaiian beaches, perhaps, or on a train with some action-romance movie superstar of the opposite (or the same) sex, or even altogether on some entirely different planet. Why else would someone let a random assortment of melodies and banter fill up the space of their resting minutes except for an absolute and paralyzing fear of the mundane, the everyday, the picayune? Being somewhere else—indeed, just dreaming of going somewhere else, imagining being in transit is sufficient—acts to placate a fear of facing up to what habit, routine, and the everyday really are: vast unknowns of social and technological contingency, aleatory webs of massive bureaucratic state and corporate apparatuses over which we have no control, and about the mechanisms of which we have no inkling. Silence would serve to remind us that, beyond all ourselves, this—our fate—still exists, an existential horror vacui in which we play nothing but an interchangeable part for others producing and directing. Thus what might happen were there to be silence for once—paralyzing, total silence—panics a great many of us, mostly below the level of our consciousness. It's the aural equivalent of our cultural fear of the dark, our tactile fear of enclosed spaces, and a constant background soundtrack elicits the same sigh of relief a well-lit street at night, or the elevator door opening after an interminably long wait of minutes; seconds.

If the blackout of '03 taught us anything, it's that we can survive without as much noise as we thought. Or, instead, that what we put on to fill up our personal and social voids can just as easily be filled by real human voices: sing-song voices, laughing voices, passionate whispers, or defiant shouts. It is then that we realize we have more to say than we thought; more to be spoken, and more to be heard. And the silences cease to be oppressive, filled with ominous reminders of things beyond our knowing, and instead become periods of determination; moments of waiting, beautiful moments of patience, in anticipation of what human voice will next speak.