My struggle to tolerate the 'sodcasters'
It was a very modern stand-off, or at least a modern version of an ancient confrontation between an adult and a teenager.
A tall, menacing looking kid was sitting at the back of the bus, blasting out R and B track on his phone.
The driver, having given one ignored verbal request for him to turn it off, now pulled over and walked to the back of the bus.
"I've told you once - turn it off."
"Why should I?"
Like my fellow passengers – morning commuters whose faces were all familiar to me from my years of travelling by bus from Leeds to Cleckheaton – I was watching the drama unfold with interest. Self-interest as well as curiosity. Over the last year or two I'd got a lot of reading done on that 45-minute journey. What if this newcomer was to be a regular? You can flip through a tabloid with tinny R and B blasting from the back of the bus. You can gaze out of the window. But you can't read anything worth reading.
So why should he turn it off?
"For the sake of my inner life and my intellectual development ..."
I didn't say that of course, not wanting to get punched. Because such was the degree of outrage the boy felt on being told to turn off his radio, it looked like it could have spilled into violence.
The bus driver paid the antagonist the compliment of reasoning with him.
"I've got to drive this thing without crashing it, mate. And all I can hear is that thing going boom-boom-boom ..."
The kid turned off his radio and sat for the rest of the journey in sulky silence.
What struck me about the encounter, and other similar ones since, was that the boy playing the radio was, at least at first, genuinely baffled as to why he didn't have a right to subject everyone else to the racket.
I was reminded of this incident when I read an article recently, identifying the practice of playing music in this way as sodcasting'.
It is thought the name originated in Pascal Wyse's Wyse Words column in the Guardian's Weekend magazine: "Sodcast (noun]: Music, on a crowded bus, coming from the speaker on a mobile phone. Sodcasters are terrified of not being noticed, so they spray their audio wee around the place like tomcats."
And it often does look like a territorial act; sodcasters appear to pollute the immediate environment with the defiance of those who would just love to be challenged.
Part of the trouble is one man's racket is another man's great music. Me, I find the staccato rhythms of R and B, especially when filtered through the treble-heavy medium of a mobile phone, intensely annoying.
Like an inverted version of the anti-social behaviour weapon, the mosquito, which can only be heard by young ears, sodcasted music seems to be designed to stick it to the oldsters.
Research shows that it's an age thing. The media firm TRU found that people do it less with each passing year from 14 to 18.
I try to be tolerant of other people's annoying habits. And I worry what it says about me when I'm tempted to call for a ban on something relatively harmless enjoyed by the young.
So on balance I think we must live with sodcasting. I have a mellow playlist on my ipod now. When faced with a sodcaster, I put my headphones on and drown out the racket with the soothing strains of instrumental jazz. I can even read to it, which is nice.
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Weather for Cleckheaton
Friday 25 May 2012
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Temperature: 10 C to 23 C
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