Years ago, I took a personality test for an old employer whose results made a startling recommendation to colleagues: “Do not touch Ray.” I’m not that forbidding, I complained at the time, though the underlying suggestion that I don’t warm easily to others, and that perhaps my ideal office environment would enclose my desk with iron bars, was truer than I wanted to admit.
I’m not a weirdo, I promise. But as I get older my sensitivity around personal space has grown more acute. It is punishment enough to commute beside a stranger inclined to spread their legs, arms and ailments, like a biohazardous Swiss Army knife. But personal space for me is also auditory, and what tends to rattle my cage are the sounds that randos love to emit from their phones.
Recently I learned that one category of this behaviour is called sodcasting, which as a word sounds like a classic example of journalese so I’m a bit reluctant to use it. It gets fitful press coverage because it’s a low-stakes issue, but the op-ed consensus is that it’s rude and annoying. And sometimes, yeah, totally. But I’d like to offer a partial defence of it here, not least because what seems to be succeeding it is much worse.
When speaking to Dan Hancox for the Guardian in 2010, the musicologist Wayne Marshall got to the heart of sodcasting’s social utility, as a way for certain groups—particularly teenagers—to stake out and assert social territory through music:
“Transistor radios and ghetto blasters are both good examples of a longstanding history of people making music mobile. The case of the transistor radio shows that people have long been willing to sacrifice fidelity to portability; while the ghetto blaster reminds us that defiantly and ostentatiously broadcasting one's music in public is part of a history of sonically contesting spaces and drawing the lines of community, especially through what gets coded as 'noise'.”
There’s a scene in Spike Lee’s “Do The Right Thing” that nicely captures the social subtext of spatial disputes set to music. When Radio Raheem and Buggin’ Out slam open the doors of Sal’s pizzeria, they demand that he makes space for Black people on his wall of fame. In case Sal doesn’t get the message, Raheem plants a boombox—playing Public Enemy’s “Fight The Power”—on the countertop, right in his face.
It’s useful to think about that scene, and the conflict that Lee’s film depicts, as symbolic of a persistent trend—one in which marginalised communities struggle to be heard and acknowledged. That’s important to explain, because what I’m talking about is a different, newer kind of noise pollution that I’ve noticed from smartphones: the sound of a mindless flick through social media.
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Music situates us in the world. It’s the immaterial mark of personhood; one of the effects of fandom is that your heroes bend the crook in your antenna, tuning the signal you send out to the world. That’s a romantic notion, I know, which fewer people share so intensely. In his book “Major Labels,” Kelefa Sanneh observes that people no longer identify with music as much as they used to. He writes:
“It’s odd that some of our old tribal musical boundaries seem to be dissolving… I sometimes wonder whether political convictions are replacing musical convictions as the preeminent marker of subcultural identity. Perhaps some of the kinds of people who used to talk about obscure bands now prefer to talk about obscure or outré causes, instead.”
That’s not to say that (young) people should care more about music than politics; only that as they pay less attention to the former, and turn to other, more insular kinds of entertainment, I wonder if music’s proto-civic function fades. I’ve come to think of being really into a band or scene when you’re 14 as good practice for forming proper political convictions, at an age where bad judgement and poor taste matter less.
Some of my fondest experiences of living in London are built on catching a few seconds of music. One April a few years ago I remember hearing T2’s “Heartbreaker” from a car window by Hackney Downs; a sick reminder to wind the clocks forward. In my local park, I often see a guy in a mobility scooter playing stuff like “Inglan Is A Bitch” from a chunky three-foot-tall speaker that sits between his legs in the footwell.
But lately I’ve felt the air changing. Music is making way for The Feed. I’d been wondering for a while about why people do this, and I’m a bit hesitant to tell you that I arrived at an answer not by hours of study at the British Library, reading academic papers and sorting the arguments in syntopical fashion. Instead, I had an argument with a stranger outside a café a few months ago.
