Lately I’ve been listening to a lot of Muzak albums on YouTube. A lot of what I listen to while I work is part of an ongoing mission to trick myself into productivity, and I guess it’s not surprising to discover that the tin-can soundtrack of one’s local K-Mart in 1982 plays at the ideal frequency for lulling the brain into complacent focus.
One of the more interesting (distracting) things about playing Muzak albums on YouTube is the comment section. A majority of comments are appreciative - as the youths say, this shit does, indeed, slap - but a great many of them take a more nostalgic tone.
Growing up, I knew of Muzak as a cultural poison, “fake music” that my parents complained about being forced to listen to. But people seem to really miss hearing this stuff in their local mall. They share the names of the malls they frequented growing up, the year they would’ve heard the album, and associated rites-of-passage - like first jobs, or buying school supplies. One of the commenters mentioned the name of a mall near the Pennsylvania suburb where my friend Lizzy grew up. I sent her the link. I said,“Look, here’s the mall soundtrack from your childhood!” She said, “Cool.”
Reading these comments feels like the consequence of 50-plus years of consumerism as the dominant mode of cultural expression, emotion, and personal narrative. So thoroughly entrenched is consumer identity in our world that “commodity” and “memory” have become indistinguishable. We’re familiar with the concept of our collective past being mediated and rendered accessible by The Market, but here, our memories aren’t being sold back to us through old Muzak albums. Rather, our memories are old Muzak albums. Intimate, personal memories are quantifiable, digital, and easily accessible on YouTube.
Once, memory was unspecific. Running into your past happened to you by accident. Here’s how it worked: you would go to a mall and catch the light shining in a familiar way. You could smell the chlorinated fountain and hear the quiet, constant din of movement, and you’d find yourself transported back to 1995. You’d hear the Muzak like an itch in the back of your head, if only to register its absence. The imprecision of memory placed it in the realm of the uncanny.
One of the defining conditions of the modern era is the specificity and precision of memory. It’s the ability, afforded by ever-more user-friendly digital content archives, to access increasingly precise concepts, ideas, and symbols. This intersection of technical affordance and sociocultural disposition means that I can type a few keywords into a search bar and hear the exact soundtrack of buying new school shoes in the 1990’s.
Certainly, YouTube was not, exactly, conceived as a resource for old Muzak albums. On some level, they belong to the same order of obscurity and cultural irrelevance that they’ve likely always enjoyed, which is to say that there are more top-40 pop hits on YouTube than there are Muzak albums. These albums owe their presence to a sheer numbers game, to wit: everything else under the sun is already on there, so why not Muzak?
The pandemic has accelerated this process, leading to the sudden and complete transfer of physical existence to digital space. Faced with the utter inability to access entire parts of ourselves, we’ve taken to running into our pasts in the digital world.
Presence, of course, can’t be equated to social weight or power. I didn’t bother checking the numbers, but let’s agree that we, as a culture, are not listening to Muzak albums at the same rate we’re listening to Top 40 pop hits. Luckily, the YouTube algorithm isn’t engineered for social power - it’s tailored to respond to individual interests, and that’s the second cause of this specificity.
If the modern era is shaped by its specificity, then it’s also characterized by a degree of “flatness.” On YouTube, the obscure, specific, and idiosyncratic are given the same visual weight and algorithmic value as the known and the popular. The accessibility of increasingly specific ideas, concepts, and forms of memories raises their level of comparative power and social meaning.
Suddenly, the mall soundtrack playing when you ate your first soft pretzel becomes available, relevant, and present. These commodities-as-memories come to exist in a constant-Now, a nether-world of time that absolves consumer culture of any historicity or past. Our lives are indexed in permanent objects, and they are available 24/7 on YouTube.
Lately I’ve been listening to a lot of Muzak albums on YouTube. A lot of what I listen to while I work is part of an ongoing mission to trick myself into productivity, and I guess it’s not surprising to discover that the tin-can soundtrack of one’s local K-Mart in 1982 plays at the ideal frequency for lulling the brain into complacent focus.
One of the more interesting (distracting) things about playing Muzak albums on YouTube is the comment section. A majority of comments are appreciative - as the youths say, this shit does, indeed, slap - but a great many of them take a more nostalgic tone.
Growing up, I knew of Muzak as a cultural poison, “fake music” that my parents complained about being forced to listen to. But people seem to really miss hearing this stuff in their local mall. They share the names of the malls they frequented growing up, the year they would’ve heard the album, and associated rites-of-passage - like first jobs, or buying school supplies. One of the commenters mentioned the name of a mall near the Pennsylvania suburb where my friend Lizzy grew up. I sent her the link. I said,“Look, here’s the mall soundtrack from your childhood!” She said, “Cool.”
Reading these comments feels like the consequence of 50-plus years of consumerism as the dominant mode of cultural expression, emotion, and personal narrative. So thoroughly entrenched is consumer identity in our world that “commodity” and “memory” have become indistinguishable. We’re familiar with the concept of our collective past being mediated and rendered accessible by The Market, but here, our memories aren’t being sold back to us through old Muzak albums. Rather, our memories are old Muzak albums. Intimate, personal memories are quantifiable, digital, and easily accessible on YouTube.
Once, memory was unspecific. Running into your past happened to you by accident. Here’s how it worked: you would go to a mall and catch the light shining in a familiar way. You could smell the chlorinated fountain and hear the quiet, constant din of movement, and you’d find yourself transported back to 1995. You’d hear the Muzak like an itch in the back of your head, if only to register its absence. The imprecision of memory placed it in the realm of the uncanny.
One of the defining conditions of the modern era is the specificity and precision of memory. It’s the ability, afforded by ever-more user-friendly digital content archives, to access increasingly precise concepts, ideas, and symbols. This intersection of technical affordance and sociocultural disposition means that I can type a few keywords into a search bar and hear the exact soundtrack of buying new school shoes in the 1990’s.
Certainly, YouTube was not, exactly, conceived as a resource for old Muzak albums. On some level, they belong to the same order of obscurity and cultural irrelevance that they’ve likely always enjoyed, which is to say that there are more top-40 pop hits on YouTube than there are Muzak albums. These albums owe their presence to a sheer numbers game, to wit: everything else under the sun is already on there, so why not Muzak?
The pandemic has accelerated this process, leading to the sudden and complete transfer of physical existence to digital space. Faced with the utter inability to access entire parts of ourselves, we’ve taken to running into our pasts in the digital world.
Presence, of course, can’t be equated to social weight or power. I didn’t bother checking the numbers, but let’s agree that we, as a culture, are not listening to Muzak albums at the same rate we’re listening to Top 40 pop hits. Luckily, the YouTube algorithm isn’t engineered for social power - it’s tailored to respond to individual interests, and that’s the second cause of this specificity.
If the modern era is shaped by its specificity, then it’s also characterized by a degree of “flatness.” On YouTube, the obscure, specific, and idiosyncratic are given the same visual weight and algorithmic value as the known and the popular. The accessibility of increasingly specific ideas, concepts, and forms of memories raises their level of comparative power and social meaning.
Suddenly, the mall soundtrack playing when you ate your first soft pretzel becomes available, relevant, and present. These commodities-as-memories come to exist in a constant-Now, a nether-world of time that absolves consumer culture of any historicity or past. Our lives are indexed in permanent objects, and they are available 24/7 on YouTube.