The hijacker usually strikes without warning. He has an iPod stacked with examples of his discerning musical tastes burning a hole in his pocket, and he’s in the mood to impress. Perhaps imagining he has just flown back from a gig at a club in Ibiza, he slinks toward the iPod dock. One moment your party guests are enjoying tracks from the new Air record, and the next—yoink, and on comes a laborious Middle Eastern fiddly jazz number with a sudden extended Strokes-style rock section, which the hijacker—let’s say he’s the bearded fellow in the corner drinking port—is conspicuously alone in savouring. “Well, I kind of liked it,” allows Chris Church, a violinist and singer-songwriter from Halifax, who witnessed this precise act of musical terrorism at a recent house party. “It was interesting. But I looked over at these women with kids who were sipping Chardonnay, and I wondered what they were thinking.”

Hijacking may not be an entirely recent invention—one woman who works in publishing recalls a traumatic operation from years ago when a well-meaning friend pressed the eject button on the painstakingly assembled mixed tape she and her husband were playing—at their wedding. But it’s a plot line that’s become increasingly commonplace at parties, weekends at the cottage, the car, even some workplaces. It has never been easier, or more tempting, to foist our musical sensitivities on our fellow men. In an era of unprecedented musical portability, we walk around, most of us, with our preferred soundtracks to our lives—not to mention our entire record collections—in our pockets. We’re used to turning any public space into our own private universe, courtesy of a single pair of earbuds. Is it any wonder that when we find ourselves on the wrong side—this seems to play a part sometimes—of several jiggers of booze, near an iPod dock that’s playing some tripe that’s definitely not our taste, some of us can no longer resist the urge to intervene? Continue…