I would like to apologize in advance because, frankly, I worry I lack the polish and rigor that all of you professional writers and academics may expect from this conference, and I don't really know if I have anything to offer other than memoir, some suspect fact, and a little theory. I would also like to apologize because in order for me to talk about my relationship with Muzak, I have to address the issue of throwing up.

I was nine, my family was on a five-hour trip back home from a vacation in Mystic, Connecticut, and I was in the middle of a virulent case of food poisoning. I don’t remember much, other than utterly humiliating myself by throwing up seemingly every hour on the hour, crouched into a ball in the back of my mother’s car, holding a plastic bag, whining I’M GOING TO DIE, I’M GOING TO DIE, MY GOD I’M REALLY GOING TO DIE.

When I got home and threw up what little there was left to throw up, I melted into bed. My mom tucked me in and brought in a radio to keep me company. Sweaty and dizzy and blinded by a too-bright day, I couldn't focus on anything but my extreme discomfort at first, but, at some indeterminate point, maybe as I fell in or out of sleep, I realized that this strange music rising fumelike by my bed was really rather BEAUTIFUL. Yes, I was delirious -- I truly thought that every song that ever made my little heart swell, everything I had ever really liked about music, no matter how vaguely understood or unexpressed, somehow found its home here, on 98.3 KJOY-FM, or what my mom later told me was “the Muzak station.”

That was a misnomer, though. “Muzak” refers to the service, offered by the Muzak company, that distributes and broadcasts music using records and tapes, and later, satellite transmissions, for businesses, stores, government entities, and so on. For decades, Muzak used nothing but music with a very particular aesthetic -- soft and string-heavy instrumental covers of pop hits where all rough edges are replaced with a tinkle and a swell and a wash of color; eventually the service and the music became synonymous in most people’s minds. There were commercial radio stations, however, that played music with identical bloodlines and aesthetics to Muzak’s, with maybe a little soft pop thrown in. These were called “Beautiful Music” stations, and KJOY was one of them until some point in the mid-eighties when they ditched the instrumentals in favor of things like the softer side of Springsteen and “Big Chill” style oldies. Muzak and Beautiful Music stations not only shared aesthetics but function as well, haunting malls, waiting rooms and elevators alike with their phantom reassurance. Indeed, both the music of Muzak and the music played by Beautiful Music stations are often referred to as “elevator music,” a term that I will use throughout this paper.

After my little incident, whenever I heard elevator music dribbling away in the ignored corners of the world, or on the portable Westinghouse radio my grandparents gave me, it filled with….it filled me with such contentment. I loved how it was always on, and that it never seemed to change. As the food incident should make clear, I was always prone to comic levels of anxiety as a kid, so I was mighty impressed at its normalcy in all situations. And it fascinated me how it always tinted experience with its presence, which was gayer than a greeting and sadder than a sigh.

I’m sure it doesn’t surprise you that I was met with incomprehension all around. It was the first time I can remember being put on the defensive for a piece of music I liked. I was forced to EXPLAIN MYSELF, a real rock critic in embryo. At best I was hyperbolic and vague; not really surprising, after all, I was only nine. I remember saying things like "it's just the prettiest music ever." Or that "it could even make a punk song melodic" -- not that I really had any idea what "melodic" meant. Or "punk," for that matter -- when the infamous Quincy punk rock episode aired a couple of years later, I saw no reason to doubt it was telling the God's honest truth. You have to understand that pop music utterly scared the shit out of me. The music of the day was the hammers and frowning anuses of Pink Floyd's The Wall; it was Gene Simmons throwing up blood onstage; it was the Eagles' "Hotel California," whose lyrics about beasts being stabbed by steely knives seemed positively Satanic to my all-too-literal mind. None of that had anything to do with me, or the life around me, and didn't speak to any wishes I could bring myself to articulate to myself. Yet EVERYONE I knew loved pop music, peers and adults alike. And the only reason I could see WHY was simple CONTRARINESS, a deliberate turning away from what was right and normal; so liking elevator music was also MY way of being contrary, a rebellion against rebellion itself.

Yet less than five years later -- a story to long to tell -- I'm all about R.E.M. and soul music and I tell my guidance counselor that I want to be a rock critic when I grow up. I know perfectly well the world I have chosen to ally myself with uses Muzak as the go-to insult for all that is generic and boring and functional and just plain ol’ lame. As I grew older still, I became aware of more "thoughtful" critiques that say elevator music is irredeemably tasteless and encourages listeners to accept only the lowest common denominator in musical values; when used as canned music, it is irritatingly omnipresent and possibly a tool for psychological manipulation. But it already informed far too much of my aesthetic outlook to for me to renounce it without feeling like a hypocrite. I still had a fetish for strings and a suspicion of rebellious rock poses. I still had a habit of listening to music as I drifted off to sleep, though by my teen years it was the classical music station WNYC; and later still, Brian Eno, Charlemagne Palestine, and Morton Feldman. And still, strong as ever, was my innate attraction to music that comforts and reassures – all of these attitudes and tendencies were reinforced, if not found their genesis, during my elevator music phase.

