Support Live Music and Deafness

 

Entertaining, isn't it? It used to be that "metal concert" was some sort of barometer for 

tasteless, pointless ear-damaging volume. Today, it's just live music everywhere you find it.

A hallmark of a civilized society has always been some sort of concern for the rights, health, and safety of everyone in the society. Here in the USA, we abandoned civilization in the 1980's and never looked back. Reagan and the "greed is good" characters taught a couple generations of mindless, work-slaves that the wealth of a few is a higher goal than the good of many. It has filtered down to every aspect of what remains of our culture. Music, for example; particularly, live music. There was a time, about 20 years ago, when I predicted that "Noise pollution will become the air pollution of today." I was wrong. We went backwards. Today we don't care about air pollution, global warming, economic inequality or insecurity, and noise pollution is practically celebrated.

If you bothered to look at the chart above, you'd notice that pretty much everything we're exposed to in modern life is likely to cause permanent hearing damage. Live music anywhere but in an acoustic (unamplified) environment is hazardous: all amplified live music is hazardous to your hearing health. Is that complicated? Is the risk worth whatever gratification the experience provides? Your mileage is probably different than mine. In my opinion, any live music that uses amplification of any sort better damn well sound at least as good as, and ought to be substantially better than, what I can experience on my car stereo system. Anything less than that is just pointless risk of a fragile hearing mechanism for no justification at all.

In all cases, the only safe way to "enjoy" amplified live music is with significant hearing protection firmly in place. There is absolutely no way to take children to an amplified live music performance that should not be called "criminal child abuse." Children are usually born with terrific hearing and lose it fairly quickly in our modern noise-polluted world. Exposure to the quantity and "quality" of noise a modern sound system produces is flat-out child abuse and should be criminally prosecuted. Personally, I do not understand how the venues, cities, and other adults involved in a well-known medically-unsafe practice are not regulated and prosecuted when they violate public safety, but that's the post-Reagan libertarian nuthouse we live in today.