Hurrah, rejoice, Allah be praised – the World Cup is with us once more. The global carnival, the cirque du monde, “football’s big party”. One month and sixty-four matches of top-class international football. The greatest players in the game taking each other on under the banners of nationality.
Here in Australia, thanks to SBS every single game is being shown live and free-to-air. SBS is a curious old thing - normally it's a broadcaster of lesser-known jewels of world cinema with titles such as Steamboat to Kyrgyzstan. But now the World Cup dominates its schedules.
Due to blanket wall-to-wall promotion in the media the normally soccer-cynical Australian populace is suddenly embracing the beautiful game. And thanks to advertising we get to watch Cristiano Ronaldo, a man with more wealth than most Pacific island nations, attempt to sell us engine oil with all the charisma of a mechanoid, six f**king times a match.
So far I have watched South Africa-Mexico, Argentina-Nigeria and England-USA. A lot of the games are on in the middle of the night due to the time difference. To watch them requires heroic feats of power-napping and the cessation of normal night-time activities. We’ve already seen a lot of great football, and it’s great that Africa is finally playing host to a World Cup… but do we really need the vuvuzelas?
Vuvuzelas? Surely you know what they are. I’m assuming you are familiar with the atonal honking sounds accompanying every single match on TV made by the long flute-like plastic trumpets in the crowd. The subject has already generated a lot of ire so it would be far from an original sentiment if I were to say they’re a bit bloody annoying.
The typical pro-vuvuzela argument is that they are part of South Africa’s cultural heritage, generating as they do a raucous celebratory atmosphere amongst the country’s gleaming new stadia. And therefore by extension, to want to deny the fans their vuvuzelas (or vuvuzelae?) is apparently to be a bigoted colonialist or a snobbish football purist.
I’m not saying get rid of vuvuzelas – I’m saying change them. Make them more musical. I know a fair bit about musical pitch and what strikes me is that when vuvuzelas sound together en masse, they don’t produce a clear note. It is a horrid dissonant mix of B and B flat. In musical terms it’s like a badly-tuned-in TV picture. That’s because no two vuvuzelas are alike – they are manufactured using crude plastic moulds - and they all produce a slightly different pitch when blown into.
With a bit of precision engineering these instruments could all be developed to strike exactly the same pitch at once, like instruments in an orchestra. Hey presto – the horrible drone would be replaced by a clear note, ringing out throughout the stadium.
To take this further, the companies making these things could manufacture different varieties, each playing a certain note in the musical scale. Some would play a C, some would play E and others would play a G, and together, through collectively blowing the three notes, the crowd would sound the chord of C major.
Imagine 50,000 vuvuzelas playing the chord of C major in a football stadium. It would marry art and beauty on a vast scale; it would a fitting musical accompaniment to the colourful and exuberant crowds. The World Cup is an event like no other - and as it only comes around once every four years, South Africa 2010 requires a grand vision to make the occasion uniquely memorable.
I propose that the tournament organisers work together with the fans in choosing different chords for different matches. France-Uruguay could have worked well with an A major (vuvuzelas in A, C sharp and E). England-USA could have been a D major (D, F sharp and A).
For teams of countries with oppressive regimes, such as North Korea, perhaps a more mournful minor chord, such as A flat minor (A flat, B and E flat). That would poetically convey the fact that the poor buggers on the pitch may be sent to a gulag if they fail to qualify from the group.
And for Argentina, a more complex diminished seventh chord, to reflect their players’ technical prowess, and in the case of Maradona, a fragile mental state teetering towards full-on psychosis.
All of this is esoteric waffle and if put into place would drive up the cost of these plastic trumpets. Then again, surely it would be a good thing to price the vuvuzelas out of the fans’ range? The world would be free to enjoy the tournament without the noise of frigging trumpets.
Take note FIFA: with my vision, you could have created not so much a tournament as a UFO ride into outer space.
I expect a call.
