The current musical "tyranny of the majority"

Since we are coming in to the final stretch of the U.S. "silly season", I will try to restrict that subject to my other blog in the meantime as well as any comments I may make on Huffington or the Times online sites.

So allow me to "kvetch" on another of my pet peeves, to whit, the all-pervasiveness of what I'd consider really bad music in our society. You can hear this "junk" (not my original choice of word!) all over, whether you want to or not; in the street, in stores, even in the workplace and it's occasionally played too loudly so you make sure to notice it. The only way to shut it out is to listen to other music on headphones which, if played too loudly, run the risk of making you deaf.

Now I admit right now that, as a senior citizen, I am even less sympathetic to this than I used to be but I was hardly of a different opinion in my youth.

As a member of the West Side YMCA in Manhattan, I would not even attend a "spinning" class due to the incredibly loud stuff coming out of that room. Even when the music has a classical basis, it almost always has an inappropriate "rhythm section" chugging away in the background. We are told it is to "keep up the energy level" but I find that to be arrant nonsense and I for one find it debilitating rather than energizing.

It is like the equivalent of too many drugs in an already overmedicated society.

If others insist on this musical diet, let them use headphones at a decent decibel level, thank you!

And since winter is rapidly approaching, the prospect of having to listen to Gene Autry singing "Rudolph" again at the local Duane Reade is equally discouraging as is a modern chanteuse applying her feeble slides and vibrato to some perfectly good Christmas songs.