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This Sunday John Heckathorn |
A double dose of
musical oppression
and all that jazzI can't hear you.
At the moment, I am listening to Hank Crawford and David "Fathead" Newman work out a tune called "Going Down Slow," written by an old bluesman named St. Louis Jimmy.
Lately, I've always got a pair of white earbuds tucked in my ears. Can't hear a word you're saying.
"It's like having another teenager in the house," says my wife. She's not really complaining. She's pleased. "Finally, I got you something you wanted for Father's Day."
Instead of the traditional bottle of aftershave, she bought me a 30-gigabyte iPod.
It was supposed to be from her and the children. But when I unwrapped it, the kids looked so envious, I guessed if they'd had their own way, they'd have kept the iPod and stuck me with the aftershave.
Everybody knows what an iPod is, I guess -- a little chrome-and-white box that works like a Walkman, except that it holds thousands of songs because they somehow slipped an entire computer drive inside.
"Just what you need, another expensive geeky toy," said one of my unsympathetic friends.
No, I explained. I need an iPod because I am a doubly oppressed musical minority. He snorted. But I have a point. Two really.
Oppressed minority No. 1: I listen to jazz.
My kids think that a taste for jazz is, at best, a symptom of senile dementia. My wife is only slightly more tolerant. Once I put on the family-room stereo a perfectly accessible jazz album, Kenny Burrell's Midnight Blue. "That's a pretty good CD," admitted my wife.
"How can you tell?" said Mallory, my oldest. "All his CDs sound exactly the same."
"Terrible," added her sister, who once seemed genuinely puzzled that Tower Records had a jazz section. "Who else buys that stuff?" she asked.
She'll listen to bands called Weezer and Jimmy Eats World, but Charlie Parker, dead 50 years, is too radical for her. She's not alone. I once gave a co-worker a ride. He listened to a few a seconds of Thelonious Monk's "Well You Needn't" on the car stereo and asked, "What's that screeching?"
Still, the problem's not just jazz.
No, the problem is the whole direction the world has taken since 1979, when Sony introduced the TPS-L, the first playback-only headphone portable stereo. Since TPS-L was hardly a catchy name, Sony called it the Walkman. There were critics, old guys who saw kids walking around immersed in God knows what music, not listening to a word anyone said, and decided that civilization was ending.
They had a point. The Walkman changed the way we looked at music. Suddenly, the concert model, in which large numbers of people heard the same music at once, was outdated. Music was no longer a communal experience.
In fact, now the only people who feel the right to inflict their music decisions on others are those guys who drive around in cars in which the subwoofer is bigger than the engine. And, of course, my youngest daughter, who is unable to load the dishwasher without playing Good Charlotte's "Young and Hopeless" at maximum volume.
But -- and I promised you a second reason why I was musically oppressed -- one segment of the population no longer has much in the way of music options: middle-aged guys. Guys like me who tend to be stuck in offices all day, full of ringing phones and serious, businesslike conferences, hardly the place to air out our Ray Charles "Birth of Soul" three-CD box set.
At work, the only music we hear is in the elevators.
And at home ... well, let's just say we tend not to be in charge of the entertainment options.
One morning in the locker room I asked the guys a simple question: "Can you really listen to music at home?"
"Oh sure," said one wag, "I can listen to anything I want as long as it's not loud enough to actually hear it."
"Now that you mention it," mused my friend Gary, "The only time I can listen to my own music is when I'm alone in my car." Gary is a hard-working, entirely pleasant sort of fellow. You hate to think of him having to drive home the long way just so he can hear the final "whoo whoo" of "Sympathy for the Devil."
A few weeks after this discussion, I show up with my earbuds plugged into my ears. "Did you get an iPod?" Gary demanded.
"My wife gave it to me," I said. "What did you get for Father's Day?"
He looked pretty unhappy, so I left my earbuds in while he told me. Couldn't hear a word.
John Heckathorn is the editor of Honolulu Magazine. He is one of four columnists who take turns writing "This Sunday."