Photos by Neil Buckingham and Blake Calderwood
As I write this, I am recovering from spending two weeks without hearing music of any sort. Two. Fucking. Weeks. It’s been awful, really awful, and, for the most part, mind-bendingly depressing.
I turned into a whining, unsociable, borderline agoraphobic manic-depressive. I hate everyone. Everyone hates me. My girlfriend told me I’m an asshole, my housemates think I’m a prick, the general public probably thinks I’m deranged to wear construction earmuffs everywhere during a heat wave, and I think I agree with all of them.
I was allowed to choose one song to listen to before my two weeks began. I decided to pick something that could potentially get stuck in my head for a fortnight without causing me to hang myself. I chose “Raspberry Beret” by Prince. An easy decision. I listened to it three times in a row the night before I began. Prince was to be my bastion of sanity.
I kept a diary for the entirety of my musical anorexia. It consists of me bitching about how shit life is when you can’t listen to music. Here is some of it.
It is 8:30 in the morning and my girlfriend is about to head off to work. She feigns to start playing music so I remind her that from today I can’t listen to anything tuneful of any kind for two weeks. She yells in my face that “this is going to be fucking shit for everyone!” I think she’s overreacting. She asks whether she can sing and I tell her that she can’t. She attempts to sing some Lionel Richie anyway and I have to block my ears.
I decide to set some ground rules for myself. The obvious: no iPod, no films, more or less no TV. And then the not-so-obvious: must wear earplugs at all times, avoid pubs, parties, gigs, restaurants, cafés, and most people. Avoid having a life of any kind. I write most of these things on some scrap paper and pin them above my desk.
I am as good as unemployed, so for the rest of the day I have the house to myself (my other two housemates are at the Glastonbury Festival—irony noted). One day without music seems to not really be a problem. Then my phone rings. I forgot to put it on silent and I hear my ringtone. Technically I just failed. I put it on silent.
I end up spending the rest of the day watching the World Cup on mute with teletext turned on. I learn that teletext is awful at keeping up with live commentary. The word “vuvuzela” is replaced by “vasectomy,” and on my TV is this sentence: “The noise of the vasectomies in the stadium is overwhelming.” This is the highlight of my day.
I sleep in until 2 PM. When I wake up, there is no food in the house. I go shopping with these strange-looking earplugs shoved in my ears. I bought them from a Turkish supermarket. They are really uncomfortable and penetrate my aural orifices much more than I think earplugs should. I feel like I’m bleeding inside my head.
I troop on down to the local hardware store and buy a pair of construction earmuffs from a guy who looks like Al Pacino. He assures me that this particular pair of earmuffs is “impenetrable, you won’t hear nuffin’.” I wear them on my way home and almost get run over by a scooter. Al Pacino was right.
There’s a really big party down the road tonight that everyone goes to except me. I sit in my bedroom drinking gin and reading a book.
I go to watch the World Cup by myself in some dreary pub that refuses to play any music and shows matches with the TV on mute. The beer is cheap, the place is awful, and I am surrounded by alcoholics, deaf people, and deaf alcoholics. I want to hang myself. I start to think that I am not terribly musically inclined, as the only song I can whittle up from memory is “Happy Birthday.” Then I think of “Raspberry Beret” and feel human again.
My photographer friend Neil comes by and we go to HMV while I’m wearing my construction earmuffs. I pick out the first album that I’m going to listen to when I finish my two weeks of musical sobriety: The Very Best of Prince.
My housemates get home from Glastonbury and tell me how amazing everything was. I tell them that they can’t play any music. I can’t handle another 11 days of this dross.
Today I withdraw into full-scale social exclusion. My housemates look at me like I’m a leper after I tell them for the second time that they can’t play any music anywhere in the house while I’m home (which is all the time). Now everybody is watching a film in the living room. I am desperate to watch it. Instead I’m sitting by myself in my room reading The War of the Worlds.
DAY 5
DAY 6
I do nothing all day. Absolutely nothing. I am a music-starved blob.
DAY 7
My girlfriend comes home from work and we have a BBQ outside in the common area of our house. Our next-door neighbor introduces herself, but I can’t hear what she says because I’m wearing my construction earmuffs. My girlfriend and the neighbor chat about something and laugh at me.
My friend from back home comes to stay at our house for a few days. We smoke a joint in complete silence and I tell him how miserable I am. We eat lunch in complete silence. All I can hear is this hideous slurping noise as he inhales his spaghetti. I fucking hate hearing people eat.
DAY 9
I am so desperate to listen to music that I watch music videos on my laptop with the sound muted. That M.I.A. video looks a whole lot better when you don’t actually hear how awful the song is. I spend the rest of the day in the park drinking cider with a friend and my construction earmuffs.
I feel like my construction earmuffs are my fifth limb. I ponder this and do nothing all day.
DAY 11
Last night I dreamed that Keanu Reeves knocked on my door. He had a towel wrapped around his head and in his hand was a full bottle of bubble bath.
When I wake up all I want to do in the world is listen to Notorious B.I.G. I think it has something to do with my Keanu Reeves dream. I think of that awful film where he’s a baseball coach for deprived black children and his star pitcher can’t pitch without listening to Big Poppa. I end up reading all day and am incredibly depressed. My girlfriend gets home and I yell at her for no reason.
DAY 12
Today I feel considerably better about life. I have no urge whatsoever to listen to music. I think I’m slowly getting used to it. I get a call from a family friend who’s in town. They have a spare ticket to the Lion King musical tonight. I seriously consider going with my construction earmuffs on. I don’t. I head into town with Neil and we eat lunch at a Hare Krishna café. Neil tells me later that a Hare Krishna asked me why I was wearing earmuffs. I didn’t hear him.
I wake up in the middle of the night and have a mild hissy fit because I think that one of the French-made pure-wax earplugs that I wear to bed has been swallowed by my ear. It turns out that this was not the case. I really want to listen to B.B. King right now. Or A Tribe Called Quest. Or Lionel Richie. Anything. Justin Bieber would fucking do. Two days to go. Kill me. I have nothing left that I want to read so I sit outside and read a Christmas cookbook. Neil comes by and takes a photo of me doing this. Later on I make some Christmas brownies that end up looking like dried turds.
Final day. I wake up at 11 and go back to sleep until one. This day cannot go by fast enough. I play videogames on mute until 11:59 at night. At midnight I turn my speakers on for the first time in two weeks and blast out The Very Best of Princein its entirety. This is a watershed moment in my life. There are tears. It ends up waking up my housemates and one of them tells me that he hates me.
I would like to say that I learned something from this experience. But I didn’t. Maybe it made me realize that if I become deaf I will also become suicidal. That’s nice to know. Other than that, it was a really shitty experience and it turned me into an asshole. But you already know that. And, yeah, it is incredibly difficult to avoid music. I get it.
This is fucking brilliant. Really brilliant. Can we PLEASE meet this week and think of something equally awesome to do??
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