Another example of a latter-day obscenity came with the television transmission of a recent one-day cricket match between South Africa and the West Indies. During play loud music was blasted around the ground. Not between overs, not when someone struck a boundary or took a wicket as has become the fashion in 50-over matches, but continuously. In reverse
mutation, cricket’s laws and traditions, its innate dignity, are slowly being dragged down to the gutter tastes of those who organise and corrupt it.
Background music is an urban curse, as corroding as acid rain. It has made of our public experience a living horror. Wherever you go, wherever you buy or walk these days, wherever you enter you are assaulted by the stuff. Today it is almost impossible to find a restaurant, a coffee shop, a hairdresser, a doctor’s waiting room, an airliner cabin, a store that is not suffused.
That the background music chosen is almost invariably from the rectal end of popular “culture”, synthesised bichordal slob-chant, doesn’t make it any easier to bear. Even worse is the use of serious music as acoustic wallpaper. It would seem that the works of the great masters, among the most transcendent expressions of the human soul, now rate only to be used as an accompaniment to eating, drinking and chattering — or buying books. That is offensive at another level.
I recently had a run-in with a local supermarket that blasts its customers at a particularly loud level with what the chain’s “radio station” has decided is a suitable musical tapestry against which to do one’s grocery shopping. As is usual, the stuff was being pumped out of little metal grilles that distorted it into the brutal metallic quality you associate with the pole-mounted loudspeakers of prisons and slave camps. Every now and then the internal staff traffic-guidance system of the branch was being conducted via the same speakers — at three times the level of the music.
My complaint to the store manager was met with a surly refusal, either to turn the stuff down or off. With that came the standard response: “It is what my management says the customers want.” No options, no argument allowed. My written complaint to the chain’s head office was shunted down the line to some weary corporate bottom-dweller who had been trained to communicate in motivational seminar offcuts. His reply frothed with shopkeeper pretensions: “We believe passionately in what our Chairman calls Customer Sovereignty” and “it forms the core of our business philosophy” and “we achieve music therapy in our stores”. That use of “therapy” was very revealing. It would seem this supermarket chain believes its customers are sick in some undefined way, in need of treatment. Special This Weekend! Chairman Raymond’s Internationally Famous Shop-Healing Lubricant Cream! Now In Economy Sovereign Pack! 70% Extra Solids!
What my feeble parable teaches is that what is being clumsily passed off by the Worcester store manager as a democratic decision is actually uncannily fascist. As an underling he was only doing what he’d been told to do by the bosses of the supermarket chain, who had decided their stores should be stitched with badly reproduced musical pabulum. An imposed decision therefore had overridden the rights of the many who might prefer otherwise. In this way store-music is exactly like second-hand cigarette smoke. Breathe it and die.
It seems all but impossible for people — leave alone supermarket intellectuals — to understand that amplified music of any sort is, by its nature, something that cannot be contained. It’s like someone drinking from a fire-hose. What they don’t swallow drenches those who might want to stay dry. If you need to read a thriller on the plane or while you are shopping, please do so. No one else is forced to read it with you. But if you so desperately need screechy music to soothe you before take-off or at the cold meats counter, then wear earphones, don’t impose your needs on others.
Living in the sticks as I do, urban cacophony is something that I find increasingly disagreeable when I do have to go into a city. When I lived in one, like all other city dwellers, I became quite deaf to the ambient hubbub. But I’m pretty damn sure my system was hearing every decibel and that some internal censor was forbidding cognisant reaction. It is said that our skin actually registers the most subtle changes in temperature but that if these minute variations were transmitted to our conscious brain we would be constantly stressed by the information.
Equally, when I lived in a city I wasn’t aware of the high levels of carbon monoxide I was inhaling, the smell of car exhausts was something I didn’t notice. Once again my physical being certainly did. As indeed our secret brains resent excessive babble.
The prime function of background music is anything but therapeutic; it is there to add to, make even more horrible the aural nightmare of urban life.
Try selling that one to the Worcester store manager.
Archive: Previous columns by Robert Kirby