A guy in white chinos and a ponytail, dressed like an NPC at a strip club, took a seat at the next table, and immediately tapped and dragged through Instagram Reels with the sound on. After a minute of this I asked him to turn it down. “Why?” I hadn’t come here to listen to the sound of his phone, I said. “But we’re outside”—the implication being that there was no clear etiquette to say that what he was doing was not on.
It’s easy to see how we got here. We decided to solve the problem of annoying sounds in public space by privatising the experience of moving through it. I do it, too—I seldom go anywhere without noise-cancelling headphones, which are extremely good at blocking out things I’d rather not hear. But the effect has been to collectively cede sonic territory; and if the space isn’t being contested, it’s not being looked after, either.
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Most of the music I’m into lately has been by Harold Budd and Hiroshi Yoshimura. I’ve been especially mesmerised by the exquisite plainness of Surround, a recently reissued ambient album by Yoshimura that was commissioned for a prefabricated housing estate. It’s no big leap to imagine it setting a neutrally pleasant mood in some of the scenarios I’ve described.
In earlier drafts of this newsletter, I made a foolish attempt to untangle whether a certain collection of sounds or types of music might work best for public space, and it gave me a headache because the debate could fill several (tedious) newsletters. But one thing I wanted to pick up was a description of two hypothetical positions by Steve Goodman (AKA Kode9) in the realm of “sonic power.”
Here’s how he talks about “the politics of silence” in his 2010 book, “Sonic Warfare”:
“It is often orientalized and romanticizes the tranquility unviolated by the machinations of technology, which have militarized the sonic and polluted the rural landscape with noise, polluted art with sonification, polluted the city with industry, polluted attention with marketing, deafens teenagers and so on. Its disposition is almost always reactionary.”
He makes a careful distinction between this and the politics of noise, a domain that Goodman is equally dismissive of for its relativism (“one person’s noise is another’s music,” as he puts it), and its tendency towards sophomoric gestures of protest (“instead of a shock to thought, a provocation to boredom”). Written 13 years ago, passages like these strike me as oddly optimistic now.
The spaces in which these philosophical auditory skirmishes might take place—nightclubs, the music press, various kinds of public space—are either disappearing or being diminished. One effect of this has been, if not a recession of music from civic life, then a kind of collective neglect, even as its oversupply means we’re living in a period of unsustainable abundance. (I’ve written previously about this for The Wire.)
Where Goodman feels a “reservoir of potential” in a concept of sonic power that positions frequency (i.e. infrasonic and ultrasonic sound) alongside amplification (i.e. loudness and quietude), it’s hard to imagine a capable setup escaping the hermetic confines of an Atonal festival premiere, much less being deployed by some decrepit local authority, who might only use it to clear schoolkids out of a Westfield anyway.
But when Goodman points to the consistency of “black noise”—UK drill, gqom, and amapiano being among the most recent examples—as a font of sonic innovation and “affective tonality” he’s onto something. Against lengthening odds it keeps spilling out of car windows and precarious mobile sound systems. As these vibrations speak, they’re reminders that the places we pass through still have interesting things to say.
What I’ve been paying attention to this past month.LISTENINGRA 909: Bake (Resident Advisor)
The mixes I like best are the ones that lead to The Tunnel (see: Shackleton’s fabric 55 CD, and this Donato Dozzy mix). You know the place: lean, moody, sinister, intense. It’s a zone I could happily (or, you know, moodily) stay locked in for hours, and this is a killer example.
Moritz Von Oswald – Silencio (Tresor)
Colleen – La Jour Et La Nuit Du Réel (Thrill Jockey)
Aesop Rock – Integrated Tech Solutions (Rhymesayers)
Various Artists - 10 (Music From Memory)
The Mystery Kindaichi Band – The Adventures of Kindaichi Kosuke (WeWantSounds)
READING
Vengeful Pathologies by Adam Shatz (London Review of Books)
The Hoffman Wobble by Ben Lerner (Harper’s)
How to Maintain Hope in an Age of Catastrophe by Masha Gessen (The New Yorker)
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