All the public spaces in the western world will soon be polluted with the sound of popular music, and most of the private ones already are.
The 40 hours a week I work are spent listening to how love was lost, how it can be recaptured, how it feels to be currently loved, and the peculiar tensions of all three of those situations. When I go to the toilet, the volume in there is turned up relative to that in the office, akin to a nightclub.
Furthermore, I have the misfortune of living next to a pub. If I leave my flat during the evening, I can of course hear Keisha and Katy Perry blasting through the walls of the establishment.
There is no hiding place from it; not in the street, not on the train, not in the supermarket. This comes from someone whose exposure to chart music is reduced by virtue of not owning a television, and yet I still feel overwhelmed.
All public spaces will soon be places where it is impossible to think. There must be a reason for this, other than the blind desire to fill the silence, or the smaller sounds of people going about their lives.
Perhaps there is no longer anything to say - and if conversation is dead, then it makes sense to delay that revelation for as much as possible by playing pop music over our humiliation.
Yet the embarrassment of having exhausted ourselves intellectually is compounded by the awareness of what first superimposes itself over our words, and then replaces them. We don't surrender to a great ideal, or a thing of beauty - instead, we bow to the repetition of fictitious love stories, and their fictitious resolution.
To rebel against this is to become a madman, because its ubiquity is so great that we never even think about it any more. That public spaces equate to an aural assault is a given, and, like with Pope Benedict, there's no point fighting against it. Even to comment upon it is to condemn oneself as old-fashioned, a refusenik - but for all that, I confess it feels strange when the radio at work breaks down, or when the pub karaoke machine pauses to change tracks.
It's a social disease, akin to smoking, where the will of the few impacts upon the many. Unlike the smoking ban, however, asking for a music hiatus would be greeted with a sneer by those who impose it upon us in the first place.
I, we, all of us, are trapped in a prison of music; not great music or moving music, but the sort which will be forgotten in another six months, to be replaced by something only slightly different. It is the accompaniment to all our lives, and there's not a thing that can be done about it.