So you might think then I'd be heartened by elevator music’s brief voguishness in the nineties. Well...not really, no. Many of the ways it manifested itself and the arguments fans put forward in its defense have been not only at odds with my current set of musical values but also have so little to do with the reasons why I ever liked the stuff in the first place. I’m thinking of things like albums such as Grunge Lite and its “Muzakfied” takes on “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and “Touch Me I’m Sick,” with its obvious ironies and its half-assed quasi-Muzak. More sensible are The Exotica mailing list and the Yahoo! group BeautifulInstrumentals, are, based on my verrry occasional experience, filled with thoughtful, serious-minded people who collect records and share knowledge on the subject. All that never really interested me, though; very much unlike the way I usually thinking about music, I prefer thinking of elevator music as something anonymous and free from “history”; as disassociated from the foibles of man as the weather. Elsewhere on the internet, you very occasionally get fans who are rather more polemical – and disturbingly single-minded -- like David Shields, the owner of classicthemes.com, who prefaces his introduction to the subject with a rant on how music is in the middle of a dark ages, "a kind of mass self-destruction from which it is only beginning to emerge," largely attributable to the dumbing down of the audience. As should be no surprise, rock is subject to his anger but he also characterizes "serious composition" and extended improvisation alike as pretentious and ego-driven; thereby holding in contempt nearly all the musics that make my life worth living.

More unsettling than any of these is the only mass-market book ever published solely focused on the subject, Joseph Lanza's Elevator Music: A Surreal History of Muzak, Easy-Listening, and Other Moodsong. As his subject is in the running for being perhaps the most universally-loathed music in the Western world, and as Lanza is unambiguously a fan, one might expect the book to offer something like a defense, something that would allow a reader like myself to more fully reconcile my values to the values of elevator music without causing too much violence to either side. Unfortunately, Lanza usually dispatches elevator music’s critics with only wiggle of the finger for what he perceives as their snobbery, as if it would be self-evident that complaints about mind control or the desecration of pop standards are mere prejudice, even if misguided. Somewhat more boldly, Lanza ventures to say that "Muzak and mood music are, in many respects, aesthetically superior to all other musical forms: they emit music the way the twentieth century is equipped to receive it," and further, in the book’s second edition, Lanza retroactively calls his book an "ethical defense" of Muzak. For Lanza, specialness of Muzak and its use of elevator music lie in the way they are engineered to fit the landscapes of business and commerce, seen most clearly in the studies he details throughout. Some are a little ridiculous, such as the claim that somehow Muzak prevents the blood of slaughtered livestock from coagulating too quickly. More reasonable are the ones that deal with what was for decades Muzak’s primary selling point, "Stimulus Progression," as they appeal to the plausible notion that the music one hears, even passively, can influence behavior. To simplify a little, Stimulus Progression was Muzak's method of programming music in fifteen-minute blocks, with each track featuring greater overall stimuli than the track that came before it, with stimuli being defined in terms of tempo, rhythm, number of instruments, and so on. Studies showed that when alternated with fifteen-minute stretches of silence, these blocks of ever-increasing musical stimulation would give its captive listeners in a workplace a definite -- but unobtrusive -- sense of forward momentum right when they felt the most tired, thereby increasing productivity through a subtle kind of psychological manipulation. This science-y flavor holds great appeal to Lanza; elsewhere, he relates how Muzak is designed at every stage of its production – from the development of musical arrangements to the installation of speakers -- to help make McDonald's food taste better, reduce unease in elevators or supermarkets, and even turn retail and public environments into virtual theme parks – an idea which Lanza sees as his model for an ideal society. Referring to the dystopia of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, he writes:

"Years after surviving the golden age of 'individualism,' we no longer have Huxley's luxury of bleating about the excesses of capitalist greed and centralized power. They are a fact of life: a fact we are learning not only to accept but enjoy. Looking objectively at our society's haphazard social manipulations designed to give people the illusion of diversity and choice, we might envy the society created by Brave New World's human engineers with their "Sound-Track Writers and Synthetic Composers."

And at the end of his book:

"That's because most of us, in our heart of hearts, want a world tailored by Walt Disney's 'imagineers,' an ergonomical 'Main Street U.S.A.,' where the buildings never make you feel too small, where the act of paying admission is tantamount to a screen-test--and where the music never stops."

What a fucking pants load that is.

