Filing for bankruptcy last week, Muzak – purveyor of smooth sounds and easy-listening classics to offices and malls everywhere – revealed that it will be unable to pay its nearly half-billion dollars in debts. Since 1936 the company has been sedating the masses with a catalog which now numbers over 2.6 million songs. Is Muzak finally getting the shaft? Or is there a ground floor opportunity here for an acquirer? Regardless of its future or your thoughts on the genre it created, Muzak has a storied past as part of American culture.
During the World War II era, the company started research and experimentation on using music to enhance worker productivity and enlisted original artists to produce intentionally subdued tracks suitable for the workplace. Today the company has over 80 channels of programming artfully branded with names such as “Cashmere” (Adult Contemporary) and “The Light” (Contemporary Christian). A sampling of the “’90s Hits” channel offered up Sheryl Crow, The Verve, The Rembrandts, The Cardigans, Goo Goo Dolls and TLC.
Despite the new clothes, most still identify Muzak as the same old cracker meekly offering impotent rewrites of past classics. The old school sound is available on the “Environmental” channel, a sample of which offered me nothing recognizable and could easily be a side project of Kenny G.
One of those recurring screenplay ideas which consistently pop into my head is that of uber-hip indie musician who dies and finds that purgatory is being a session musician for Muzak recordings. As desperately as I hit the Google, I was unable to find a single interview with a Muzak session musician. I wanted to learn about the daily routine. The days of slugging down Sanka between takes of “Do You Know the Way to San Jose”. Late nights on the town swilling beers and chasing skirts while cooing, “did I tell you I’m in a band?”
Fast forward to mid-life crisis, empty whisky bottle hurled against the wall while picking soulful licks and crooning the lyrics he’s had to keep mute all those wasted years. After his untimely death from cirrhosis, a cache of thousands of brilliant 4-track recordings is found in his attack and he becomes a hipster hero lauded by the insider elite.
But I digress.
Lest anyone be doubtful that the music industry has always been the irrational litigious machine that it is, back in the 1940s the American Federation of Musicians was at war with Muzak and fretting that piped in music would lead to unemployed musicians. Nevermind the unlikely occurrence of a big band showing up to play a gig at the local cannery, the slippery slope argument went into full effect. Under the iron fist of boss James Petrillo, the union demanded a halt to all musical recording in 1942. It’s really quite amazing that after more than half a century of such self-destructive behavior, the recording industry is still largely intact. Muzak survived because it was sitting on a three year stockpile of fresh wax. But this would not be the last of the company’s troubles.
In 1989, drunk with cash from a greatest hits album and his schlock rock supergroup, Damn Yankees, Ted Nugent offered a bid of $10 million to purchase Muzak with the promise of shutting it down. In a not uncharacteristic binge of hyperbole the Newj claimed that, “It’s an evil force in today’s society…ruining some of the best minds of our generation.”
Screenplay idea #2. In a not-so-distant future, packs of jumpsuited teens cruise the alleyways of their town shirking school, pillaging the locals and packing ipods pulsing with easy listening classics. One miscreant is thrown in prison for his crimes and and subjected to scenes of ultraviolence accompanied by a drug therapy and an instrumental version of “Alfie”. The CIA scrambles to hack into American Eagle Outfitter’s network to pipe in “Cat Scratch Fever” and thwart the coming revolution.
Captain Beefheart’s Don Van Vliet was slightly more subtle when he opined on the fringe appeal of some of his music in a 1973 interview with Sounds saying, “A lot of people could never relate back to that sort of music… Muzak has done that to them, it’s made them all on one level.”
But for all the shit Muzak has taken over the years, it still has its fans among a coterie of musical taste-makers. Experimental composer John Cage wrote Silent Prayer specifically for Muzak which he felt was in the same spirit as Erik Satie’s “furniture music”, short compositions intended to be performed as background music. John Lennon, in a 1980 interview with Newsweek, claimed that during the mid-’70s he “listened mostly to classical or Muzak. I’m not interested in other people’s work…” And Devo lovingly recrafted many of its hits into easy listening versions sold through mail-order.
In Lennon’s comment it’s implicit that Muzak is faceless and lacking in any personally identifiable characteristics. It’s devoid of the hype and swagger and all the things you either hate or love about a band. Take away Chris Martin’s palsied stage antics and, with a little taming, Coldplay could be some damn fine Muzak – i.e. an improvement. Is that such a bad thing? The very criticism often levelled against Muzak – that it’s benign and unobtrusive – is also its appeal.
Film director John Waters said in 1978, “I would certainly never come home to my apartment alone and put on, you know, The Slits. It doesn’t relax me. I like Muzak.” There was plenty of market for Muzak-style arrangements at the time with Herb Alpert, Mantovani and Burt Bacharach on the charts and Antônio Carlos Jobim and Brasil 66 infiltrating the nation with lush sounds and a south of the equator beat.
But while older artists like Esquivel experienced a brief revival a decade ago and new artists like Stereolab surged to prominence, MTV and arena tours had moved music from the background to the foreground and easy listening became too sedate, too safe, too inanimate to move the masses. RIP Muzak.
- Xavier Van Zandt
MP3 :::
Jobim/Getz/Gilberto – Corcovado
Stereolab – Ranco Symphony
