When it comes to listening to music on campus, there are two passionate parties: those who wear headphones everywhere, and those who think that wearing them is pretentious or antisocial.
(If you don't care, I don't suppose you count as passionate at all, do you?)
The first group is easy to spot - or maybe just hard to avoid. Let's call them Listeners. You see them everywhere, with all models of headphones -from petite earbuds to the sporty over-the-ear variety to (in great number) the expensive-looking oversized muffs. The breakable ones with the cheap, black foam - the kind that comes with $20 cassette players - are less common than ever. Have headphones become a fashion statement?
Then you have the others, who blend in more - the Watchers. Picking them out of a crowd can be tougher. Look for them to give Listeners snotty, annoyed looks as they pass each other silently; the two types don't mesh very well.
Why the animosity? Maybe the Watchers think that the Listeners are being pretentious or snotty themselves (while the latter don't seem to care much about others' opinions at all). Wearing headphones as you walk around campus shuts out everyone around you -I might call that an elitist tactic after all.
Now before you start to get confused -if I'm anything, I'm a Listener. But I think that no matter which side of the battle you're on, you should try it out from the other perspective. Wearing headphones on campus is not a sin, but neither is it always the right thing to do.
I'll confess to having been a Watcher for most of my life. Most of the Listeners I had seen had those huge audiophile, I-appreciate-clarity-of-sound-and-am-better-than-you headphones. They seemed self-consciously large (like the car of an insecure man), and most Listeners tend to leave them around their necks when they're not using them. It seemed ridiculous. Why not use something smaller that you could fit in your bag during class? Surely this was a cry for attention, and in my book, it was a poor one. "Look at me! I listen to music all the time, and I need big headphones to do it!"
Besides, most Listeners walk around with detached looks - either dour scowls or holier-than-thou half-smiles, depending on the person involved - and that just grated on me. Stuck down in the real world, I didn't appreciate these people looking past me like a squirrel all the time.
Drivers don't like Listeners either. A guy wearing headphones seems much more likely to take a blind dash in front of your grill and spoil everyone's day - especially if they're those big-mother headphones that block out so much sound that you have to fire a .38 in the air to clear the crosswalk.
So what changed? It wasn't anything terribly dramatic. I bought a pair of those same audiophile headphones on the cheap, planning to use them in my room so I wouldn't wake up my housemates (or, more accurately, so I could ignore said housemates when one of them was set on waking up the rest with his stereo). The decision to wear them on my walk across campus one day was not a remarkable one.
The experience, however, was well worth any snotty looks that I drew from the Watchers. After a bit, it dawned on me that they didn't see me as one of their own... and that they were right.
Walking around campus with your own soundtrack puts a certain bounce in your step. For one, it makes everything around you seem more dramatic. If you see a guy standing quietly by himself at the shuttle stop while you're listening to Peter Gabriel's "In Your Eyes," you won't see the same person that you would if the song were Rob Zombie's "Dragula."
You'll also start to see the music around you. Much like that hypnotic, briefly-ubiquitous Volkswagen commercial, you'll spot rhythmic and melodic coincidences everywhere if you try. A car peels past you just as the song crescendos, and you can't help but gasp just a little. A dark song transitions into "Here Comes The Sun" right when the clouds part a little bit, and you bet you'll notice. Even if those clouds don't part, you might feel just a bit better.
Knowing this, I could see the effects of music on others. If you watch carefully, you can figure out what kind of music a Listener has on: the dour expression I mentioned is usually reserved for darker music like techno, rap, and metal, while a cheery look implies something happier like pop or light rock.
In that respect, I think it's best to pick something with some variety - a homemade mix, for example, or a DJ set, or at least an album that has both happy and dark moments. Some of the best options are actual movie soundtracks - Stand By Me comes to mind, if you're into that kind of thing.
Even with my newfound appreciation for giving my walks a musical accompaniment, however, I haven't given up my Watcher ways. Most days, I don't even take my headphones with me. Having seen both sides of the matter, I've decided that the Watchers are onto something.
Wearing headphones everywhere you go cuts you off from people whether you realize it or not - you don't notice the faces around you, and no one stops to talk. Listening to music on every cross-campus trek turns you to the inside, and while that's a good place to go, it's not a good place to live.
And besides, I know exactly what annoyed me about Listeners. So when I do wear my headphones, I treat everyone like I would otherwise (which does mean that I perhaps ignore a few people from time to time - everyone does). When I stop to talk, I take off the headphones and turn off the CD. And when I get to class, I put the whole pretentious mess in my bag.
