The Emperor’s New Tracksuit
It is a sad but unavoidable fact that I am slowly turning into my dad. I nearly watched a documentary on canals last weekend, which should give you some idea of just how far it’s progressed. Once I own a copy of Nat King Cole Sings the Blues, I’ll know the transformation is complete. Until then, I’ll just have to measure the decline by how annoyed I get at young people.
I’ll say that again: young people. I’m 26, have no functional recall of either Black Monday or the Lockerbie Bombing, and the earliest contemporary pop song I can remember hearing is Stevie Wonder’s Part-Time Lover. Young people are getting on my nerves.
Except it’s not young people. It’s a specific young person who was sat over the aisle from me on the train a couple of days ago. Tracksuited and sporting a no-back-and-sides haircut, he was playing a game on his phone with an annoyingly catchy and loud techno/dub soundtrack. I was sorely tempted to go to the woman sitting behind him, politely ask if I could open the window, then lean over the seat, snatch the phone away from him and hurl it to some obscure cranny of the West Midlands rail network.
I don’t just mean I was idly fantasising about doing this. I was seriously weighing up the pros and cons of going through with it. Stepping over the line and becoming a low-level vigilante, combating injustices too trivial for the law to handle. Even Batman had to start somewhere. Once I’d done it I could ad-lib something witty, and the rest of the people in the carriage would cheer and give me a round of applause. I Am Shallow Justice! Cower, antisocial wrongdoers, for your days are numbered.
In the end I decided against it, on the grounds that it would only be polite to ask him to turn it down first, and that would ruin the surprise. He might even actually turn it down once asked, thus smashing all my prejudices about young people in tracksuits. Bizarrely, the fact that he was asian didn’t actually register until I was recalling what happened after the fact.
It comes as no surprise to me that I’m probably considerably more biased against tracksuits and stupid haircuts than I am against young asian people. If you think about it, judging people based on how they dress is entirely defensible. If we willingly telegraph our allegiance to an abstract social grouping by wearing certain clothing, we have to take the rough with the smooth.
It might seem easy for me, someone who habitually dresses either smart-casual or like an off-hours Top Gear presenter, to defend making character judgments based on what people wear, but clean-cut mainstream attire carries its own concerns. I don’t bat an eyelid at someone with facial piercings and a Ramones t-shirt, but what do they think of me? I used to get quite paranoid about this. I wanted to meet their disapproving gazes and say something like “been in any good moshpits lately?” or “I used to have transgressively long hair, y’know”.
The problem I find with telegraphing information like musical tastes, social background or political allegiances through what we wear (or through any broadcast means for that matter) is that this information is no less superficial than any other immediate judgments you can form about people. There’s no uniform for not being an arsehole, and even if there were, we’d all wear it.
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