The Day Music Was Put on Life Support

One listener’s vital rock is another’s background music to be ignored or not even heard

Photo by Alexey Ruban on Unsplash

Background noise for people scheming, seducing, revolting and teaching That’s all right by me, don’t think that I’m complaining After all, it’s only leisure time, isn’t it? *Robert Wyatt, Moon in June*

Seems as if every store I shop in nowadays has some sort of classic rock on the store speakers. Not “classic” in the sense of Dylan, Joni Mitchell, or the Beatles, but “big” hits from the past few decades.

Last night in late-night Wal-Mart, the intercom blasted XTC’s “Mayor of Simpleton” from 1989.

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Now most of my music self-education stops around 1980, but I’ve come to appreciate a number of well-crafted pop / rock songs from the 80’s (the AllMusic bio of the band mentions Ray Davies as an inspiration for this album, so there you go).

Well, I’m grooving on the background music (“Where were these cucumbers grown”) but then start wondering: how does such a classic song resonate for my fellow shoppers? The guy buying an industrial-sized box of Keystone beer. Or the Hispanic family stocking up for the week. Most of them are too young to have grown up with XTC. If the song doesn’t appeal to the shoppers’ sense of nostalgia, do they feel

• comforted
• inspired
• annoyed
• more likely to make purchases
• less likely to shoplift

I would guess that most people don’t hear the music at all — it’s more like traffic noise when you’re driving down the highway or the drone of tree frogs outside your window on a summer night.

So here you have a talented band reconciling innovation with tradition, reaching a variety of listeners (including fossilized Boomers like me, with their shopping cart of organic cucumbers and tofu), and while XTC is probably making more money from Wal-Mart’s programming than from the pittance that Spotify pays out for streaming, their heritage has been reduced to a background drone that’s harmless enough not to bother the shoppers, but weighty enough to imply that Wal-Mart is “with it” (i.e. their prices are competitive).

End of rant.

At least we on Medium have publications like Plethora of Pop, The Riff, InTune, Rock n’ Heavy and others to promote discovery and enjoyment.

So listen to some new stuff today. In the foreground. And post your reactions on Medium for others to reflect on.

Fight the stasis.