I'm counting "On rainy days, I wish I had a long, pointy umbrella" as Idiotic Things People Do in New York City #3, so this post will be number four. In case you haven't heard/noticed, I moved to New York City permanently, so now I can whine all the time. Yay!
Music in the subway stations is lovely. Music in the subway cars... not so much. The difference between the two is that it's generally easy to walk away from or ignore the former, if you do not wish to listen, whereas there is no relief from the latter.
About every other day, on at least one of my trips on the subway, a mariachi band will enter the subway car and interrupt the Usher or whatever's playing in my headphones with some loud mariachi music. I can turn up the volume until my eardrums nearly shatter, but even that is not enough to overpower the loud accordion next to my head. I can try walking to another end of the train, if there is room to do so, but then they also walk towards the other end, to make sure than everyone "gets to" hear. And of course these guys board between express stops, so that they have several minutes to force everyone to listen to them.
But it doesn't stop there. After interrupting my semi-peaceful subway ride with their awful noise, they actually have the balls to walk by and ask for money. This confuses me. I'm not sure why I'm supposed to give them money. If anything, I think they should be compensating me for taking up a few minutes of my time.
But let's pretend for a moment that interrupting a complete stranger's subway ride with loud obnoxious music is actually doing them a service of some sort. Even so, it's a bit presumptuous. I didn't ask the mariachi band to board the train. I don't owe them anything for playing. You can't really expect an audience that had no other choice but to hear your music to feel they owe you anything.
And that's my main issue with subway train busking. In a station, on the street, in a park, etc., I can either stand around and listen and chose to drop some money in your bucket, or I can walk away and ignore you. But on the train, I have no choice. I can't leave. I'm being imprisoned to listen to music I do not care for, and my captors expect me to pay them for the "privilege." As I've said before in a status update on Facebook... if I wanted to listen to mariachi music while riding the subway... I'd load some onto my MP3 player. But... I don't.
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