Loud Music Versus Soft Music

Loud Music

By Stephen Dobyns

My stepdaughter and I circle round and round.
You see, I like the music loud, the speakers
throbbing, jam-packing the room with sound whether
Bach or rock and roll, the volume cranked up so
each bass notes is like a hand smacking the gut.
But my stepdaughter disagrees. She is four
and likes the music decorous, pitched below
her own voice-that tenuous projection of self.
With music blasting, she feels she disappears,
is lost within the blare, which in fact I like.
But at four what she wants is self-location
and uses her voice as a porpoise uses
its sonar: to find herself in all this space.
If she had a sort of box with a peephole
and looked inside, what she'd like to see would be
herself standing there in her red pants, jacket,
yellow plastic lunch box: a proper subject
for serious study. But me, if I raised
the same box to my eye, I would wish to find
the ocean on one of those days when wind
and thick cloud make the water gray and restless
as if some creature brooded underneath,
a rocky coast with a road along the shore
where someone like me was walking and has gone.
Loud music does this, it wipes out the ego,
leaving turbulent water and winding road,
a landscape stripped of people and language-
how clear the air becomes, how sharp the colors.

When I first read over this poem for my English class, it really confused me. But as I read it more slowly again to try to understand the imagery, I started to see what the poem was about. It made me think about peoples’ different tastes in music and how I like my music. I know a lot of people who like to have the music all around them. They want to get carried away by the rhythms. These are the people blasting their music in the house next door at 3:00 in the morning. On the other hand, my grandma is a big advocate of the classical music makes you smarter theory. She listens to quiet Bach and Vivaldi all the time. To me she seems like a person with much more control over her life rather than someone who loves to blast their music so loud it can be heard over a Boeing 747 flyover.

But with me, I’m indecisive. I like to chill out and listen to my favorite classical guitar music, but I also like to jam out in a car to some rock and roll, windows down, seats vibrating from the sound waves. Teenagers in general seem to like loud music, but I think that it detracts from what we can hear all around us. One example is teenagers who listen to their ipods in a public place like a party. They should be talking with others, but instead they look just like a selfish noob. For now, I will have to try to keep my loud music level on a low, because in the end, I know that classical music is the best for me.