Fun that some of the messages in-between the songs are for things like security being called to go to a particular zone of the store. I remember hearing those as a kid and wondering who got busted, never thinking that the announcement might be as fake as the security cameras.
It isn't always fake. I used to work in a retail chain store (I won't say its name, but it ends with "xx" and starts with "TJ") and we were trained to use certain codes on the PA when we needed security to come deal with a situation. The difference, I think, is that these real alerts were coded so as not to be understood by the customers.
Captain Pedantic checking in to remind our viewers that at a quick glance this does not appear to be Muzak (EDIT: no, that is definitely not Muzak), but rather ambient music played in K-Mart stores. Muzak is a specific brand of ambient music, which appears to suffer the same fate as Kleenex and Xerox:
Thank you Captain Pedantic. HN threads won't be the same without nitpicking and pedantry. I think by "ambient" you mean piped music, elevator music, Muzak(tm). Because Eno ain't no elevator music.
In keeping with the pedantic nitpicking, I think Eno might actually disagree and say that his music could be elevator music. In the liner notes[0] for 'Ambient 1: Music for Airports', he writes that "Ambient Music must be able to accomodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting."
But, speaking for myself, I wouldn't relegate Eno's music to the elevator. :)
It's funny. My favorite band, Devo, released Muzak mixes of their songs several times in the 80s. However, you would never hear such a thing piped in a store in 2020. Plain vanilla "Whip It" though? Absolutely.
Said another way, Eno (and Devo and many others) are essentially the Muzak of the modern day.
At some point I feel like society deserves a vote. Sorry, you have claimed copyright & intellectual property, but we are just going to go to duckduckgo.com and google for whatever we're looking for. Your insistence that this (google, noun) is your word has failed; we all know it, why deny it.
Whatever the owners of "Muzak" wanted, whatever they thought of it: the dog is out of the yard. It's free. Your claim may be legal, but it is, by all accounts, incorrect and false. This word has a meaning now, this passive easy listening background vibe, humming nothings, it embodies something more real than what the owner intended. It's falsity & a lie that we let law & property dictate to us the terms by which we think. It's said that a rose would smell just as sweet by any other name. Well, society knows these roses, far better than whomever came up with the name. Let us not let the first-comers shape & dictate to us our usages.
(Velcro, I am coming for you. Your hegemony over this idea is coming to an end! We will not fall back to "hook and loop" forever, like animals! We all know we need a word. That you own it? Bah! Poppycock! The resistance of your lawyers does not cow me, does not frighten us!)
I worked at a restaurant that did have it and they appeared to be magnificent 16 track tapes (or whatever the alpha male of the 8-track family was). They looked like they could fit a full LP.
The YouTuber "techmoan" has done a few videos on the hardware that ran various background music systems, and one that stands out is the 3M Cantata, which had some massive tape cartridges https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WQbJ0VFrFQ
Oh man. Exurban wastelands of Nowhere, America. Endless fluorescent popcorn ceilings and despair. Is there another word for nostalgia, where instead of missing something you remember fondly, you are grateful to have escaped from something that seemed to drain your soul? I remember these places having an almost Dementor-like effect on me long before I was old enough to be a coastal elite or a classist or an architecture snob or whatever.
FINALLY! I've been wanting to remix these kind of songs into hiphop songs for a long time. This is such a weird victory for music producers. These are a gold mine for hip hop sampling.
Late to the party on this one but I wanted to leave this note for posterity. Turns out that there's an interesting business story and a timely death tied-in here too.
I got curious because some of the tapes bear the name of an audio production company in Greenville, OH, a few miles down the road from my hometown. The booming male voice on the recordings also sounded familiar to me, too. I'm fairly certain I heard him on the local radio station that my father played over the PA in our family grocery store when I was growing up.
I did some searching and learned that back on November 30, the gentleman who founded the audio company, and who acted as the "voice of K-Mart", died.
It looks like he was involved in ventures that persist today. His company EchoSat[1] (which I'd heard of with some past involvement in the convenience store / retail petroleum industry) recently merged with an IT security firm to become "ControlScan".
Quoting the obituary[2]:
He started Tower Sound and Communications while in Greenville to pursue a venture that would eventually spearhead "in store" broadcasting for companies such as Kmart (he became the voice of Kmart) and Jamesway which evolved into another corporation in KY called EchoSat that would use satellite technology in helping with multiple stores for POS processing and security.
There's an interview with Lee Rutherford in 2011.[3] He absolutely still has that "radio voice".
