Overheard #12
My Public Transport Courtesy Cards, designed way back in 2015, are perhaps more relevant now than ever. They need an update and redesign then I will get them printed for mass consumption.
Taking the bus every day, I am of course used to the sounds of youth playing their phones full blast, whether it be TikTok videos, music, films, TV clips or, even, phone calls with the speakers on, with total disregard for other passengers. I wouldn’t mind, you know, if the music was good or the conversations interesting.
In fact, it’s not even just youth any more. I’ve seen/heard grown adults having video calls, listening to the football, watching TV shows out loud.
It’s a struggle to understand why people don’t just wear headphones (some do, of course). After extensive online research I have come to the conclusion that the reason is simply because they are utter selfish morons.
I’m old enough to remember kids with ghetto blasters playing music in the street. Ages ago, probably pre-smartphones, I think it was Simon Reynolds who wrote something about enjoying the different, random music of the city – radios from open apartment windows, music from cars and ghetto blasters to represent the rich cacophony of the city. If this sounds like a scene from an American movie*, it probably is – Do the Right Thing meets West Side Story, perhaps. I’m sure he’d change his mind today with teenagers blasting horrible modern R&B (it’s not impossible of course but highly unlikely you’ll hear Miles Davis or Joni Mitchell; actually, to be fair, there’s one teenage girl on my bus who plays 1980s pop ballads on her phone and sings along) from their tinny phones.
Anyway, what I overheard on the bus recently was pretty special. The teenager was present and correct, playing an intriguing yet indecipherable mix of crap and more crap on his phone. But then a man in his 60s – ponytail and leather jacket, I need not say more – sits not too far away from him. The man starts to plays the BBC news on his phone out loud (Israel attacking Iran; man attacking teenager, perhaps even making a passive-aggressive comment on children’s lack of interest in current affairs). The boy almost sneers, and changes tack: he too goes for spoken word, but some conspiracy theory show with a guy ranting about chem trails, yawn, injections, yawn.
It was five minutes of this – female BBC news presenter vs conspiracy theorist. The man backed out first, turning the sound off his. The teenager interrupted his music every ten minutes anyway with his mate calling him from Truro, asking him when he was arriving. Every time the teenager on the bus would answer, ‘Yo! I’m 30 / 20 / 10 minutes away’ and hang up. It all seemed so annoying at the time, then he gets off the bus and I forget all about it.
(*I did actually hear music – mainly jazz, of course – almost every day in New Orleans. Once whilst living there I was having an outdoor barbeque with some friends, it was some national holiday. We had Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks blaring out of our stereo. Across the way some black dudes – also having a barbeque – had hip hop blaring out of their stereo. We turned our stereo up louder; they turned up theirs. This continued for some time, I can’t remember what happened. Blood on the Tracks probably ended. Nothing dramatic, though we did live by the tracks near the Ninth Ward on North Rampart Street.)