Polyphonic spew

There is no person more deluded than he or she who has a song programmed into their mobile phone. This is what, at some level, they are thinking when their phone erupts into Crazy In Love or Hey Ya: "Everyone in this carriage now believes that I'm a cool, sophisticated individual and an absolute tiger in the sack." And this is what everyone in the carriage - even if they own such a phone themselves - is actually thinking: "Jesus, what a wanker. I'd like to take that phone, ram it sideways down their throat and heave them headfirst through the rear window onto the road, where, with any luck, they'll be reduced to pâté by the garbage truck behind us." The ringtone is the redheaded stepchild of the digital music revolution.
Polyphonic spew


Andrew Mueller
Saturday July 10, 2004
The Guardian


Equal opportunities ethos ... the Black Eyed Peas. Photo: AP

There is no person more deluded than he or she who has a song programmed into their mobile phone. This is what, at some level, they are thinking when their phone erupts into Crazy In Love or Hey Ya: "Everyone in this carriage now believes that I'm a cool, sophisticated individual and an absolute tiger in the sack." And this is what everyone in the carriage - even if they own such a phone themselves - is actually thinking: "Jesus, what a wanker. I'd like to take that phone, ram it sideways down their throat and heave them headfirst through the rear window onto the road, where, with any luck, they'll be reduced to pâté by the garbage truck behind us." The ringtone is the redheaded stepchild of the digital music revolution.

It might be grudgingly conceded that there are limited circumstances in which a ringtone could be acknowledged as witty - it is popularly rumoured, for example, that several of William Hague's staff during the 2001 election campaign had their phones implanted with the theme from Mission: Impossible. In almost any other situation, you might just as well have the word "cretin" branded into your forehead. Despite this, ringtones are being sold in ever greater numbers. In 2003, according to the Mobile Data Association, the people of this once-great nation spent £70m on ringtones, up from £40m in 2002 (2003's most popular ringtone was Black-Eyed Peas' execrable Where Is The Love?, followed by the theme from The Muppet Show). Ringtones have become so popular that an official fortnightly chart was introduced last month. It is widely anticipated that ringtones will, at some point, outsell singles. This is weird, and somewhat sad.
People - especially young people - have long advertised their musical tastes with T-shirts and badges. But owning, say, a Ramones T-shirt did not fundamentally alter your relationship with the Ramones' music. Rocket To Russia was still something you listened to and enjoyed, still art with which you had a relationship of some level of intimacy. Buying a song as a ringtone indicates that you value the track only as an advertising jingle for qualities that you perceive, almost certainly mistakenly, in yourself. You haven't bought the music to listen to - even the most modern polyphonic phones sound like a cheap Casio keyboard. You've bought it so people around you will have to listen to it. You are, in short, a vain, irritating idiot.

This gruesome corruption of music is an extension of the solipsism promoted by the mobile phone - the reason mobiles have had such a catastrophic effect on workaday manners is that they encourage people to believe that they are so important that nothing they have to say can possibly wait until they're off the bus. It's also a pretty poor reflection on much modern pop, that its consumers don't want to sit down and hear it as its creators intended, but prefer it in brief, tinny bursts on the number 26.