Music is a distraction: the climate crisis would be solved if our thoughts were ours to pursue – Sydney Morning Herald

Another date with Bob. Another one-way conversation. Isis, oh Isis, he will intone. Among other things. He gets to spew whatever errant rhyme flits through his head while I listen obediently. It’s old hat, man. But it’s addictive, and I listen. Again.

Dylan has made you dumber because he’s denied you the opportunity for silence. You can’t get your internal dialogue going when he’s prattling on to a tambourine man that he’s not sleepy and there is no place he’s going to. Music is an intellectual treadmill that saves your brain from going for a walk in the world.

The central display on my Prado stopped working. Apparently it’s a known thing among Prados, and its deepest repercussion is I can’t use my radio. Until now a long drive has always been a concert for me. But recently while driving, I caught myself thinking. An internal dialogue had started up in the voice that has been a companion all my life. I was mentally discussing the merits of different endings to a story I was writing. Hearing that voice again while driving the Prado was like bumping into a mate in Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar. Wow, hey… what are you doing here? Where’ve you been, man? We’ve lost touch.

It only happened because the radio was inoperable and I was surrounded by the unintelligible sounds of tyres, wind and engine, which is silence of a sort. Music had become my default and my inner voice had dimmed. But without it I was forced to think. Detached from Dylan, denied The Doors, my mind began to do what a mind will without the preoccupation of music. Nature abhors a vacuum. (As does my wife.)

Silence is a place you can’t help but think. Song is a particularly injurious type of noise to a thinker; organised, sculpted, curated and designed to lead and command your brain as if it were a bichon frise at Crufts. No other sound is as captivating as a song. Composers are judged by how deeply they own you while their song is playing, by how affected you are. You don’t think Dylan or Beyonce are going for total control? In music the geniuses are tyrants.

Economists have a precept they call “opportunity cost”. It means the loss of one alternative when other alternatives are chosen. And the opportunity cost of song is thought. Put on Stairway to Heaven and try to write a speech. There will be a hedgerow in it and at some point you will tell your audience their shadows are taller than their souls, and you’ll think yourself profound for doing so. I have listened to that song perhaps 500 times. At eight minutes long that one tune has burnt 66 hours of my working life. I’ve played along on air guitar and paradiddled my desktop and dashboard and screamed about listening very hard and the truth coming to you at last – and always my internal dialogue is shut down while this plagiaristic puppetry is being performed.

Music obliterates thought. The better a song is the more completely it envelops you. I can barely do my six times table while listening to Gimme Shelter. Until the Prado broke I had forgotten how much more easily reflections and ideas bloom in silence than with music. Silence is to a writer what light is to a painter, it both enables vision and provides a blank canvas onto which to pour your art.

There’s no greater distraction to the freelancer than music. Not even grog or porn can take you down so easily. Music flashes its petticoat, calling itself “inspiration”, asking you to imagine what great stories you might write while listening to Gustave Holst’s The Planets, or Miles Davis’ Sketches of Spain. But it turns out you can’t vibe on the numinous and think complex thoughts at the same time.