When the Foreground becomes the Background...

You know what I really hate?

Well I’ve been hanging around in coffee shops a bit recently, and you know how they always endeavour to have, like, ‘good’, ‘tasteful’ music going on in the background, and due to the universal critical consensus which hovers over us at all times, ready to leap up and tell the layperson which are the best records to listen to, this inevitably boils down to a small selection of really, really awesome stuff – “Kind of Blue”, “Five Leaves Left” and tons of Billie Holiday and Nina Simone.

This is then run through on a constant loop, being gently inflicted on the uncaring staff and customers ten, twenty, thirty times a day, with nobody listening. And even if you know the music, and do listen, the repetition still drives home the connection to the extent that the next time you’re sitting at home and decide to put one of those awesome records on, you’ll find yourself with a big, flashing light in your head the whole time saying “Lame Coffee Shop Background Music – not cool!”. Eventually this flagrant misappropriation, as repugnant in its own way as Moby (remember him?) ripping off the voices of dead plantation workers to lend stolen pathos to our commercial breaks, could sour the wider world’s relationship to this fine, moving music altogether.

If coffee shop chains are going to continue with this policy, I feel they should employ muso weblog bores such as myself to stand on platforms in the corner and loudly interject into people’s conversations with the occasional “You there sir, are you enjoying Richard Thompson’s sterling guitar work on ‘Time Has Told Me’?” or “Listen up everybody, Coltrane is about to take a solo!” or “Excuse me young lady, but do you not find the historical resonances of this song emotionally affecting? Are you grateful for being able to live your life without fear of being hanged?” and so on.

Or alternatively, they could revert to doing what such bourgeois high street institutions have done since the dawn of time, and just play old fashioned bad, boring, non-descript music that no one will ever give a shit about. Because god knows, there’s enough of it around without wrecking and devaluing the good.