kimberlysteele | Music, Cacomagic, and Consent (Reply)

Gospel singer Bobbi Storm recently went viral when someone captured her verbal tiff with a flight attendant. Bobbi was insistent about serenading the plane’s other passengers with her Grammy-nominated original song. The flight attendant bickered with Bobbi as she tried dodge after dodge, claiming God himself wanted her to keep singing and walking into the cockpit. When she asked the other passengers if she should keep singing, her inquiry was met with awkward silence. After nearly being booted off the plane, she took a seat and suffered the rest of the Delta flight in silence.

The Limited... in More Ways Than One

When I was in my late teens/early twenties in the 1990s, I worked at a now-defunct store called The Limited in the local shopping mall. The Limited was a dead end job to end all dead end jobs: we were expected to harass anyone who came in to buy our cheaply-made yet overpriced clothing for sadly inadequate commissions. The job was so excruciatingly dull, I often jumped at the chance to clean the back rooms because at least it involved some minimal brain activity. The back area was also somewhat of a respite from the horrible canned music that was piped in on loudspeakers throughout the main retail area of the store. The musical choices at the Limited ranged from semi-well known pop hits to obscure, bizarre, acid trip flights of pop fancy and banal spa music with a beat. The tunes they forced on shoppers and store associates alike would not have been all that bad except for the fact they were played too loudly to hear oneself think and they were repeated on a 1.5 hour loop that became extremely grating during eight hour shifts. There is a certain trance that descends upon the retail worker that I came to know very well that was obvious preparation for a life spent as an office drudge. The store managers were always grooming us girls to compete with each other to sell more garbage clothing. We were also encouraged to buy hundreds of dollars worth of the latest Limited styles, especially blazers and matching pants, so we could look like we were paralegals. Considering that pay at the Limited at that time was a laughable $7-$9 per hour, which was low even by 1990s standards, I am not sure where we were supposed to get money for overpriced Chinese-made pantsuits.
 
I was viscerally reminded of my Limited days when I encountered a store associate working the cash register at the local Cost Plus a couple of years ago. She had the same pushiness we were expected to have as Limited drones and wheedled me into accepting texts from Cost Plus on my mobile phone, which I of course cancelled in about a week. The same sort of bland, innocuous music rang through the aisles of Cost Plus, and I could tell that she had often spent her entire paycheck on the crappy merchandise. Her general air was one of abject misery, hatred, grumpiness, greed, jealousy, and sorrow. This is what happens when you trap a human being indoors in a fake happy, posh environment for the majority of her waking hours and pummel her with garbage songs and an agenda to sell more product, even if you have to resort to pushing it on those who cannot afford it.

Meretricious Music

I was born in the 70s and perhaps because of this, I naively thought the music world was a meritocracy. John Denver was huge in my era. Carole King had been writing songs both for herself and others. There was no autotune and except for Nancy Sinatra with her miniskirts and Robert Plant with his package, most singers were fairly modest in their attire. By the 1980s, even I realized that it was the attention getters were doing far better than the virtuosos. Of course there was plenty of great songwriting in the 1980s and afterward, but songwriting decidedly started taking a backseat to theatrical antics and the shock prostitution of megastars around 1983 or so.
 
Christmas music started creeping into our lives earlier and earlier. In my young childhood, the day after Thanksgiving marked the holiday season with Christmas tunes on the radio and Christmas themed commercials on TV. Nowadays, Christmas starts sometime in early August and Christmas displays appear at the large chain hardware stores sometime in July. Most retailers have a burgeoning understanding that Christmas music drives shoppers out of stores, and because of this, I have noticed the volume has been turned down at the local shopping mall. Nevertheless, there are still some stores, such as a local grocery chain that advertises free on-site vaccinations, that pump in loud Christmas music well before Thanksgiving. I guess they have not yet gotten the memo that people find Mariah Carey’s All I Want For Christmas is You played every two hours along with Paul McCartney’s horror Wonderful Christmastime extremely annoying and off-putting.
 
The only cure I have found for annoying music is to counter it with better music. I am not saying my own Orphic hymns or any other of my songs are better than Wonderful Christmastime, however, when I am suffering from the latest in popular music earworms at 3:30am when I have woken up to use the washroom, I will replay my own Orphic hymn arrangement in my own head in order to fight it. Studying music is great for displacing earworms, but listening to the music of J.S. Bach also seems to do the trick. Another strategy could be listening to your own favorite music, whether that is a popular song or something else entirely. Perhaps if the Cost Plus lady was allowed some headphones with her own favorite music playing in her ears for her long stints at the register and “facing” merch, she might begin the long fight in wrestling her brain away from the state of zombie cacomagic intimately known to most retail associates.
 
Bah Humbug and be blessed.