"Kill... Kill the humans..." Nipper, the HMV dog (1984 vintage), receives instructions through the gramophone
A Very Silent Night, a song audible only to dogs, reached number one in New Zealand over Christmas. Given the music industry's psychotic inability to let any dead horse go savagely unflogged, a dog-whistle pop record is almost certainly heading towards your particular corner of the global music market even as you read this.
This isn't the first time pop music has been specifically aimed at dogs. But it is the first time humans, cats and other non-dogs have been excluded from the listening experience. Civil liberties watchdogs and investigative journalists have been quick to link the imminent dog-rock invasion to those stories that keep cropping up in the tabloids about how security firms are planning to blast the hooded herberts who hang around shopping malls with unbearable noise that only under-25 year olds can hear.
Entertainment journalists, meanwhile, have speculated that the two technologies - sonic dog rock and youth-be-gone-onics - could be combined to create a sound that only young dogs could hear (or, more usefully, would make dogs attack young people).
Whatever the future holds, it's clear that the hearing spectrum is ripe for niche marketing. And I predict music-makers will soon target "super-hearers". Super-hearers are the aural equivalent of super-tasters - the name scientists give to the 15-35% of humanity who can taste the disgusting sick-tasting chemicals in brussels sprouts and broccoli. Where a singer like Nick Cave, Danny from Embrace or Ian Brown from the Stone Roses has an unbearably awful singing voice, horribly incapable of carrying a tune, super-hearers are people like me who, when they attend live concerts, can only stand and gape in uncomprehending horror at the hordes of happily dancing "rubbish-hearer" fans who act for all the world as if they are actually hearing good music.
The marketing possibilities are endless. The super-hearer elite could be specifically catered for with good music blasted out from carefully hidden speakers every time Cave, McNamara or Brown "sang" live. Then we too could smile and dance along, saying goodbye to our feeling-like-lepers-just-because-we're-not-cloth-eared-peasants misery. By planting special hidden super-hearer tracks on recordings, entire rubbish-hearer genres like indie could be made accessible to those of us who have previously dismissed them as a bolt-hole for talentless passive-aggressive inadequates who wouldn't know a decent tune if God gave it to them on a gold plate below a huge flashing neon sign that said TUNE!
How I yearn to be able to say: "Oh you're planning to play that entire stack of Belle and Sebastian, Decemberists and Noah and the Whale CDs on this six-hour car journey are you? How perfectly splendid."
Alternatively, we super-hearers could be provided with lust-goggles that amped up the sexual desirability of the aforementioned monkey-faced croakers Cave, McNamara and Brown to such a point that we no longer care that they sound like cows dying.
By reverse-engineering the concept, we might even be able to make super-hearers out of the poor tone-deaf masses by issuing them with special hearing aids. Imagine a Sonic Youth or a Teenage Fanclub fan suddenly able to appreciate good pop music like Girls Aloud or Pink for the very first time. Visualise the tears of joy (and of bitter regret over all those years wasted in the musical desert) coursing down his crudely featured, screwed up little face. Imagine the whole wide world of good music we would be introducing to the poor wretches - Mozart, Shaggy, Shostakovich, Andrew WK, Motorhead, Status Quo and so forth.
Me, I'm definitely in the market. I yearn to be a Nick Cave fan, just like all my less discerning friends. Capitalism, bring it on. Make me a believer.
