Opinion | I Was Sure I Knew Why New Yorkers Blast Their Music. I Was Wrong. – The New York Times

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By John McWhorter
Opinion Writer
Hearing people play their cellphones without headphones or earbuds is now a common fact of life. So is hearing people complain about it.
Some regard it as a direct threat: The person playing his iPhone like a radio, the argument goes, is essentially angling for a fight, daring you to say something so he can lash out in response. Some of the folks I see acting like this do indeed seem glowering and unfriendly. They remind me of a similar phenomenon in the 1980s and 1990s, when guys would play their boomboxes at top volume on the street and in trains.
In the influential book “Streetwise,” the sociologist Elijah Anderson describes the phenomenon. “Spontaneous and boisterous,” Anderson writes, “they play their radios as loud as they please, telling everyone within earshot that this is their turf, like it or not. It may be that this is one of the few arenas where they can assert themselves and be taken seriously, and perhaps this is why they are so insistent.”
Anderson may have seen these men as antiheros of a sort, but frankly, I saw them as the quintessence of obnoxiousness. These days, many have similar feelings about people casually playing music, sports videos and TikToks on their phones in public, and especially in confined spaces, like restaurants or public transportation.
I used to see it that way, too, but at least when it concerns to music I have come to see it in terms of the challenge of diversity. Hear me out!
I once knew someone who, nearing 30, was surprised to learn that not everyone liked the same music that they did. They hadn’t been close with many people whose taste differed from their own, and hadn’t heard much beyond what they chose to listen to. It seemed natural, then, to assume that their music gave everyone else joy, too.
I think this is part of what makes so many people comfortable turning up their phones in public. Perhaps, like my friend, they grew up surrounded by people with tastes similar to theirs. Either way, they might just think they’re providing everyone with good music.
I started thinking about this a little while ago when I was walking on a quiet street in my neighborhood. A car drove by with the windows down, playing Latin hip-hop with the bass turned up so loud it practically affected my digestion. That’s not uncommon where I live, and I have generally regarded it as inconsiderate. But when the driver parked and got out of the car, I was surprised to see it was the barber I always go to. He’s not inconsiderate at all — he’s a contented family man living a peaceful life, with no interest in being a public nuisance. In his mind, he was just filling the world with good music. And given today’s musical sensibilities, he wouldn’t be out of his mind to suppose that everybody likes some hip-hop or merengue.
You might want to be able to choose when you listen and at what volume, but that’s not a universal preference. The journalist Xochitl Gonzalez situates New Yorkers’ love of noise along the lines of class. For “the have-littles and have-nots,” she writes, “summer means an open window, through which the clatter of the city becomes the soundtrack to life: motorcycles revving, buses braking, couples squabbling, children summoning one another out to play, and music. Ceaseless music.” I once saw a squabble about a young Latina woman’s out-loud iPhone that ended when she declared, “New York is all about noise!”
That approach is not intuitive for me. I like the peacefulness of the color green. I weary quickly of the sound of the electric guitar. (Sorry!) And I spend much of my life in an actual armchair. An armchair that reclines. But I have come to accept that my preferences in this regard are idiosyncratic — like the concert hall rule against clapping between movements, a modern convention that would have baffled Mozart.
I recently had the thrill of hearing the violinist Kelly Hall-Tompkins play Wynton Marsalis’s Violin Concerto in D. It’s such a marvelous piece that stopping myself from applauding every movement felt as unnatural as suppressing a sneeze. I suspect that to a great many people, keeping their music to themselves would feel just as inanely restrictive as sitting on their hands after someone plays a thrilling piece well.
I’m trying hard these days to just accept other New Yorkers’ sense of normal noise levels. The volume isn’t going to change, and in the end, I don’t think it’s usually coming from bad faith. Most recently I got the chance to practice this new acceptance as I rode the train. One of my fellow passengers was under the impression that everyone else in the subway car wanted to hear Toto’s “Africa” as the soundtrack to their ride. I (almost) didn’t mind.
Still, I would rather have heard the composer Eric Schorr’s art song cycle “New York Pretending to Be Paris: Songs of Remembrance and Desire.” To a certain degree it summons Ravel, if he wrote art songs about our own time and place, but Schorr’s musical voice is very much his own. Three singers sing poems by writers such as Cynthia Zarin and Thomas March set to lush, thoughtful scoring arranged for a 19-piece ensemble. I doubt anyone will be playing this up loud on a phone on the subway, but I highly recommend listening to it from the comfort of your armchair.
Finally, a correction to a correction: Last week I shared some information I’d gotten from Mark Post, a linguist at the University of Sydney, about a language of India that describe siblings in terms of birth order and genitalia (“first vagina,” “third vagina,” etc.). The existence of that naming convention belied a claim I had somewhat rashly made on a recent podcast. He has since clarified that the language in question was Adi — not, as I wrote, Galo, although Galo has similar terms of its own. Thanks again to my colleague in Sydney.
John McWhorter (@JohnHMcWhorter) is an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University. He is the author of “Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter: Then, Now and Forever” and, most recently, “Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.” @JohnHMcWhorter
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