On the eve of the opening match, the only phenomenon likely to spoil the 19th FIFA World Cup, other than injury to the best players, is the vuvuzela.
The vuvuzela, a plastic trumpet about a metre in length that emits a flat, loud, monotone blare, has been adopted by South African football fans as a symbol of their enthusiasm but was almost banned from this year’s World Cup after complaints from European players and coaches, and most broadcasters.
The decision not to ban these ‘instruments’ will prove detrimental to the world’s enjoyment of the tournament and the reasons behind allowing them are driven by political correctness and a confusion over the real issue with the vuvuzela.
When Sepp Blatter admonished those advocating a ban by saying, ‘we should not try to Europeanise an African World Cup.’, he showed that he had completely missed the point. A ban on the vuvuzela is not a ban on South African football culture, it is merely removing one particular element of it that the majority of people seem to find, at the very least, rather irritating. It is not racist or an attempt to impose an alternative culture on a group of people to ban the use of one particular instrument. Blatter adds that African and South African football ‘is all about excitement, dancing, shouting and enjoyment’, and nobody is trying to stop that; conflating the drone of thousands of vevuzelas with ‘excitement, dancing, shouting and enjoyment’ is absurd.
In any case, there is enough evidence to suggest that the vuvuzela is far from an ancient African artifact and actually a cunning invention by someone with entrepreneurial spirit and a faith in mob culture. There will certainly be a few people somewhere that like the vuvuzela, knowing that they’ve become a whole lot richer courtesy of those who decided it was better to pay for an oversized horn than make noise with their own (free) voices.
There is a need to recognise that there are some noises that we, as human beings, find deeply unpleasant. If, through some strange arrangement, the FA supplied every England fan with a chalkboard and asked them to scratch them incessantly for 90 minutes, people from other countries could, legitimately, demand that they refrain. The same would be true if German fans were all given a copy of their Eurovision entry for 2010 and asked to play it on their own personal ghetto blasters inside the ground for a full 90 minutes.
This last scenario would, in fact, be more musical than the noise the vuvuzela makes. It is bad enough to have been compared to the tortured wail of a dying elephant, so when writers begin articles with sentences like, ‘Music will play a big part [in the world cup], and in particular, a trumpet called the vuvuzela’ they are, in fact, making paradoxical statements. There is nothing to recommend one, flat droning note as ‘music’, just in the same way you wouldn’t liken the noise of a washing machine to a Brahms violin sonata.
For all the accurate descriptions of the awful noise this terrible invention makes, it would not be so unbearable, and there would not be such desire to ban it, if it didn’t go on constantly. It's not the noise they make per se, but that fact that it never stops. Apologists for the vuvuzela talk about the ‘electrifying atmosphere’ it creates, when in fact it does nothing but drown out all other noise and detract from the match. People blowing the vuvuzelas do so all the time, with no reference to actual events in the game. It creates the impression that most of those in the stadium have very little interest in the football itself. If fans blew them in reaction to on-field events rather than relentlessly, the noise wouldn’t be so intolerable and might genuinely add to the atmosphere, as there would be some contrast in its volume over the course of 90 minutes. If someone wants to argue that the idea of fans reacting to on-field events is inherently European, then we should also admit the argument that blowing a trumpet constantly for 90 minutes, with no regard for the football, is inherently moronic. Thousands of vuvuzelas blown constantly do nothing for the atmosphere but create expressionless and soulless noise that detracts from more rousing crowd noise, including the euphoria of goal celebrations and the drama of controversial decisions.
Ultimately, the vuvuzela will prove to be an irritant and possibly the lasting legacy of the 2010 World Cup. It’s a pity for those interested in watching the tournament over the next six weeks but the real losers will be the people of Africa because the rest of the world will want their football played elsewhere from now on.
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