Music is
one of man’s great inventions. Up there with the telephone, the computer and
the spork. But, as usual, man is seeking to defile its own creation. The
irrevocable THUD THUD THUD of a pounding bass drum through a wall, for me,
indicates the approach of the apocalypse and I’ve had enough.
Admittedly I’m the least ‘studenty’
student in all of human history. If I could, I would sit in a wing-back arm
chair wearing a smoking jacket and smoking a Churchill with a large tumbler of
18-year-old scotch in hand, but I’ve resigned myself to the fact that I’m
living in what is basically Satan’s arsehole complete with this incomparable THUD
THUD THUD coming from every direction at quite literally all hours of the day
and night.
It starts at about 9am and doesn’t
finish, on and off, until about 1am the next morning, on a good day. The
problem not only lies in the repetitiveness of the ‘beat,’ and I can’t
understand how anyone can listen to the same song straight for 12 odd hours
anyway, but the basic disregard for the fact that these un-insulated, paper
thin, toy terrace houses are clearly not the most soundproof buildings in the
world.
This problem is not new. For decades
music has pumped out of student houses louder than a bunch of pre-teen,
mini-humanoids at a One Direction concert. In the 70’s it was Punk; in the 80’s
it was New Wave; in the 90’s it was House and unfortunately in the 2000’s and
beyond we’ve reached a stage where manufactured electronic bullish faecal
matter is the norm.
This problem is also, sadly,
unsolvable. For as long as there are students, there are arseholes. I cringe
when I see the bio tag saying ‘student’ on a television show because you know
what you’re going to get; some fleshwaste who is apparently the epitome of the
British student but someone you’ve never seen or heard anything like before.
But there are some students who
never seen to account for anybody else. I wear headphones around the clock to
prevent people from having to listen to my music, because that’s exactly what
it is, my music. Sometimes I’ll put
it on my speakers, but quietly and generally when the house isn’t full or tying
to get to sleep.
It’s the same on trains. I’ve taken
more train journeys these last couple of years than in my entire life put
together and the ratio of journey to wanting to strangle the person next to me
with their own headphone wires is incredible. Last week I was listening to a
strange hybrid of a Christopher Hitchens audiobook and, thanks to the nihilistic
schoolgirl next to me, an electro mega mix of Rihanna for an hour and a half.
All these people are doing is making the death penalty sound like the more
humane option.
Of course this discourse is futile.
What do I hope to achieve by singling out these out these ‘bloody students?’
Well, nothing really. I just wanted a moan. And besides, there’s nothing really
that can actively be done about it. You can’t stop people from listening to
music, and I wouldn’t try to, you can only tell them that if they don’t turn it
down you’re going to force-feed them bleach straight out of the bottle. You
have been warned.
It’s just approaching 10am and the
thudding has commenced once again.
