Loose cannon Robert Kirby
Background music, Muzak, piped music, whatever might you call it, has become one of the most toxic of urban excreta. It doesn’t matter where you go, you can never escape it. In restaurant and supermarket, in the street, on the telephone, at the filling station, even in your barber’s chair you are under merciless barrage.
Orwell would be delighted to see this unforeseen mutation in his predictions of brutal social mechanisms dedicated to the annihilation of human individuality. If ever there was a Big Brother you may never elude, piped music is him – blaring out of the walls, under your feet, over your head. He’s like the foetid poisons of the city air which no one notices any more but which bucolic nostrils find so offensive.
So with the music which, like the hydrocarbons, few city-dwellers notice any more. Some buried censor in the brain does its best to mitigate the corruption, to shut it out from the conscious mind. Like persistent traffic noise, piped music does its wounding in tiny increments.
Why do they play it? Ostensibly it’s in order to calm people down, condition them in unrevealed ways. The idea behind background music was defined in the early 1900s by the occasionally Dadaist composer, Erik Satie. He called it “furniture music”, something to fill time and silence, a musical equivalent of sofas, chairs and curtains. Like these, furniture music was meant to supplant soundless spells with assiduously bland, largely unnoticeable aural wallpaper. The satiric implication was that this would calm people who were frightened of silence because it forced them to think.
Faithful to the absurdist conventions of the Dadaists, Satie composed his first example of what furniture music should be, making it the most noticeable music he could manage. It was a long and what someone at the time called an “exceedingly jagged symphonium” played by some grotesque combination of two or three bagpipes, a hurdy-gurdy, a couple of trombones, a factory siren and a blacksmith’s anvil, all at triple-forte. It was performed at an exhibition of Dadaist paintings held in a public urinal.
No one, of course, paid any attention to the paintings. Instead the crowd clustered around the bandstand listening in astonishment to the lunatic ensemble while Satie ran around shouting at them that they were not supposed to notice it.
Since then background music has taken over. It’s as though some terrible pestilence has befallen us. Biblical Egyptians had flies and boils, we have small cloth boxes with Yammamota written on them, which play synthesised Mozart tunes among all the theme-artifacts of early Johannesburg, the faded photographs and genuine old pickaxe and miner’s lamp still covered with original stope-dust at “Number Two Shaft” (Clsd Mndys).
There’s no escape either, even unto the lakes and hills. A fly-fishing friend of mine was on the exquisite Maden Dam – near King William’s Town. A windless, a perfect autumn afternoon on this sequestered reach of trouty water, touched only by fragile birdsong, filled with reflected light, but infested harshly by a fellow-angler with a tiny cassette-tape player strung around his neck, screeching out some Madonna bimbo lullaby. My friend said that if the fellow had come over and pissed on his head it would have been preferable.
Why are we, as a nation, so tolerant of the stuff? I think that Erik Satie’s idea harboured a sombre apprehension of the twentieth century’s impending proletarian triumphs, the obliterative modes of commercial socialism, of Murdoch-style dumbing-down; the dull anthems of militant Philistines. As if in readiness, Satie even wrote a brief atonal piano chorale, Vexations, which the performer was instructed to play 840 times without stopping.
If people must have this continual acoustic Ritalin, why can’t they have it surgically implanted so that no one else has to endure it? There was a woman in the mid-60s who complained to the SABC that, ever since they started FM transmissions, she could hear non-stop Springbok Radio programmes in her head, received via the amalgam fillings in her teeth. Surely modern technology can fit out the Muzak-desperate with three or four channels. The newest kugel craze: surround-sound dental crowns?
Or perhaps we humans have become so stupid as a breed that we can no longer function without our monkey’s rhapsody; that the English language has become so ineffectual that headlines on the television have to be reinforced with electronic drum-riffs? That we can’t hold a conversation without piped cretin-song to help us get through unblessed quietness.