Cricket music choices confound even the most genteel

In past years, the music has been safe, if predictable – the type of standards from the 1950s to the 1990s that has the broadest possible appeal to the widest possible audience.

‘‘If music be the food of love’’, wrote the bard, ‘‘play on’’.

This is a noble sentiment, taken a tad too literally in Hamilton of late.

Eat at the wrong hour and you feed the paunch and risk indigestion. Consume the undercooked, disease is a consequence. Botulism, of spirit and mind if not body, has been my lot this week.

Incident the first: boom box at 4am

Well, frankly, I don’t recall the hour with precision and am unclear of the means of amplification, but sometime shortly after most CBD pubs had closed a group of hardy revellers brought the party to the north end of Victoria St.

They elected to position themselves directly under our bedroom window. The volume was turned up to infinity and beyond, or at least well in excess of Spinal Tap’s infamous ‘‘No 11’’ setting. The music – and for the purposes of this argument I am forced to label it thus – fell broadly within the ‘‘hip hop’’ designation. It was aggressive, anti-social, misogynistic, misanthropic.

This was not serenading in the traditional sense. It was closer to protest. I’ve recently finished Bob Dylan’s autobiography, in which Mr Zinnemann mounts a defence of African-american cultural expressions that emerged in the 1980s. Personally, my taste runs to earlier eras.

I would like to find the people responsible for the early morning wake-up call, stake out their houses and then blast the opening bars of Louis Armstrong’s West End Blues in their collective ears at the moment they fall asleep. If I felt particularly self righteous I could add a wee rejoinder, accurate if didactic: ‘‘This is MUSIC, you morons.’’

Incident the second: an afternoon and evening on the grassy banks of Seddon Park, Hamilton.

Once upon a time, one attended cricket matches to watch cricket. The sound of the game is celebrated, too. Leather upon willow. The constant chirping of the keeper. Words of encouragement between fielders. Batsman calling for – or against – the taking of runs. Strident appealing. Veiled insults and sledging.

These days you would be lucky to hear much of that. As the price of tickets edges ever closer to $50, organisers now feel a bigger, or noisier bang must be delivered for the buck.

Speakers, long positioned on the boundary, have become instruments of deadening thought control. On Sunday, as New Zealand took on England in the first ODI of a five-match series, not one break in play could pass without a wretched sound bite being forced down the throat of the captive audience.

Four reasonable objections can be raised.

Firstly, the choice of songs. Whoever was responsible for Sunday’s selection had no evident understanding of the demographic he or she was supposed to be entertaining. In past years, the music has been safe, if predictable – the type of standards from the 1950s to the 1990s that has the broadest possible appeal to the widest possible audience.

OK, maybe we did have to listen to The Monkee’s I’m a Believer once too often, or Sweet Caroline. At least the songbook of Neil Diamond is a known phenomenon.

If you are going to play music at all you surely desire a collective response and how can you get that if you chose minority music of dubious quality? The only track known to the crowd on Sunday was the theme to Coronation Street, a welcome respite, I thought, but hardly one to encourage dancing on the embankment.

Secondly, the duration the songs are played. What is the point of reducing music to a couple of seconds here and there? As a friend of mine put it, ‘‘Why play the first verse(s) and have to cut off before... the chorus, which is generally the rousing bit?’’ Even if it is the equivalent of fast food, you need the Big Mac, not just half a Chicken Mcnugget.

Thirdly, the volume. Like our 4am friends, the Seddon Park amplification knob went beyond 11.

Fourthly, the frequency. Has anyone ever explained the concept of ‘‘less is more’’ to New Zealand Cricket? Perhaps if half the amount of music was played for twice as long, with the occasional silent interval for the crowd to gather its thoughts, contemplate the state of the game or – heaven forbid – engage in their own, original chanting, there might have been something that approximated real atmosphere on Sunday.

The official attitude at present would seem to discourage crowd banter and singing. Perish the thought that you can make your own fun.