There was a period between the introduction of walkmen and the ubiquity of iPhones where we had not yet landed on an accepted headphone etiquette. On one side were those who seemed to view any headphone sighting as confirmation of an incoming antisocial Black Mirror cyborg dystopia. On the other were those who pushed the boundaries of acceptable behaviour by simply refusing to understand how headphones worked or indeed to acknowledge their own public embodiment.
There is a particular voice you get singing with headphones in, quiet and breathy and a little bit flat. I remember trying to watch these people while seeming like I hadn’t noticed them—staring at them like I was staring into space—trying to understand what was happening: whether they thought they were just mouthing the words and didn’t realise they were singing, whether they knew full well they were singing but thought they sounded good, or whether they knew exactly what they sounded like and simply didn’t care. I knew this was something I had done too, and I didn’t quite know what the answer was for myself.
***
In anticipation of my first overseas trip, my uncle gives me a walkman along with a cassette of Delta Goodrem’s ‘Out of the Blue’ and a pair of headphones that clip onto the top of my ears and curl around the back of my skull.
On a sleeper train between New Delhi and Amritsar, I arrange my dolls in the back corner of my blue vinyl top bunk and enter my own little world. I begin listening to my Delta Goodrem cassette, and slowly, I also start to sing along to my Delta Goodrem cassette. I think I am being quiet and I also think that in a fantasy world where I could be heard, it would only be by somebody who would recognise my immense talent and somehow change my life for the better. My mum is in the bunk diagonally below me, and she notices people slowing down as they pass us, or coming over to try and find out what the noise is. My skin is paler than my mother’s, so people don’t always realise we are related. She doesn’t want to draw further attention to us, to herself being a single mother travelling without a man, so she pretends to be another confused passenger that knows nothing about this white kid singing Delta Goodrem quite loudly to her dolls. I get sick of the three tracks on the cassette and go to sleep, and the crowd dissipates. I don’t even realise I have been observed (or disowned) until my mum tells me the next day.
***
The year I start high school, my uncle organises our family to get a third generation blue 8GB iPod Nano for my birthday. He offers to transfer my CDs onto it but I only really own Nikki Websters second album—which I had saved up for by finding a two dollar coin under the carpet that my mum had let me keep, which then gave me the idea of slowly sneaking a further twenty-eight dollars in coins from my mum’s handbag under the carpet and then ‘finding’ them (I don’t know why my mum let this go on). My uncle loads it up with music from his own collection instead.
That night, I take the iPod to bed and scroll through the album covers (Arcade Fire, Augie March, Ben Folds Five) until I hit a name that sounds fun and I press play. The Cat Empire’s ‘Hello’ blasts through my headphones and I close my eyes. I can feel my life changing, I can feel myself becoming cool, I can feel myself becoming grown up.
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