What I find kinda strange in American Culture (as an American) is that the rest of the pop music tapes are pretty much just period music that no modern kid would recognize.
The Christmas tape is a 100% known landscape. We let hits die but Christmas music is eternal.
One could argue that the whole point of traditions like Christmas is to have comforting, repeated experiences like listening to the same music each year, something to ground your mortality in timeless rituals that started before you were born and (you hope) will continue after you die.
That said, there is lots of Christmas pop that doesn't make it into the canon. I have no recollection at all of the first song on the Christmas tape, and i was around then (and going to K-Mart with my mom).
I think it's a combination of copyright and licensing.
The pop music they use on these tapes are cheap to license --- they weren't even popular when they were contemporary. They were just generic cheap music.
For Christmas, there is a set of Christmas music that just gets played every year and is licensed in blocks that are fairly cheap. That's why you hear a lot of "traditional standards" and not much else.
Readit News
- Sun Tzu, 5th century BC
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muzak
That page is worth a read, if only for the means of distribution used over the years. But do I ever digress...
In keeping with the pedantic nitpicking, I think Eno might actually disagree and say that his music could be elevator music. In the liner notes[0] for 'Ambient 1: Music for Airports', he writes that "Ambient Music must be able to accomodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting."
But, speaking for myself, I wouldn't relegate Eno's music to the elevator. :)
[0]https://audioweb.sitehost.iu.edu/T369/eno-ambient.pdf
Said another way, Eno (and Devo and many others) are essentially the Muzak of the modern day.
Deleted Comment
Whatever the owners of "Muzak" wanted, whatever they thought of it: the dog is out of the yard. It's free. Your claim may be legal, but it is, by all accounts, incorrect and false. This word has a meaning now, this passive easy listening background vibe, humming nothings, it embodies something more real than what the owner intended. It's falsity & a lie that we let law & property dictate to us the terms by which we think. It's said that a rose would smell just as sweet by any other name. Well, society knows these roses, far better than whomever came up with the name. Let us not let the first-comers shape & dictate to us our usages.
(Velcro, I am coming for you. Your hegemony over this idea is coming to an end! We will not fall back to "hook and loop" forever, like animals! We all know we need a word. That you own it? Bah! Poppycock! The resistance of your lawyers does not cow me, does not frighten us!)
There are also systems with smaller cartridges https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_5DPvPiUMY
Stacks of vinyl records https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kCHx3_vu9M
And standard cassette tapes running at a lower speed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OV2EhEd46BY
The word you're looking for... My spouse suggested something related to trauma or PTSD. Then I saw "flashback" suggested.[0]
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/508877/is-there-...
Deleted Comment
https://youtu.be/JELt1jxJsHQ
https://youtu.be/FZUfiW3W1KY
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4im2nSUjjCdReLLDNwDQoC
I got curious because some of the tapes bear the name of an audio production company in Greenville, OH, a few miles down the road from my hometown. The booming male voice on the recordings also sounded familiar to me, too. I'm fairly certain I heard him on the local radio station that my father played over the PA in our family grocery store when I was growing up.
I did some searching and learned that back on November 30, the gentleman who founded the audio company, and who acted as the "voice of K-Mart", died.
It looks like he was involved in ventures that persist today. His company EchoSat[1] (which I'd heard of with some past involvement in the convenience store / retail petroleum industry) recently merged with an IT security firm to become "ControlScan".
Quoting the obituary[2]:
He started Tower Sound and Communications while in Greenville to pursue a venture that would eventually spearhead "in store" broadcasting for companies such as Kmart (he became the voice of Kmart) and Jamesway which evolved into another corporation in KY called EchoSat that would use satellite technology in helping with multiple stores for POS processing and security.
There's an interview with Lee Rutherford in 2011.[3] He absolutely still has that "radio voice".
[1] https://www.dandb.com/businessdirectory/towercommunicationsg...
[2] https://www.legacy.com/obituaries/dailyadvocate/obituary.asp...
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQqoQL3pkyI
https://archive.org/details/KmartDecember1992
The Christmas tape is a 100% known landscape. We let hits die but Christmas music is eternal.
That said, there is lots of Christmas pop that doesn't make it into the canon. I have no recollection at all of the first song on the Christmas tape, and i was around then (and going to K-Mart with my mom).
The pop music they use on these tapes are cheap to license --- they weren't even popular when they were contemporary. They were just generic cheap music.
For Christmas, there is a set of Christmas music that just gets played every year and is licensed in blocks that are fairly cheap. That's why you hear a lot of "traditional standards" and not much else.