Gone. In sixty seconds.

One evening last week, driving back home following a session of delectable mastication courtesy of ‘da Lucio’ (surely, the best little Italian restaurant in the South of England?), my wife and I decided to listen to The Stone Roses on the car stereo.  This in itself isn’t anything new – as people who know me will testify (and, as those keen-eyed readers who don’t may have guessed, given the appropriated title of my blog) – I am a little bit of a fan.

If the (albeit short-lived) jangling citrus-sucking genius of Manchester’s finest is never far from my ear, then why mention it?  Well, it struck me as we travelled up the M4 that evening that listening to music for music’s sake is something that – in this throwaway society – we don’t seem to do very much anymore.  As we pulled up outside the house, ‘Fools Gold’ (the full version, of course) had just started playing and, as I reached over to turn off the stereo and the exit the car, my wife stopped me and suggested that we ‘should really listen to the whole thing, don’t you think?’  So we did.  We turned up the volume and just listened. To 9 minutes and 53 seconds of baggy magic.  The wonderful thing about music, even when it’s a record you really know and love, is that it can still surprise you; still reveal more, if you only give it a chance.  Stop everything else and just listen.

When did music become associated with the word ‘background’?  How did we allow this to happen?!

A few years ago – in what now feels like a former life – I was presenting to a group of listless retail staff in a faceless conference room somewhere in the North-East of England.  In order to break the ice, and in an attempt to get these sluggish acne-ridden delegates showing just a little more life than the peeling paint on the walls that enclosed us, I went round the room asking each of them to name their ‘favourite movie’.  Now, I’m acutely aware, it’s probably impossible to pick just one – this was simply to give people a chance to open up a little and communicate with each other (incredible that you’d need to do this with customer-facing retail staff, I realise!)  As we moved round the room from person to person and as the usual suspects – ‘Star Wars’, ‘Taxi Driver’, ‘The Godfather’ etc. – were called out; by the time we’d reached the last row of bodies there was almost – almost, mind you – a small hubbub lingering above the pimply heads of those sat before me.

Communication without txt spk?  YFKM!

(By the way, the choices made by this group are something I’m bound to re-visit in a later blog.  In fact the whole ‘Top-Ten-this’ and ‘Top-Ten-that’, is something that deserves discussion.  One particularly pustular chap in the aforementioned group actually chose ‘Gone in 60 Seconds’ as their favourite film of all time. Yes – the Nicolas Cage version.  The mind boggles.  Then boggles some more.)

In addition to the issue of diminishing verbal communication skills, I can’t help but wonder whether or not, in this instant age of social networking – of tweeting, facebooking and yes, even blogging – are we also losing the ability to savour what is around us now, let alone show reverence to the past?  I used the phrase ‘throwaway’ earlier in this post when talking about our 21st century society.  It’s almost as though there’s some sort of underhand, hidden inculcation that has taken place and we’re all being pre-conditioned to needing everything – news, music, video; content of all kinds – immediately.  I think Ferris Bueller put things nicely in perspective when he said, ‘life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.’

Yet, everyday we are bombarded with more and more information... We hungrily snaffle this content up; we gorge ourselves on a never-ending stream of faceless fifteen-minutes-of-fame ‘celebrities’ and we assault our ears with manufactured soundalikes who allegedly have ‘the X factor’.
Quite frankly, the only ‘X’ I’d like to see on these delusional dunderheads is one that has been daubed with paint and serves as a target for a high-powered rifle.

They could show it on the BBC.  Now that really would be public service broadcasting.