Face the Muzak
The art of calming customers through sound is starting to backfire, writes Carlos Amato
YOU’RE supposed to shuffle rightward as you get older, especially if you’re middle class. Political views are usually congealed into selfishness by growing comfort and a rising stake in the status quo.
This will happen to me soon: I’m 37, with a job and a car and a house and a pension fund. Until it does, I will lean childishly left, and might even vote WASP in next year’s elections, being quietly confident the party will not overthrow late South African capitalism and force me to tend mealies on a collective farm formerly known as Parkview Golf Course.
But in the meantime, my fascist potential is being channelled into musical bigotry. If I walk into a shop and that front-bum from Nickelback is moaning his tepid Canadian problems through the in-store PA, I walk straight out again in protest. A few bars of dribbly smooth jazz, piped into a lift, will throw me into an anxious rage — exactly the condition it is supposed to prevent.
The retail music company Muzak made its name by supplying inoffensive melodies to soothe the
It strengthens your belief that you deserve a R40 punnet of gnocchi
jangling nerves of New Yorkers as they stepped into the newfangled elevators of early skyscrapers.
But the art of pacifying consumers through sound has backfired over the decades: now we’re pissed off by calculatedly calming music on customer helplines, which represent a belittling effort to defuse our anger at being ignored or ripped off. Elevator music treats the consumer as a lamb to the commercial slaughter: “Don’t worry, little one, everything’s going to be fiiiiiiiine.”
McDonald’s has adopted a subtle variant of the Muzak strategy to repel broke and obnoxious youths: many outlets play proper classical music, thus driving out the laaities and making room for uptight adults with deeper pockets.
Woolworths deserves a favourable mention here: for years, those skilful relocators of wealth boosted their consumers’ confidence by spinning wall-towall Amy Winehouse and Nina Simone. Both dead geniuses emitted a wallet-lubricating mixture of euphony and melancholy: a subtle balance that balms the soul and strengthens your belief that you can afford and deserve a R40 punnet of gnocchi.
But walk out of Woolies into the mall, and the genius gives way to One Direction, Miley Cyrus, Flo-Rida and the Parlotones. Somebody must love them.
Perhaps audio fascism is a very early sign of approaching death. But if life must be soundtracked by Nickelback, I’m ready to go.