Noise Culture Boosterism

While most noisy people tend not to be on track to split the atom, they do know rather well their noise is loud enough to be heard through the party wall, the floor or ceiling, or across the street. They make it anyway. How much of a neighbor stupidity curve should we apply when forced to visit someone to pleasantly address his or her disturbing nature? A positive stab at one-on-one communication may work in some cases, as some noisy neighbors aren't genuinely abhorrent individuals looking to enrage us. (Owning a motorcycle or belonging to an independent rock band doesn't make someone a bad person or bad neighbor, automatically.) But diplomatic efforts by good neighbors, when dealing with hellishly loud ones, are often either dead ends or the start of new problems. Kindness is weakness to chronically noisy neighbors. They're accustomed to hearing complaints, so are ready with an aggressive response - and typically maintain or worsen their offenses.

Today's noisy neighbors are following a trend with long roots, and while it's tiresome to throw blame in this direction, anti-neighbor influences clearly flow through our chief communications systems, seemingly birthing and rearing what I call noise culture. The entertainment industry and its marketing machinery increasingly present the noisy as part of a superior culture, one that's fun and funny and full of sexy people who are smart and cool enough to make every day a loud celebration. Those who don't want to be disturbed are belittled in countless examples of noise culture media boosterism. This is a method for reaching a target audience of younger people, but advertisers and show producers easily influence impressionable mobs while supposedly reflecting their sensibilities in order to sell them stuff. Noise culture media boosterism also makes victims of intolerably loud neighbors think twice before complaining, since the messages deftly depict complainants as whiney little things who deserve to be bothered as much as possible.

And it's coming to seem almost un-American to complain about noise, as though our patriotic duties should include tolerating uproar and loudness, hooting and hollering. American institutions like rock-and-roll, Harley Davidson, football and cheap beer call for a certain insensitivity to nuisance noise and unnecessary air vibration. It follows that many people catch a mindset disease that their neighbors shouldn't mind listening to the sounds they choose - their taste in music, for instance, or the sound of their talent-less guitar practice. Not every piece of media content supports the idea that noisiness is next to godliness, but here are a few examples of messages that stand to impact neighbor behavior and general perceptions of complainants:

• A 2003 cola ad on TV showed two soda delivery truck drivers - one Coke and one Pepsi - side by side, staring each other down at a stop light as though they're about to drag-race. The Coke guy turns up his music really loud and gives his foe a competitive grin. The Pepsi guy outdoes him - he throws a few switches and the truck opens up to expose concert-venue speakers that pound the surrounding air with bass, while the truck bounces up and down and young onlookers nod approvingly and sway to the beat. When the Pepsi driver departs, the Coke driver left behind admits, "That was awesome."
• Advertisements in magazines aimed at teens and twenty-somethings demonize neighbors for complaining about the noise of their bass-boosted stereos and related equipment. One shows a young man in shades with messy hair giving the finger to the camera with a confrontational look on his face, beneath the ad's headline, "Turn It Down? I Don't Think So." Smaller print reads, "Not You. Not On Your Turf. Not With Boss Audio Systems." Notice the "turf" reference, empowering readers to make noise that in fact leaves their turf. Stereo speaker ads for the car and the home are particularly offensive to peace-seeking neighbors; one from JBL reads, "Either We Love Bass or Hate Your Neighbors" (their emphasis, not mine). Imagine an ad for an upscale for-men-only club that reads, "Either We Love Cigar Smoke or Hate Our Wives." Or, since loud neighbors are encouraged to essentially torture neighbors, how about a tobacco ad that shows a smoker burning a non-smoker with his lit cigarette, with a "No Smoking" sign in the background? Messages assailing good citizens who complain about their neighbors' noise habits are okay, though, because no protected class is getting hurt.
• A 2001 movie starring Snoop Dogg featured him greeting police during a party in his apartment, who say they'd received complaints about the noise. He says okay to the officers, slams the door on them, then orders his fellow partiers, "Turn that up." The scene was used in trailers and TV ads. Does it reflect the way some people react to police orders to hush? Usually. Does it plant a seed in those who'd previously possessed a degree of respect for authority, a seed that may grow into the same disrespect Snoop exhibits? Proof would be hard to establish, but this monotone, expressionless celebrity is much in demand and gets a lot of exposure. In 2005, he appeared in Chrysler television ads with Lee Iacocca, barely speaking English as they played a round of golf. The guy has influence.
• A 2003 ad for Doritos that ran in the United Kingdom showed Kelly Osbourne, offspring of the now brain-dead but still successful rocker Ozzy, playing loud music in her apartment. The downstairs neighbors are disturbed and want it to stop, but one says, "I don't want to be the jerk from downstairs who complains about the noise." He finally knocks on her door and is greeted by Ms. Osbourne munching on Doritos; he politely asks her to keep it down. An off-camera voice shouts from within Osbourne's flat asking who's at the door, to which she responds, "Oh, just some jerk from downstairs complaining about the noise."
• The 2005 Volkswagen Jetta ad campaign targeted twenty-somethings stuck between pre-adulthood and maturity. A young and very hip couple is blasting "Molly's Chambers" by the Kings of Leon while stomp-dancing in their apartment above an older neighbor, who comes by to complain. In the next scene, they're driving in their new Jetta with recently purchased, huge, powerful speakers visible in the backseat; they're evidently planning to really blow that complaining neighbor away with much worse sound than he could have imagined. The ad closes with the couple stomp-dancing once again to the bass of their new equipment. The shot zooms out and we learn they've moved into a single home with no one below, and the Jetta sits in the driveway. Despite the relief we can then feel for the poor neighbor below them, the message was still clear - exacting revenge against complaining neighbors is good fun - the right thing to do and worth the investment.

Even if they were not influential of behavior, messages like these affirm the way bad neighbors feel toward noise complainants around them. With noise trends moving easily through our electronic culture, the resultant ill neighbor behavior spreads through interstate and global emulation.

There isn't any conspiracy among advertisers and other media trend-setters to harm peace-seekers - it's just business. The young and noise-acculturated form a hot advertising market; one or two market research firms developed a profile of what makes them buy stuff, an advertising formula was developed, and everyone wanting to reach that market jumped on the bandwagon. It's kind of ironic that the MTV-incarnate possess such cultural clout, when more mature groups have so much more spending power - as CNBC's Mark Haines once pointed out on the air, the young don't have a pot to pee in.

But in our pop-media culture, society's ruling class is determined greatly by advertisers, and they've made their choice. In the process of targeting and spurring on the noise-acculturated, healthy communal coexistence is threatened by the un-neighborly habits of noise culture forming a widespread norm - unreasonable ruckus has become popularized, noise culture is alive and strong, and neighbors who complain find themselves against a rather powerful social movement. We're supposed to understand that horrendously loud music from a vehicle or upstairs neighbor is no longer viewed as a bad thing at all - it's "awesome," and if we don't like it we must be unattractive old jerks who are no fun, deserving of hatred and mistreatment. If it's awesome to embrace noise culture, the majority will follow without questioning it - fearing to question it - and will go the next step of questioning those who don't follow. Most people are sheep.

Noise culture is gaining such momentum that it looms as a potential 21st century American melting pot - the singular brand of assimilation that can survive as diversity agendas and disparity celebration have hung the old pot on the rack. Better neighbors who don't appreciate the emerging social norms are becoming marginalized (often dubbed "out of touch" and "intolerant") by the media messages, and seem to be slowly forming a new underclass - the people who it's okay for the growing masses to look down upon, as do the messages that champion noise culture and the trashy attitudes being embraced.