Readers should be forewarned that lyrics contained in the attached videos may be of an offensive and distasteful nature. We are allowing them only so as to put you into the household of Bryant Trew at night-time on weekends

I don’t get it. Mutual respect. It’s such a basic idea: don’t do to our neighbourhood something that you wouldn’t do to your own.

Last week, a Somerset resident pulled me aside to state that he, too, is being driven up the wall by music being played loudly outside. To put this into geographic context, I live a quarter of a mile away from West End Sailboat Club. This person lives a quarter-mile farther west, so we are referring to a person who is being impacted from half a mile away.

This sounds unreal, but his comments were of no surprise at all to me. On April 15, 2022, I arrived home and heard bass in the neighbourhood unlike anything I have heard in the 30-plus years that I’ve lived up here. The difference in volume/power was so great that I wanted to see just how far the sound actually travels. So I got back in my car and drove all the way to Cavello Bay. Much to my fascination, the bass could be heard clearly. Since then, at least three other people who live half a mile away have stated that they can hear it, too.

In other parts of the world, the ability of sound waves to travel over water is called “the lake effect”. It is derived from the experience of people living near a lake and discovering that at night-time sound travels across the lake better than it does at daytime. The scientific term for this is “refraction”. Basically, when sound waves travel over cooler water, those sound waves get pulled back down to Earth in something of a cannonball effect.

Everyone’s experience is different depending on the location, altitude and wind. My home lies front row centre. Bass pounds my house from across the water, and sound reverberates between houses in the neighbourhood. On some nights, no room in my house is immune. It doesn’t matter that my hurricane-resistant windows are closed, or even that the storm shutter is rolled down — under the right circumstances, the bass still pours in. On the worst nights, the bass cannot only be heard, it can also be felt for hours until 3am.

My family have been kept up or woken by this on multiple nights. On Sunday afternoons, we sometimes have to wear noise-cancelling headphones to block out music being blasted outdoors by Woody’s. I am aware of a person who doesn’t sleep in their bedroom when a “full on” reggae session is going on. Another neighbour is sleep-deprived because they can’t go to sleep after doing an evening shift. I’m even aware of a person who has installed white-noise machines in the hope that this would allow their household to sleep.

Sometimes, the issue is not just the bass. At 8.11pm on Sunday, April 23, I could clearly hear Chief Keef’s song Faneto being played by Woody’s. This song is basically about “niggas” getting high, murdering their opponents, and running from the police. At 11.38pm on Sunday, May 7, West End Sailboat Club was blasting Khia’s song My Neck, My Back. This song repeats a request to be sucked and licked from the neck to the anus. All of this can be heard right in my living room and bouncing around my neighbourhood.

I would bet that the majority of us have privately played some guilty pleasures from their music collection at one time or another. If a person wants to indulge in murder fantasies that glorify gang violence, that’s probably something to think about. If a person wants to listen to some “adult musical entertainment”, that, too, is something to think about.

If you want to go out to a soundproofed nightclub seven days a week and party to reggae, rock, country or death metal until 3am, I say be a responsible adult about it. But, understand, a line gets crossed when you host outdoor events in a residential area and impose/inflict your desire to party upon others.

Common sense should be enough here. Mutual respect should be enough here. But when basic human decency fails, there is the law. In Bermuda we have the Summary Offences Act, the Liquor Licence Act, the Public Health Act, and most likely others, to deal with this situation.

Here’s the rub:

• West End Sailboat Club has known about this since March 2022

• The Bermuda Police Service have known about this since April 2022

• The Liquor Licence Authority has known about this since October 2022

• Michael Weeks, the Minister of National Security, has known about this since May 2023

It is now the middle of October 2023. Over the past year and a half, I have shared my notes/recordings with all four parties, and nothing has stopped any of them from looking into the matter further. Yet, despite so many people having power or authority to do something, the conduct has continued.

Honestly, I don’t get it.