Remote Controls

So… what’s on your iPod?

The iconic white headphones are one of the key signatures of identity these days. Our playlists define us. They grid-reference us by age and taste and style. When we plug them into iTunes, we see a categorised list of our preferences and of ourselves. Folk. Traditional. Country. Alternative. R&B. Pop. Rock. The list goes on… and none of us wants to be Middle of the Road… a mythical location were we risk being flattened, fast, by the speeding vehicles of greater credibility…

And it’s not just on our iPods either. We define ourselves and one another in a constant categorisation exercise which goes on every day. All day. “I didn’t have you down as a Coronation Street viewer,” someone said to me recently. We watch one another as we watch and listen, and draw our own conclusions. The soap watchers… the sports fans… the devotees of reality tv. We feel confused when someone breaks the pattern into which we’d fitted them. What we watch is the little secret between us and our remote controls. Nobody need know… and yet are these controls controlling us, through their endless possibilities of entertainment and definition? Someone told me recently about his elderly mother, who found herself at Mass one Saturday evening, and suddenly realised that she’d forgotten to record Strictly Come Dancing. So she covertly texted her Sky Plus remote, which duly recorded the programme for her return. When her son questioned her on the morality of this act in the middle of a religious service, she replied, “Son, when you go to Mass every day, you can tell me how to say my prayers.” Maybe the watching and recording of our favourite shows has become as much of a ritual as our communication with God?

And then there’s where we go, too, in our time off. To unwind. I put my foot in it at work one lunchtime, when someone asked me whether I was going to the Amy Winehouse concert, and I replied with some firmness that, no, I wouldn’t be giving credence to an artist whose personal life had become performance art – no matter how convincing her voice, or how vertiginous her hairstyle. There was a silence as my friend half-smiled, then revealed that, actually, she was going to the event with her teenage daughter. As, so it turned out, was the person on the other side of me, with her husband – and a few people at the other side of the room. “Not an Amy Winehouse fan, then?” I was asked. “Not really,” I replied… trying to temper my response a bit to avoid causing any further offence.

It’s always been this way. I’ve always been just a little bit conscious that what I listen to (and watch, and read) can often tend to be a bit… unexpected. Maybe more a case of standing on the edge of the kerb as opposed to being right in the middle of the road. The harp arpeggios of memory transpose me to a sixth form common room of long ago – and find me removing someone’s Duran Duran cassette to listen to Tom Waits or Leonard Cohen, on Tuesday afternoons when there was hardly anyone there, accompanied by a few disgruntled looks and muttered complaints from those who, in their spare time, liked to dress in brightly coloured, co-ordinating outfits with United Colors of Bennetton emblazoned on their person. Nowadays, has anything really changed? For the sake of a quiet life, I may not look terribly unusual … but my playlist, or my bookshelves, or what’s programmed into my brand-new Sky Plus system, might just suggest otherwise.

And yet… while we may congratulate ourselves on being “different” or “unique” or “able to be ourselves”, are we really? Can we ever really be ourselves in a world where the possibilities for expressing this are so inevitably limited by someone else? How we dress is a good example of this. I have a long, fitted black coat which I was once told was “very you”. But I have this apparently self-defining garment only because a particular shop decided to create it – order it – stock it – sell it. When we stand in front of the wardrobe in the morning, trying to decide what to wear, we don’t really have a free choice at all. Far beyond the temporary constraints of workplace dress codes, or what we’ve ironed, or not wearing the same thing as our friends, we’re constrained by the simple fact of what we’ve found to buy. Those one or two people who somehow missed the poncho trend of autumn 2005 will find it difficult to find one of these formerly ubiquitous garments in the shops right now. If the designers decide that Winter 2007 is all about skinny jeans and knee-high boots, it’s going to become difficult to purchase anything else; if you need a new pair of smart black trousers in a season when it’s been somehow decreed that “navy is the new black”, you’ll probably come home without the garment of your choice. Last autumn, for instance, someone had decided that brown is “in”. I hate brown. It drains what colour there is from my face and anyway, I was made to wear far too much of it in my childhood. When I went shopping last autumn, I saw muddy oceans of brown and came home with a headache. It may have saved me a fortune but nonetheless – what about those of us who want a different colour?

If what we look like is a constant compromise, then what about the politics of what we say and do? We all try to be polite – to please others – not to cause offence. But is this just a self-perpetuating network of lies? One distant morning in my first year at university, on the way to a nine o’clock lecture, I walked straight into a large red pillarbox and immediately apologised to it. Now: admittedly I should have noticed it (note the words “large” and “red”) but it had been a late night finishing an essay and it was a foggy morning. As for the apology… who hasn’t said sorry to the person who almost knocked them over but has rushed on, unabashed? Apologised first in an altercation with family or friends even though they know they’re not at fault… just to calm the situation down or instigate a termination of hostilities? We all do it. Apologise when we’re not sorry, or when we’re not at fault. We’re such adept apologisers that “Sorry” has become the commonest response to the words we didn’t catch. We do it all the time. We tell each other it’s all right. Don’t worry. It’s absolutely fine that you didn’t call. It doesn’t matter that you forgot my birthday. Never worry about that bruise on my arm from when you crashed into me on the pavement: I actually wanted to walk in the gutter. And no: of course your bum doesn’t look big in that. Still, though: if we were to tell the truth all the time, we’d hurt everyone we know, and they’d hurt us. If we were to behave without the apparent lie of good manners, we’d have a world of anarchy where cars and pedestrians ran each other off the roads and paths, as rules became irrelevant. Maybe these civilities stop us truly “being ourselves”, putting a constraint on our reactions and how we express ourselves. But it’s a constraint that, in an ironic way, gives us the freedom to express ourselves without fear of a violence of response. We have the freedom to make friends, but with this freedom comes the responsibility to keep these friends by avoiding hurting them, offending them, insulting them. And sometimes this means changing what we say, or hiding what we think, or moderating what we do. Maybe we are lying – but we’re lying to keep the right to be ourselves at all. To have the freedom to listen, to read, to dress, to make what choices are available to us, according to who we are or who we’d like to be.

It’s obvious, isn’t it? What’s on my iPod is dictated by a lot of things. What’s there to download, for a start. What I grew up listening to… what my friends have recommended… songs with memories or meanings from the past, or songs whose lyrics or melody have a resonance today. The songs on my playlists help define me. I might be told they’re “very much your kind of thing” by somebody who does not share my taste. I’ve got them categorised by state of mind. Songs when I need cheered up; songs for working; songs for the gym; songs for late at night; songs in case of terrible emergency. The music travelling through the wires and through the white headphones can soothe or heal or energise. They’re defining me by breaking a mood of sadness or dissipating an ache of lethargy. And so it goes on. If people who meet me draw conclusions about my age or workplace or character by how I dress or how I do my hair… let them. What are we, after all, but puzzles for one another to solve. The clues – the pieces – are all there to assemble. The clues of outward appearances and habits and routines will lead us in the end to some sort of understanding of what’s behind the façade of wardrobe and hairstyle and bookshelf and tv schedule and playlist. The ephemera of the details of what matters to each of us will lead the friend who really wants to understand the truth through a mist of compromise and apprehension to the truth they’re looking for. The simple myth of being yourself.

Our computers and our phones and our remote controls might veer from tool to tyrant in the shaping or defining of identity. We might save someone’s feelings by compromising a truth. We might be categorised by a genre or by a habit or an age. But the people who really matter will see that the puzzle of who we are goes far beyond the pattern of the individual pieces – far beyond a manner or a song.