Sodcasting

Public Nuisance or Social Harmony?

“I love it when people play loud music on their phones on the bus.”—no one ever.

Why are more and more people playing loud music on their phones in public?

I don’t know about you, but sometimes I’ve a good mind to grab their phone and chuck it off the bus. Picture their faces, etched with shock and confusion: Should I beat the shit out of this guy who just threw my phone off the bus?! Or should I go and get my phone?! In my fantasy, they always choose the phone because phones are expensive (and I don’t like getting my face punched in) and then the other passengers give me a standing ovation.

In the UK, this rising sonorous scourge has earned the name “sodcasting”—people playing music through their phones in public without regard for others.

I put these selfish sods in the same league as litterers. Or those people who think it’s OK to open a tub of corned beef sandwiches or pickled eggs in a confined space.

Actually, forget that. Sodcasters are way worse than people who eat smelly food; most of those folks are probably unaware. Like bad breath; only the person who has it doesn’t know it. But sodcasters know exactly what they’re doing. And they’re smug about it too, which makes them doubly unsufferable.

When we first moved into our flat in London, noisy neighbours almost made us move back out, and we had to buy a white noise machine to drown out the disturbances. Noise machines work on a psychological level by putting control of noise back in your hands. You get to decide when you fill the room with noise, how loud it will be, and how long it will last. And it’s this control that sodcasters take from you.

Whenever we retweet or share articles, I think it’s because we enjoy the status boost that comes from being associated with an idea. And maybe this is one of the things sodcasters are after. They like a song and they want us all to know they’re cool for liking it. I get it. I can even accept that part, even if it is completely ridiculous. I mean, can you imagine being on a packed bus and reading a tweet really loud so everyone can hear it?!

But the part I can’t accept is the veiled threat that sodcasting often carries with it. A friend who lives in Melbourne said she “gives them space in case they’re trying to start a fight.” This is the absolute worst type of sodcasting: territorial sodcasting. It’s an oppressive way of colonising space, like an alien invasion where we can’t defend ourselves.

Les Blomberg, executive director of the Noise Pollution Clearinghouse which aims to combat noise pollution, defines noise as “sound that harms the wellbeing of people or animals, or interferes with activities.” One other definition he offers is “a sound that is out of place or inharmonious.” I say sodcasters are guilty on both counts.

Did you know that up to 4% of heart attacks that occur in people living near airports happen because of the noise of the planes? It’s a similar story with people living near motorways. Yikes!

In another surprising study, researchers filled two rooms with office workers—one room was quiet while the other was noisy. They asked all the workers how much they believed a colleague of theirs should earn. All the workers in the noisy room valued their colleague’s labour less than those in the quiet room. Brutal!

It seems no matter how conscious of it we think we are, no matter how habituated we become, unwanted noise triggers our fight or flight response (but where can we run to when we’re on the bus?!) and generally makes us less civil and less generous with each other.

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So why oh why are sodcasters doing it? And how has it become a worldwide phenomenon reported in the States, Europe and even Asia?

The answer lies in history.

Sodcasters aren’t the first to play music in public. Boomboxes in the 70s and 80s (and transistor radios in the 50s) were all about broadcasting your beats. Cassette players fitted with amps and loudspeakers and often requiring several large batteries, boomboxes were loud, they were heavy, they were hard work to maintain. But they were portable and freed young people for the first time to take their music with them.

Space expanded. Suddenly anywhere could be the scene of a bloc party or dance off. Boomboxes turned enemies into incumbents, created new goals and aspirations, they gave creatively-starved kids a ready and much-needed outlet. Part instrument, part status symbol and part cultural icon, the boombox showed the world who you were, the music you liked and the culture you were part of. They were instrumental (sorry, it was right there) in creating hip hop culture and rap music that catalysed an explosion of artistic output that’s still reverberating around the world today (yep, I’ll see myself out).

Boomboxes were certainly rebellious, certainly a mode of youthful expression that prodded older people, they certainly involved (re)claiming public space and they were probably even threatening at times to those who didn’t understand them. But at least they brought people together and were highly productive.

Boombox culture was ultimately about gathering. It was collective, outward-oriented, community-driven and it prioritised shared experience.

Contrast that world with today’s increasingly personal and private realm of music enjoyment. From the Sony Walkman to MiniDiscs (remember those?) to MP3 players and iPods, culminating in the handheld black holes we call phones, listening to music has become hermetic. We’ve turned inward, sealed within membranes of our own making, with only the sonic detritus of Candy Crush and Instagram feeds to keep us “connected.”

Culture has shifted from the street corner to TikTok and technology’s extended creative expression to all. Our communities are bigger and more connected than ever but we move around in cloistered soundscapes that render us indifferent to the person sitting beside us on the bus.

But wait! There’s a sodcaster! They seem to be trying to tell me something. I hate their music and their speakers sound shit—and they’ve mistaken the bus for the park—but if I plug my ears and squint my eyes hard enough, I can just about make out the hazy apparition of the social innovators of yesteryear.

History has a tendency to repeat itself. Ideas fade out and back in when they’re needed. I suspect, now more than ever, that boombox culture has something to teach us, something we’re all needing, and whilst sodcasters aren’t quite getting it right, it’s a signal we should probably tune in to.

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Thanks to Camilo Moreno-Salamanca, Henri James, Paudan Jain, Jenny Herald, Georg Bulmer, Diana-Maria Demco, Ramses Oudt, Andrew Bertodatti, Garrett Kincaid, Annabel Youens, Alex Exum, Jen Dyck-Sprout, Anfaal Batool, Heather King, and David and the team at Write of Passage for reading drafts of this.

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