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Attention K-Mart Shoppers: Piped Music Collection on the Internet Archive

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Re: Attention K-Mart Shoppers: Piped Music Collection on the Internet Archive

#11

Post by shervinafshar »

polka_haunts_us wrote: post #8
shervinafshar wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Devo was a bunch of brilliant, genre-defying creatives. In my point of view they have been as influential as Kraftwerk, but don't get as much love and respect.

Re: Attention K-Mart Shoppers: Piped Music Collection on the Internet Archive

#13

Post by jjulius »

shervinafshar wrote: post #5
mikestew wrote: post #2

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: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muzak That page is worth a read, if only for the means of distribution used over the ye…

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.

>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. :)

[0]https://audioweb.sitehost.iu.edu/T369/eno-ambient.pdf

Re: Attention K-Mart Shoppers: Piped Music Collection on the Internet Archive

#14

Post by rektide »

mikestew wrote: post #2

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: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muzak That page is worth a read, if only for the means of distribution used over the ye…

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!)

Re: Attention K-Mart Shoppers: Piped Music Collection on the Internet Archive

#15

Post by shervinafshar »

jjulius wrote: post #13
shervinafshar wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>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 myse…

Touché. Eno could be elevator music then.

Re: Attention K-Mart Shoppers: Piped Music Collection on the Internet Archive

#16

Post by rootsudo »

carabiner wrote: post #10
seph-reed wrote: post #3

Just a story: My friends and I built a beer-loan agency for a burning-man event. We had people fill out forms to get a beer loan, told them their credit was too low, sent them on a quest, then gave them a beer on return. This music is what we used for our fully fabricated waiting-room office. At one point a guy with a legal degree from Yale came to question our paper-work, and proceeded to litigate from the bar down…

Jesus. White collar types have ruined BM. That sounds insufferable.

More like innovated fun in the desert!

Re: Attention K-Mart Shoppers: Piped Music Collection on the Internet Archive

#19

Post by SubiculumCode »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #6

Not just Muzak - Music! I like the Kmart August 1992 Generic, and listening to that now as I code!

Kmart Week Of 02.02.1992. I'm surprised at how much I like it, and how much I hated this back then. ha im old now.
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