Although I hate all music, sound, images and delight in general (I am like Skeletor in that respect and in one other), occasionally a happy tune and the reaction it illicits in people can be a heart-warming delight even for one as cynical and bitter and devoid of love for anything that is actually real and tangible as me.
I was walking near Hammersmith roundabout and the sun was shining through the cold afternoon. The traffic on the road was held up at the lights, which would usually have been a dour, uneventful affair, but there was loud music coming from one of the cars which had its windows rolled down. Usually this kind of brazen disregard for what other people might or might not want assailing their ears is the responsibility of an arrogant young man, stridently challenging you to complain about the racket, thus giving him an excuse to pop some caps into your ass. I expect.
But this music had less bass than you would expect from such a scenario and was upbeat and lif-affirming rather than threatening and full of swear words. It was what I believe is called Bhangra music and the car it was emanating from contained four or five very happy looking young women who were all dancing in their seats to the music, like they were in a film.
To see such an unbridled expression of friendship and joy in the cold and grey environs of Hammersmith would have melted the hardest of hearts and as you know, in reality my heart is soft and easily maleable even after all those hours on the anvil and I had to laugh. As I went by them I looked back at them still gesticulating away and I smiled again. It was like a little burst of colour in the otherwise black and white world and as infectious as mutated bird flu, but much less harmful. The moment spoke of fun and friendship and the vitality of youth and though these things can sometimes make an old man like me cross or jealous, today it just made me happy.
Later,as if to remind me that music is also a force for evil, (making it an effective tool of torture in Guantanemo Bay) I was in the tube and a European man was standing at the bottom of the escalator, singing "Fly Me To The Moon" through a microphone with a recorded backing track, very loudly and very out of tune. I walked right by him on my way up the escalator and my fragile ears were affronted by both the volume and the off keyness of it all. I was appalled to see that this man was hoping to get money from passers-by for this slaughtering of a song that I would argue was already dying a natural death without his help. The girls in the car had provided their dances and smiles for nothing - happy to share their happiness with the world - and yet this man was subjecting strangers to an aural assault and expected to get some of my hard-earned money in return. I pulled a face at him and gave him nothing and actually wondered for the first time in my life whether it is acceptable to take money out of the guitar cases of buskers who are of sufficiently poor a standard. I would have tried to, but I was already on my way up the escalator and getting further away from the noise, so why risk going back to it?
