xhxhxhx:

Today, deterrence through classical music is de rigueur for American transit systems. Transportation hubs from coast to coast play classical music for protective purposes. Brahms bounces through bus stops and baggage claims. Travelers buy Amtrak tickets to Baroque Muzak at Penn Station; Schubert scherzos grace the Greyhound waiting area in New York’s Port Authority Bus Terminal; Handel’s Water Music willows over the platforms of Atlanta’s MARTA subway system. Beyond big cities, the tactic extends to small towns and suburbs across the continent. In Duncan, British Columbia, Pavarotti’s tenor tones patrol the public park dispersing late-night hooligans, while the Lynchburg Library in Virginia clears its parking lot with a playlist highlighted by such scintillating soundtracks as Mozart for Monday Mornings and A Baroque Diet. In the most dramatic account of concerto crime-fighting, the Columbus, Ohio, YMCA reportedly dissolved a sidewalk brawl between two drug dealers simply by flipping on Vivaldi’s Four Seasons.

Baroque music seems to make the most potent repellant. “[D]espite a few assertive, late-Romantic exceptions like Mussorgsky and Rachmaninoff,” notes critic Scott Timberg, “the music used to scatter hoodlums is pre-Romantic, by Baroque or Classical-era composers such as Vivaldi or Mozart.” Public administrators seldom speculate on the underlying reasons why the music is so effective but often tout the results with a certain pugnacious pride. As a Cleveland official explained, “There’s something about Baroque music that macho wannabe-gangster types hate.” The police chief of Tacoma, Washington, echoed the same logic (and the same phrasing): “By playing classical music, we hope to create an unpleasant environment for criminals and gangster-wannabes.” One London subway observer voiced the punitive mindset behind the strategy in bluntest terms: “These juvenile delinquents are saying ‘Well, we can either stand here and listen to what we regard as this absolute rubbish, or our alternative — we can, you know, take our delinquency elsewhere.’”

so if transit systems play classical music to flush out the poor, do shopping malls play pop music to flush out the middle class?

because i hate it

I definitely remember “mall music“ as a distinct kind of elevator music/Musak

Oh man there’s another thing I get to explain to the kids - midcentury American public spaces used to subscribe to services that provided unobtrusive, inoffensive-to-the-point-of-being-offensive background music

I remember it being a collection of original compositions and downtempo instrumental arrangements of recognizable tunes. This maybe had something to do with how playing mainstream/’freelance” not for-hire musicians in public requires paid licensing from ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers) or BMI or SESAC or something

anyway that kind of ended around the same time that TV shows (and to an extent, movies) stopped using original scores and started using popular music, in the mid-’90s

(actually the TV story is pretty interesting, from 21 Jump Street and Miami Vice pioneering it in the ‘80s to the WB teen soaps running post-episode “as heard on” segments in the ‘90s to be a more appealing venue to “break” bands

Well the ‘90s were a time of TV pushing to be an alternate venue to radio to break through, MTV was the progenitor obvs but Little Fluffy Clouds broke through a Volkswagen commercial or something, didn’t it? And a Hooverphonic song.

Actually actually, there’s a lot of interesting stuff there - the ‘90s were when video games (say, Wipeout XL and Gran Turismo) were on CDs with the capacity and started licensing pop music. You know those deals go through your publisher and not your record label and thus present an alternate funding stream?

And around the same time film soundtracks were establishing themselves as an independent profit source - Prince’s “Batdance” didn’t thematically match the 1989 Batman movie at all, but it made the soundtrack a must-buy. Probably the apex there was Baz Luhrmann’s ‘96 Romeo + Juliet, structured around the soundtrack and shot-by-shot lush like a music video)