The last time I said something mean about Barry Manilow, I was roundly thrashed by members of his international fan club, who will apparently let no slight stand. A woman in England wrote, "Children, calm down there is no need to throw your toys out of the pram just because people love the Manilow."
Well, I'm not going to make that mistake again. I actually think it's a good thing that a suburb in Australia is going to use the Manilow as a crime-fighter:
Australians sick of the late-night music and revving engines of gangs of boy racers have unveiled a secret weapon - Barry Manilow.
Councillors in Rockdale, a suburb of Sydney, hope that the crooners' ballads will drive away the dozens of young "hoons", as boy racers are known, who are making residents' lives a misery.
Loudspeakers will belt out hits such as Mandy, I Write the Songs and Copacabana over the car park where the youths gather nightly to drink, smoke and compare souped-up cars.
Councillors believe Manilow's music is so deeply unfashionable - "daggy" in Australian slang - that teenagers will flee the area.
We have plenty of hoons in this country, and some of them drive up my street. I can hear the bass lines booming from their cars from 10 blocks away. Say what you will about all the daggy stuff many of us listen to, it is not used to force one person's taste on another at eardrum-shattering decibel levels.
I can personally attest to the power of Bing Crosby to drive hoons out of a tavern. When I was stationed at Fort Hood, Texas, a bunch of us were in a place one night, near the holidays, consuming adult beverages, and one of us discovered "White Christmas" on the juke box. We kept feeding quarters into the thing, playing Bing over and over again, collapsing into fits of laughter everytime the song started, until everybody else got sick of it and kicked us out.
The lowest "everyday noise" level, by the way, is 30 dB, which is the sound of a whisper or what you might hear in a quiet library. The loudest: a jackhammer, 130 dB; firearms, air raid siren, jet engine, 140 dB; and, of course, rock music played at full blast, 150 dB. Sounds louder than 80 decibels are considered potentially dangerous.
