Canned music. It’s everywhere. You cannot get away from it. It is always playing in public spaces. Grocery stores, hotel lobbies, airplanes, colonoscopy exam rooms.
Piped-in music is playing in hospital delivery rooms, this very moment. As new babies draw in the first breath of life, they are hearing Ke$ha’s “Party at a Rich Dude’s House.” Which is the name of an actual song. Background music will be playing overhead in your funeral parlor.
It’s hard to find silence anymore. Silence is not a thing. The National Park Service’s Natural Sounds and Night Skies Division recently measured noise pollution and discovered noise levels have tripled in the last few years.
It’s not just music, of course. The roar of traffic, the booms of bulldozers. Whirring distant blenders. TVs blaring 24-hour news. Every 11 seconds, somewhere in America, someone uses a leafblower.
But canned music…
Per day, Americans are exposed to an averaged 76 minutes of “unchosen” music in public. You have probably heard “Party at a Rich Dude’s House,” multiple times and never knew it.
Stores use music like this all the time. Businesspersons call canned music part of the “immersive branding” experience. The songs are usually ones you’ve never heard before, produced by artists young enough to be your grandchildren, who have names that involve numbers, dollar signs, and emojis depicting excreta.
You cannot avoid this music. It is blasted in parking lots, public parks, and nursing homes. When you are in the hospital, with only minutes left to live, overhead Ke$ha will be singing “We R Who We R.” The nurses will still be humming along as they wheel your body off to the morgue.
Some stores tried removing canned music. Walmarts tried this. Many Targets attempted this. Restaurants did it, too. FACT: The second most common complaint in US restaurants is the music.
But it didn’t last.
Overwhelmingly, young shoppers said public spaces were too weird and uncomfortable without music. So, all stores went back to playing music. Walmart even developed their own radio station. And that’s the world we live with now.
Just a few days ago, I was trapped on an airplane awaiting takeoff. There was piped-in music on the plane. I paid attention to what I was hearing.
And as I listened, I realized this was not happy music. It was not peaceful. It was angsty. It was mostly about copulation.
The playlist featured songs like “Demons” by Imagine Dragons, followed by “J CHRIST” by Lil Nas X. It was music that made many passengers deeply fantasize about using the emergency exits.
So I took an informal poll. I asked passengers whether they (a) recognized these songs, and more importantly, whether they (b) LIKED them.
The vote was almost unanimous. None of the passengers liked the music. And it’s important to note: These people hailed from different walks. Different ages, different creeds, different political persuasions. These are Americans who cannot agree on ANYTHING.
And yet their resounding response was, “THERE SHOULDN’T BE MUSIC ON AIRPLANES!”
Still, it was the 15-year-old girl beside me who delivered a remark that stuck with me:
“There’s noise everywhere you go. We don’t know how to embrace silence because we’re trying to drown out how lonely we are.
“We’re lonely because we’re separated. Technology separates us, politics separates us, media separates us. They want us separate. Because when we’re loving each other we are an unstoppable threat.”
Kids. What do they know?