Music in shops

The slack faced, nodding bodies move between the shelves with their lips muttering banalities of no great consequence.  Their fingers twitch as they reach for items waiting on shelves, they look vacantly at the vital information contained on bottles and cartons before either putting them back haphazardly or placing them in baskets or bags at their side. Occasionally there are kids running around and couples plodding around beside each other.  Sometimes friends are giggling and suited people, or some other arrangement of triviality, are sauntering around speaking on phones discussing some trite object or another. People are queuing, paying, beeping, talking of plans: picking up kids, a call centre argument, an errant colleague; hackneyed oblivious ego maintaining detritus.

What do we hear on the outskirts of the hubbub, providing an absurd gift wrap to this whole scene? A lone voice, a tender melody, the sounds of a soul reaching for that great void of love.  A song – music pumped in from a carefully selected selection, agreed on by official looking drones sat around big round conference tables. I’m sure I am not alone in experiencing that uncanny moment in a shop when you suddenly become conscious of the music and actually start listening to a song coming through the speakers that tackles subjects that seem like the most unorthodox of choices considering the current scene and the present context (see above).  

She sits on the corner of her bed; there was no need to turn on the lights, the faint seepage from the street is all she needs and the dull fug seems more relevant. She pushes back the hair form her face, it’s clumped and stringy from tears, her phone sit on her fingers like a dead fish, she looks at the words on the screen, she looks again, then it slips from her hand onto the floor and there it is, the hole, the truth, the utter impotence of her existence; the guttural place of pure indifference. She takes the pad from the drawer and falls backwards onto the bed and lets it fall out, things that shouldn’t exist burst into the world, a moment of purity and impossibility. The Real.

Is there a relationship between the two situations(the moment of creation and the moment of consumption)? Should there be? I realise that context is all in the infinite play of meaning and there is no right and wrong and all contexts potentially have the same value and can create new and unusual combinations.  However here’s my argument (my blatant logocentrism), I am privileging certain contexts (a lone listener sitting in a quiet room, the collective sway of the Dionysian concert goer) over others (the shuffle of the retail emporium). I’m not saying that there is something more present in the former, but just that it feels to me that some songs seem richer and more resonant  in certain environments, just as people are individuals that have strengths and weakness in different situations so does music. The shop atmosphere kills anything that is challenging, new and unusual about the music it plays and I know having to spend many hours a week creeping in between the thud and the whine of the shop stereo; or as those in-the-know call it the Mood Music. It’s a situation that hollows out meaning, seals everyone in an apathetic darkness; it’s a passive hand on the shoulder, a thought numbing distraction machine.  The economy can’t run on silence.

Some songs, however, are so trite and emotionally lethargic that providing a backing track to banality seems like the perfect fit – I’m thinking here of a lot of pop music that is lyrically lacklustre and Pavlovian in melody (Girls aloud – Sound of the Underground, Crazy in Love  -Beyonce), there’s no story-telling involved, it’s mainly repetition of a hackneyed vaguely optimistic axiom set to a catchy melody. Christmas songs are the shop song par excellence and they work to perfection, there’s no need to listen to the lyrics, there’s no thought involved, you can’t dance to it, it’s made to hum along to mindlessly, which it what I do sometimes and yes it’s fun.

Nonetheless, some of the songs that get played in shops surprises me, I often hear some of the more tender songs by Adele or Roxanne by The Police played, now the later is a song about a prostitute, and the lyrics clearly state: ‘You don't have to wear that dress tonight walk the streets for money’, but yet this is clearly suitable for all members of the family, except it’s not and in any other context it may be seen as a bit unsavoury and let us not mention The Thong Song or My Humps. The retail setting (and the prefix ‘pop’ in general) slaughters all meaning, it’s a vacuum where all is permitted, yet all is meaningless and tired; it empties out any significance and trounces on certain songs lessening their impact in other contexts. You could write a song about a pervert serial killer (probably called something like Bang Bang Stab Stab) and play it in the middle of the day in Top Shop over and over and I doubt you would get even a mild reaction form the 'audience'. Music overplayed in shops or on the radio is dulled and its mark rubbed away or, as Daniel Kitson might say, the overexposure has ‘put the poo on it’.  All must be laborious and inoffensive, it all just becomes blah blah blah and try fitting that slop into that special place of your memory where all is truth and joy.

I can’t imagine that when a would be artist envisions their song, that piece of themselves achieved with so much grit and determination, played to the masses, he sees a scruffy middle age man singing idly along,  scratching his nads while sorting through a crate for the best bunch of bananas at the same time as thinking of tits.  Although when trying to explicate this idea to my colleague at work, he simply said: ‘Bet they don’t care when they get the royalty cheque.’ I guess I never considered this, I presume this isn’t what the girl in the above scene was crying about – she’d just received a text with her royalty payment then set out to write a complaint to her agent. It just seems a tragic outcome, the transition from the intensity of the girl in her room to the obliviousness of the aforementioned nad scratcher. It doesn’t seem right, it shouldn't be about control and money but freedom and engagement.

For most songs let them play, but some should be kept out of the grubby hands of those Mood Music technicians. They want to control our moods for maximum profit and that is what it is all about, tilting our unconscious forces into a most conducive angle for the perpetual sliding of capital into the big pot. It all comes down to the tension between art and money, but some songs need to be protected or else listened to and taken in, a whole shop full of weeping eyes, or aisles full of jumping, dancing legs. That’s what I want to see.  

Without music life would be a mistake.

Without music shops would be a mistake.

Without shops music would be a mistake.

Without economic gain music would be a mistake.