Eight Feet Deep

A pretty good pro­por­tion of the pop­u­la­tion — mean­ing a lot maybe but I don’t know how many exactly — gets songs stuck in their heads once in awhile.

It can hap­pen when you hear some­one whistling some tune while they toil away at some task or another. You go to your kids’ school plays and the lit­tle ones sing some­thing just dar­ling and later that night while you try to sleep that song is still there. And then, there is back­ground music as in music to shop by.

Now the grand­pappy of back­ground music, known as Muzak, has been around for years. As early as the 1950s — a time when the least lit­tle thing could get peo­ple wound up, a spe­cial con­gres­sional com­mit­tee would be formed — there were charges Muzak was caus­ing brainwashing.

I would imag­ine the sub­ject of manip­u­la­tion through back­ground music would be research gold for a music-loving social psy­chol­o­gist. From what lit­tle sci­en­tific read­ing I have done I don’t know this to be one way or the other a fact. This piece sug­gests that play­ing clas­si­cal music in a wine store made shop­pers buy more expen­sive wine. Whether that would mean that play­ing Sousa marches in a gun store would cause cus­tomers to arm them­selves to the teeth is some­thing to think about, but I don’t know that to have been specif­i­cally stud­ied and affirmed.

Nonethe­less, it seems at the very least back­ground music in gro­cery or depart­ment stores do seem to make songstuckus – my made-up word for a song being stuck in one’s head — more severe.

Since a great deal of my work is done in dif­fer­ent stores, I lis­ten to a lot of back­ground music. I never really thought much about store music until I started vis­it­ing many dif­fer­ent stores. Even when I go to stores now just to shop I am some­what taken aback by the vari­ety of back­ground music in stores.

Go to the store just up the street, with a decid­edly more work­ing class black pop­u­la­tion, and you may hear Soul from the 60s and 70s. Before you know it, you’re walk­ing out of the store with gro­ceries in your arms and Eddie Kendricks and the Temp­ta­tions in your head singing “The Way You Do the Things You Do.”

Some­times the songs you hear will stick with you even though you may not have ever heard them or hadn’t lis­tened to a par­tic­u­lar song in years. Like at a drug store in Port Arthur awhile back while wait­ing to speak with a phar­ma­cist. “Hmm, hmm, hmm.” Wow, what is this? And you remem­ber from way back to “Toulouse Street” on which the Doo­bie Broth­ers qui­etly sing “I might just pass this way again.”

Today it was early Bea­t­les I hear over and over. “If there’s any­thing that you want/If there’s any­thing I can do/Just call on me, and I’ll send it along/With love from me to you.” Such sim­ple, melodic, pop music. You won­der what all the hub­bub was about when the Bea­t­les first appeared on the scene wear­ing iden­ti­cal suits and mop­tops? Nonethe­less, the song got stuck in my head at a store this morn­ing and now I can’t get it out!

I don’t really know why music from the store has such an impact. It is played at level in most cases where it is almost sub­lim­i­nal, which makes some sense. But if it’s meant to affect you, to buy more toi­let paper and six-packs of Busch, then why does the lyrics and music get stuck in your head and not the prod­ucts themselves?

It’s jus another one of life’s great mys­ter­ies, unsolved, with love from me to you.