I’ve witnessed this phenomenon a couple of times at recent gigs: A table full of (generally young) people will yak and yak and yak and yak while my band is playing, apparently oblivious to the music. Usually, several of these folks will have their smart phones out, extending all of the yakking into the digital sphere. And we’ll play on and those folks will continue to ignore us and everyone else, even if other people dance around them or some drunk person stumbles across their path. It’s as though a see-through dome has descended around them, allowing everything they say to be broadcast but preventing any incoming sounds or actions from being heard or seen.

But this is not a kids-these-days rant. I want to muse a bit about how people experience music these days and why it leads to behavior like this.

For anyone under 30 or even 35, music is primarily a background experience. People are introduced to music via video games, or through a headset while they’re doing something else online, or as a bumper at the end of a television program. These folks don’t often sit down and just listen to music. And since music is a background experience, these people keep doing something else in the foreground.

Put a group of these people together in a room and let them loose, and an older person like me will notice a sort of herd mentality of obliviousness. They’ll all do something — anything — other than pay attention to a performance. And when the worst of these people are active, I swear, it feels like I could launch a writhing live shark at them and they wouldn’t notice until the animal chomped off at least two limbs.

This is what folks my age mean when we say that we got to listen to all of the cool music. For us, music was a primary and often transformative experience. At the height of my music mania, I was probably buying 20 or more albums a month — at the time when the price of an album was more than twice the price of its digital equivalent today (if you adjust for inflation). I spent more time to music all by itself than any other free time activity by far. You know how some casinos advertise that they’ll cash your paycheck? If my old record stores did that, I’d probably have gone bankrupt twice in my 20s.

Music’s new secondary-first role isn’t going to change for most folks. I realize that. But for Chrissakes, if there’s a band in the bar and other people are trying to listen, would you people at least get a clue and clear out of the tables in front of the stage? Nobody else wants to hear you and lots of other people want to hear the band. Please engage in your activity where it’s more appropriate. Thanks.