Taxi drivers. I have been seeing quite a lot of them lately, and it has not been a perfect record by any stretch. Music-wise, it has been a struggle.
It was years ago when I first realised that taxi drivers have the worst taste in music. In fact, it used to be a childhood phobia of mine, that when I grow up and drive my own car, this was how I would end up: changing gears, following traffic lights, listening to crap. The car does this to you, I imagined: it distorts your senses and it makes you like them, the taxi drivers. The ones who I only saw on occasion and who rarely got away from their bullshit radio stations, 90s power ballads and Metallica compilations. If that sounds like a cliché to you, I envy your innocence.
Childhood phobias never truly disappear, they just get assimilated into common everyday experiences. And these days, as I get into a car and hear that annoying hook of Billie Eilish's "Bad Guy" (far from the worst option, mind you), I somehow imagine that this driver sitting at the wheel used to be a Ramones fan before he got into this car business. Or else, when I hear that fucking song by Ed Sheeran (again, hardly the worst case scenario), I imagine that my taxi driver had dumped Kate Bush for that. I cannot think of any rational explanation for imagining all of those things, but it does keep me distracted for a minute or two.
And then these tough 'rock' types. Those whose radios never stop playing "Sweet Child O' Mine" and "Another Brick In The Wall p.2". Those insufferable types who turn the volume louder when "Walk This Way" starts playing. Those who derive any meaning from the word 'rock'. They are the worst.
Honestly, at this point I am ready to believe that being a taxi driver and retaining good taste are two incompatible things. As Martin Amis once put it, 'poets don't drive cars'.
Which is not to say that miracles do not happen. The other day, the guy driving me home played something different. It was neither random nor pretentious. In fact, I had to put away my laptop and my writing and just sit back and listen all the way to my house. It was a compilation he must have put together himself, a carefully crafted set of songs that create the sense of fast driving, this sense of being on a speedy highway in the middle of the night. It was not unlike the soundtrack to that Nicolas Refn's film called Drive, and, for once, it was magical. It made me realise, right there and then, that this complex thing called 'taste', it is all about imagination.
