What's On Your Radio?

Elton John began it. Sort of. Waaay back in the 80s when some of us weren’t even toddling about, due to our severe lack of existence, he’d already noticed and drawn attention to the fact that “Sad Songs Say So Much” (in an extremely alliteratively magnificent way too). The Living End seems to have taken note of it too.

With the advent of ipods and all those other personal music devices that Microsoft Word doesn’t passively aggressively put as “misspelled” with an angry red squiggle line under it, we can now be around music of our choosing virtually twenty-four hour a day if we so wish. This shift away from shared to private music listenage, though somewhat subtle, has happened extraordinarily rapidly.

In 2000, Glenelg-Seymour bus travel meant 107.1 SAFM blaring from a black cassette/radio player which had its very own seat. Within weeks, newbies would be well equipt to handle high pressure radiodical situations; swinging towards the hills, the station would cease working, giving the nearest person mere seconds to switch to the other SAFM frequency before the passengers started suffering music-and-inane-breakfast-show withdrawal symptoms.

Time passed, and with it came a new bus, with new, inbuilt radio (with a penchant for Nova) and, ever so sneakily: Discmans. Albeit, for choice you did need to bring the bulk of your CD collection, but the difference was now you didn’t need to share, or depend on what everyone else was listening to.

Now we have MP3 players and other headphonated devices. Now I am by no means saying that this is a bad thing; merely that it is heralding a shift that inevitably will, or indeed is already affecting our society, again, not necessarily in a bad way.

Simply, now if we need to escape from people, places, or even our own thoughts, its easy to retreat into a world where you hear nothing but the voice of someone, who chances are, you’ve never met speaking words that seem so relevant to what you’re feeling, whether that be happy, sad or confused.

I realise this isn’t a new thing. Maybe back in his day, when feeling a bit down, 18th Century Teenage boy indulged himself in a bit of ‘Marriage of Figaro’ to cheer up. There’s so much variety of music around, that no matter what’s going on, there will always be one that’s lyrics speak to you as if talking about your own life, day or problems. This is what the Elton John thing was about – sad songs say so much. As do happy songs, and random “Numa Numa” type songs (albeit in Romanian for that particular case).

Music is important, and not merely for entertainment. They have it in movies almost constantly to heighten what you’re seeing on screen, as it is extremely emotive. Even before the silver screen, music played a lead role in plays, stage-shows, circuses – almost every form of entertainment imaginable.

Now however, we are almost elbow deep in it. You hear something you like, not only can you immediately “acquire” it (and about twenty other songs by the same artist) you can listen to it straight away on your computer, copy it onto your music player and take it with you wherever you go; something not possible when all we had was CDs and Cassettes – unless of course you fancied toting a disc wallet around. It’s gotten too easy.

I’m not entirely clear on what my point is exactly. It’s not like “oooh! Watch out for that Billy Idol – he’s a bad influence talking into your ear all the time about “White Weddings” or that Eskimo Joe’s going to convince us all that the only cool girls are those with “Black Fingernails, Red Wine”…or something like that. Nor that Robbie Williams is telling us all to release “the hooligan half of me who steals from Woolworths.” (yes, that is one of his lyrics…)

The girl on the bus who’s at a loss at what to do because her ipod’s run out of battery, or the hooded boy charging through Rundle Mall not hearing the people around him…maybe I’m just slightly unsettled by the possibility that our generation could be the first to completely rely on self-therapy and become increasingly detached, because now we can be alone in a group, if we so choose. Already, what percentage of conversations we all have involve actual voices and talking, and isn’t all text and emoticons?

But, like I said, it’s just a possibility; things could go entirely the other way. Whatever the case, it’s not something that’s going to (or needs to) change anytime soon.

I mean, this whole thing was written while I was logged into msn, with music playing resoundingly loudly in the foreground :-p