This, as far as I can see, is the heart of Lanza's ethical argument for Muzak: if the highest good is a world where an all-engulfing global capitalism is the measure of all things, and the highest virtue is the complete acquiescence to that world, Muzak is good because it allows people to acquiesce more readily.

Luckily, though, the idea that elevator music has any significant role in the establishment of a corporate New Atlantis had been rendered even more ridiculous by developments soon after the first edition of Lanza's. As you may have read in David Owen’s story in The New Yorker a few weeks ago, in an attempt to modernize and hippify the company, Muzak abandoned the rhetoric of Taylorian efficiency to explain themselves to the world in the late 90's, shoving all talk of "Stimulus Progression" into the background and discontinuing its association with the sorts of studies on the psychological effects of Muzak that Lanza is so very fond of. Furthermore, by that time, the music Muzak was most identified with was only being used by 10% of their corporate accounts; today, the company’s primary business comes from providing companies like Starbucks and the Gap with "foreground music": that is, actual MUSIC music by artists such as Moby, Massive Attack and Miles Davis -- all the M's. Foreground music is intended to be heard, and is often used in the service of "branding" or the creation of a set of positive associations with a company in the mind of a consumer. As their website puts it, a music program designed by Muzak "bypasses the resistance of the mind and targets the receptiveness of the heart. When people are made to feel good in, say, a store, they feel good about that store. They like it. Remember it. Go back to it."

And oh boy, does this piss Lanza off. In the second edition of Elevator Music, published in 2004, Lanza replaces his Walt Disney fantasy with a complaint that "Anti-Muzak naysayers used to complain that background music was too 'manipulative,' but foreground music seems to be much more insidious. Walking into a Rite Aid and pelted with chart versions of country rock, smooth jazz, and hip-hop, one may feel subjected not only to the whims of the store manager but to a clutching fashion apparatus that never lets go."

If, as Lanza states, elevator music's aesthetic superiority rests on its appropriateness to the 20th century, is it still superior when the 20th and 21st century utterly abandons it? But if elevator music has disappeared from the public sphere, and if Muzak itself has practically disowned the science that made its music open to accusations of psychological control, then it means that many of the ethical dilemmas that once tainted elevator music have now shifted elsewhere, leaving it relatively innocent. Like many an art whose power to disturb diminishes over time, perhaps now elevator music is "safer" for us to listen to.

But it is still not completely defensible. As someone who is occasionally put on the defensive when I say that, yes, Britney Spears has a right to exist, for some I know, liking elevator music even in my own, limited way is even more beyond the pale. It makes me oh no a horrible IRONIC HIPSTER, OH NO! And still, I don't have much in the way of defense. Not that elevator music makes it easy; its very nature resists many of the ordinary ways we defend other kinds of musics. Being largely without voice or lyric, it lacks the things people are most apt to point to when they want to talk about the meaning of a piece of pop music, and further, is chockablock with the kind of ethereal sonics -- especially those glissy, massed strings -- that seem to race forever ahead of any mind that tries to think about its details. It lacks the structural complexity of classical music or the social complexity of folk and pop, both of which allow its listeners to invest in those musics a wide variety of meanings, and it also lacks the robust dialogues between musicians and listeners that constantly refresh those musics meaning and value; in comparison, elevator music only has a slightly heremetic cult. Personally, when I try to speak in favor of a kind of music, especially pop I resort to what I'll be brutally honest and call an undigested mish-mosh of the Kantian sublime and the attitude of Richard Rorty's liberal ironist who uses art to more fully understand the suffering of others -- but elevator music resists my nebulous tack, too, eschewing the terror that is so central to the concept of the sublime. And as far as I'm concerned, in order to detect any sense of human desire in elevator music, one would have to be someone like Mucho Maas in Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, hearing the Muzak playing in a restaurant and detecting with his LSD-addled Spidey Senses that one violinist's E string was a few cycles too sharp.

David Shields' ressentiment or Joseph Lanza's nostalgia for a future never-to-be may not help matters any, but I don't help much, either. Whenever I talk about elevator music and why I like it, I feel inexorably forced to resort to biography and describe a set of conditions for my admiration of it that could not possibly be shared by you, and cite reason after reason for my alienation from elevator music's fans and defenders. A small irony, that: we're talking about a music characterized by its homogenization, but it's also something that can only be loved by a few eccentrics. Feel free to argue that I’m being contrarian again; that deep down, in my heart of hearts, I don’t really care if you come like elevator music as I do; that all I really want to do is retain that sense of perverse specialness elevator music gave me when I was nine but in an entirely new context. You may very well be right…which would make this essay is as good an example as any of how NOT to defend Muzak. And for that...I'd like to apologize again. Thank you.