Christoph Niemann
Earbud jackasses playing their music loud enough for the entire train drive me crazy. How do I tell them to turn it down without seeming like a jerk?
You’ve probably never heard of Kirk Thatcher. He grew up in the San Fernando Valley in the ’70s, the child of two loving upper-middle-class parents. Still, he was angry. And he fell into the punk scene—which seemed exciting and dangerous. “I was a bourgeois punk,” he says. “I never lived on the street or sniffed glue. I didn’t have anything to be angry about, so I could just be generally angry at everything.”
Thatcher turned out all right, though. He went to UCLA and eventually got into the movie business. In 1985 he was working on Star Trek IV (the one with the whales, where the Enterprise crew goes back in time to 1980s San Francisco) and saw an opportunity to contribute. You know that scene where Spock and Kirk are riding the bus over the Golden Gate Bridge and they ask the punk kid to turn down his music, and the punk kid flips them off, so Spock gives him a Vulcan neck pinch, and the punk kid collapses onto his boom box? Of course you do—everyone loves that scene. Well, one day Thatcher went to Leonard Nimoy, who was directing, and told him he wanted to play the punk. Nimoy thought it over for a week and finally agreed, so an enthusiastic Thatcher went and dyed his hair and shaved it into an outrageous orange Mohawk.
They shot the scene without any music, Thatcher clutching his boom box and just headbanging away to a metronome in his head. In postproduction, a problem arose: The studio didn’t have rights agreements with any punk bands and wanted to dub some Duran Duran—or some kind of pretty-boy synth pop-into the scene. Thatcher was alarmed. It wouldn’t make any sense! It was undermining his character! So he went to Nimoy again. I can write you a punk song, he said.
Thatcher reached back to his roots. He started writing, but it all came out different this time. He was at a new stage of his life, and the lyrics he wrote poked fun at the baseless agitation he’d felt as a teenager. His song was called “I Hate You.” It was ridiculous. It was really very silly. (“And I eschew you! And I say screw you! And I hope you’re blue too!”) Twenty years later, Thatcher still laughs when he says the lyrics out loud, especially the word eschew.
Thatcher seems like a fun and easygoing guy. He’s done other things in Hollywood, but for a lot of people that scene on the bus defines him. (“I could win the Nobel Peace Prize,” he says, “and my tombstone would say PUNK ON THE BUS.”) I ask him if he ever encounters people listening to their earbuds too loudly, and how he advises handling it. He does, but it’s not something that annoys him—if anything, it makes him happy. That’s right: Hearing other people’s obnoxiously loud music has become a delightful experience for Thatcher. Because as soon as he feels himself getting annoyed, he laughs at himself. After his iconic role in Star Trek IV, “I detect how ironic it would be for me to get upset or ask them to turn it down, or to have any other opinion than: ‘Right on, brother.’”
So here’s the thing: People who flood public transportation with their music are inconsiderate jerks. It is totally acceptable to ask them to turn that music down. But do it politely, OK? Your anger is justified, but try to be calm and polite and not carry that anger into the interaction. Thatcher has transcended his anger. You try too.
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