Seldom does an article appear that describes with eerie precision my own experiences and feelings. Yet, writing in The Mail, Dominic Lawson managed to achieve that rare feat.
Apparently, St John’s Wood, one of London’s more salubrious neighbourhoods, was overrun with drug pushers who, as a sideline, vandalised the parked cars – and believe me, few of them were old bangers.
When the residents sought police help, they didn’t get police action. Our cops are too busy enforcing DEI rules to waste their valuable time on drug dealers. However, they offered advice that I find remarkable: “You can also contact your housing association/the council and ask them to play classical music, as this has been proven to deter and prevent crimes.”
The residents found the advice unhelpful and actually stupid, but their ivory tower clearly doesn’t offer a good view of the lower social strata. I can testify from personal experience that modern youngsters – not just drug-pushing criminals but even well-behaved girls from decent families – flee from real music the way demons flee from the cross.
When I still abased myself by running the creative department of an ad agency, I had several designers, most of them good-looking girls from good-sounding families, working for me.
The girls were all pretty because they had been hired by my predecessor who treated that aspect of their personality as a sine qua non qualification. He called it a “positive hiring policy” and didn’t mind sharing that term with the girls themselves. They didn’t mind, but that was 25 years ago. Today they’d sue him or possibly even have him arrested.
They all did their designs in one large room where pop music was blaring at all times. Since that musical genre never fails to produce an acute physical pain all over my body, I pulled rank and told them to switch the bloody thing off whenever I walked into the room.
The young ladies saw that as a quaint peculiarity and alternately put it down to my foreign origin or snobbishness. It never occurred to them that their colleague, albeit a senior one, could possibly find anything wrong with that anti-musical din. What did occur to them was that I had some kind of aversion to vocal music as such.
To prove them wrong, the next day I brought a CD of a Bach cantata to the office and put it on in their room. Only one of the girls, a stunning beauty who had spent most of her youth in discos and gone almost totally deaf as a result, showed no negative reaction.
The others suffered physically, with their faces contorted in pain. After a minute or two one girl couldn’t stand that assault on her senses any longer. She got up and left the room to save her sanity.
Let me repeat that those young ladies all came from what used to be called lower-middleclass families. They were all educated at art colleges, had well-paid jobs (too well-paid, according to my partners) and had neither tattoos nor facial metal that one could see. If they reacted to music the way they did, I can easily believe that the yobs terrorising St John’s Wood would run for their lives when exposed to Mozart or Beethoven.
In fact, Mr Lawson cites several examples of that crime-busting stratagem achieving a great success. One involved playing classical music (the easy-listening end of it, opera areas sung by Pavarotti) at a London tube station so crime-ridden that staff refused to work there.
The report quoted by Mr Lawson says: “Within 18 months, robberies were cut by 33 per cent, assaults on staff by 25 per cent, and vandalism by 37 per cent as the voice of Pavarotti made troublemakers scarper.”
When the same tactic was deployed in Seattle, Washington, the local paper commented that: “The reason certain types of music work as a crime deterrent, neurologists say, may lie in people’s neurobiological responses to things they don’t enjoy or find unfamiliar.”
I suspect the problem is deeper than simply a lack of enjoyment and familiarity. Today’s youngsters grow up in a culture where ugly is the new beautiful, and beautiful is a universal source of distress.
Initially, the response was more ideological than neurobiological, but several generations of aggressive brainwashing have shifted aesthetic inversion from ideology to physiology.
People intuitively associate beauty, in this case real music, with everything revolting in life: social hierarchy, tradition of any kind including aesthetic, toffs, buildings unmarred by graffiti, human flesh not disfigured with ink and metal. The revulsion they feel lives in the subcortex, and they’d find it difficult to express it in words, especially since their verbal skills have been honed on monosyllabic interjections, four-letter words and Internet slang heavy on acronyms.
In short, my advice to St John’s Wood residents would be to follow the police recommendation. Of course, it’s not certain that their own aesthetic sense is all that different from the yobs’.
One problem with modernity is that these days wealth and taste seldom coexist in the same breast. The typical line of demarcation nowadays runs not between people with and without taste, but between yobs with and without money.
Mr Lawson then commented on another one of his – and my – bugbears. He can’t stand pop music blaring in restaurants. Whenever he finds himself in such an eatery, and they are thick on the ground, he asks a staff member to turn it down, with variable success.
I sympathise with his predicament, which is also mine – and not just in London. Once Penelope and I misread the roadmap and found ourselves somewhere near Place Pigalle in Paris. It was past normal lunchtime, and the only restaurant still open played some sort of prole music at full blast. When we asked the waiter to turn it down or ideally off, he replied with the explanation Mr Lawson cites: “The other customers would object.”
Actually, there were no other customers there, except another couple our age who almost certainly wouldn’t have complained. But concern for other people’s feelings isn’t the reason for waiters’ obstreperousness. It’s only a pretext. The real reason is the urge to deliver a victorious cry into the ears of the vanquished foe, throwbacks to a civilisation long gone.
These days we don’t even try to negotiate with waiters. When the background music is too loud, we simply walk out and eat elsewhere.
Actually, we object to such music even when it’s classical. Perhaps we object to it even more, because that music wasn’t written to accompany the jangling sounds of silverware and the chomping sounds of chewing.
We’ve been known to ask our hosts at dinner to turn background classical music off – or else turn it up so we’d listen to it and neither eat nor talk. These are questionable manners, but respect for the greatest achievements of the human spirit trumps etiquette as far as I’m concerned.
All in all, I sympathise with Mr Lawson’s ordeal. Yet neither of us can do anything about it: it’s piped, hurricane-strength zeitgeist itself that’s blaring at restaurants. It can sweep away all before it, me and even him.