January 24, 2010
I miss Muzak when I am shopping. I miss not really caring what dull, canned ambiance was filtering through the speaker system in a store. It was just flaccid innocuous noise.
But now they play real music in stores; songs that you hear, or used to hear, on the radio.
I’m not a big shopping fan to begin with. In fact, I generally despise grazing the malls with the herd. It’s like an anxiety with me.
But I don’t mind grocery shopping too much. Maybe because I get to pick what I want to eat and drink for the week and eating and drinking is generally pleasurable, as well as necessary.
But this idea struck me about how much I miss Muzak in stores when I was pushing the shopping cart along to the song: ‘Wake Me Up When September Ends’ by Green Day.
I’m not a huge fan of Green Day, but I like several of the songs I’ve heard from them over the airways. This song in particular is a favorite of mine from them because I don’t hear it too often and because it is rather sad and melancholy.
Some say the song is about September 11, 2001 (I don’t think I need to explain that). But the singer, Billie Joe Armstrong, says the song is about the death of his father.
Regardless, it is a sad and haunting song which makes it a rather unusual, if not morbid, selection to be played as the backdrop to a crowd of sullen basket jockeys shopping for sustenance. I felt like I was participating in some half-baked music video commenting on the quiet desperation of modern consumerism. I felt awkward looking at the other shoppers’ faces as they pretended that they were not hearing and experiencing the same oddity of perception that I was regarding the song.
But perhaps they didn’t notice; which is a different kind of sad.
The song is begging for connection through its melodic isolation. Music tends to evoke certain emotions. Apparently, most shoppers want to avoid that.
I don’t know whose brilliant decision it was or when it started, this piping of real songs into grocery stores instead of Muzak. But I think it should stop. When I’m shopping for groceries, I don’t want my emotions toyed with.
Muzak does not toy with your emotions.
