May 3, 2025 • 51 mins
Muzak got a bad reputation as bland garbage music. In this classic episode, we aim to set the record straight.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, there, everybody, it's me Josh, and for this week's
SYSK Selects, I've chosen our twenty twenty one episode on Musak.
And you might ask, who could possibly like the noisome,
omnipresent annoyance that was Musak? Well me, I like Muzak.
So there. But if you're not over forty, you might
not even know that there was a time you couldn't
(00:21):
step out in public from department stores. Those are in
something we call malls to elevators without smalltzy string arrangements
of pop music pummeling you with their saccharine sound, and
you know what, you're the worst offtware not having experienced it. Instead,
you can experience this episode, and I hope you enjoy it.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:55):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and
there's Charles w You, Chuck Bryan over there, and there's Dave.
See Coustin. I said it right this time.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
I thought it was Coustain.
Speaker 1 (01:10):
No, if you're in France, that's how you would say it.
But here in the United States, you say Coustin.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
Can I start this off by saying something, Oh.
Speaker 1 (01:21):
Boy, I'm worried about what you're going to say about.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
Okay, well, this episode is on muzak, and I started
thinking last night. I was thinking about your love of musak,
which is not at all ironic.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
Not in the least, but you can't say that kind
of thing these days. People don't believe you.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
I know it's true everyone. I know Josh very well,
and I was thinking of your and I like all
kinds of music too, but you know, at my heart,
I'm a rock and roll guy. Sure, And I was
thinking about your top musical genres that are above rock
and roll, and you're picking order, not in order. I
counted easy listening, musak, disco, art rock, crowd rock, and
(02:03):
I probably missed a couple.
Speaker 1 (02:05):
Crowd rock is below rock and roll. I want to
like crowdrock, it just doesn't quite jibe with me. I
like some, but not all of it.
Speaker 2 (02:11):
And then stuff I think art rock because it's just
sort of that avant garde, like I don't you don't
love Yoko, but you certainly are a bit of a
Yoko apologist. Sure, Grace Jones stuff like that, But I.
Speaker 1 (02:23):
Love Grace Jones for sure. What about talking heads? They
go in there too, right, they'd probably be. I mean
they literally went to art school together.
Speaker 2 (02:31):
Yeah, I mean they kind of span from art rock
to new wave to like world music by the time
they finished.
Speaker 1 (02:37):
Yeah, yeah, I know, but uh yeah.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
I mean, I certainly love the Talking Heads, but all
of those, for you are above good old fashioned rock
and roll.
Speaker 1 (02:46):
I think, Yeah, you also left out nineties tech noo.
I've been listening to a lot of that accutely too,
like Alternate and the Prodigy and everything.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
But you love music, you really do.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
I do too.
Speaker 2 (02:58):
Actually, I don't know, so I don't know how much
I like. I will listen to some of that stuff
and we'll talking about we'll talk about emo in here,
of course, old sourpust Brian Eno, but I love listening
to his ambient stuff, which he sort of wrote as
an antidote to music. Again. We'll talk about that more later.
(03:20):
But I do like in certain circumstances that music thing
is really great to have on in my house as
background music, and it's sorts that same purpose.
Speaker 1 (03:32):
One of the big reasons why too, is because you
can get stuff done with it. Like lyrics can be
so distracting, they just latch onto your brain and say no, no,
pay attention to me. I'm I'm talking to you now.
Music does the opposite of that. It says, go be free,
but also enjoy this, Like there's there's like a whole
part of your brain that music can tap into that
(03:55):
doesn't require your conscious thought, but it still produces like
good feeling. And you know, like Peo, people just smack
music around like it's just it's so bland and it's
so soulless, and I totally disagree with that. Like if
you actually stop and listen to music, it's really really
technically proficient. It's frequently well done. It's often very clever
(04:19):
and creative and inventive, which is really saying something. Because
you're doing this when they in the confines of covering
an existing song in a way that makes it familiar
and easy to recognize but also takes away any intrusiveness
that it might have. It's tough to do. And I really,
I just I love music. You're absolutely right, Like I
(04:39):
listened to music this whole time. Yeah, not just when
we were when we were researching music today, but also
when I was researching the Havana syndrome, and I realized,
like this is my normal thing. This is the same
stuff I listen to when I'm researching anyway.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
Yeah, and we can go ahead and dispell a couple
of or not myths, but clear up a couple of
things right off the bat. First of all, Musak is
a name brand, and people can kind of collectively use
the term music or have collectively use that term for
what's called like potted plant music or elevator music or
shopping music. But it is actual actually a brand name,
(05:17):
which we'll get to the history of. And then the
second thing is it gets the name elevator music. Part
of the myth is that people said, well, they put
it on elevators because people were afraid to death of
elevators early on, and it calmed people down, or it
covered up the noise of the clanking elevators.
Speaker 1 (05:35):
I'd never heard that before. You.
Speaker 2 (05:37):
Yeah, neither one of those things are true. Total myth.
My guess is that it was played on elevators, and
because you're in such a closed little box that's usually quiet,
it just was way more noticeable than like in a
big office full of people working. So people call the
elevator music.
Speaker 1 (05:56):
That's my guess, right, Yeah, I mean, yeah, there wasn't
music gone elevators before? Before several decades in the twentieth century, Like,
there weren't many elevators you could get on because people
didn't have elevators in their house. It was a public
building you were in where they weren't playing music of
some form very frequently music.
Speaker 2 (06:17):
That Great Blues Brothers scene, Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (06:22):
Because they're they're going up to what the Cook County
Assessor's office and the like. There there's the entire Chicago
Police Department is after them, but they're forced to get
on this elevator and the girl from Ipanema is playing.
Speaker 2 (06:37):
I think my favorite part of that scene is there's
just dozens and hundreds of cops and swat guys just
you know, hut when they're repelling and doing all this stuff.
And then there's the one shot of the lone guy
repelling down the side of the building and he's by
himself just going hut.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (06:57):
That's a good one, so funny.
Speaker 1 (06:59):
There's another scene from around the era a few years
later from Airplane two where it's like ripped Torn. I
believe it's Ripped Torn. The party from the Larry Sanders Show. Yeah, yeah,
and I don't know the other guy he's talking to.
But anyway, they're walking and talking and they have to
get on an elevator and the elevator door opens and
(07:20):
it's just blaring, like ear drum shattering decibel MacArthur Park
and they have to get on. People are coming off
the elevator like with their hands and their ears like
with splitting headaches from this. But it's just completely the
opposite way elevator music's supposed to be like. But it's
a good little scene too, as far as elevator music
(07:40):
goes well.
Speaker 2 (07:41):
I mean that's kind of one of the points too,
is Musak has long been a movie trope and a
TV trope and then been lampooned and scenes just like
the Blues brother scene where there's something chaotic going on
and then you cut back to the sound of Musaic
playing wherever the other scene is setting. Right, Yeah, very
very fun stuff.
Speaker 1 (07:59):
But that's started, a guess it started with The Blues Brothers,
which came out in nineteen eighty, But before that that
was like Musak was not really lampoon I mean, not
everybody liked it. It really kind of started to get
a little backlash in the late sixties early seventies, as
we'll see, but there was a very significant chunk of
the twentieth century again from maybe nineteen fifty to nineteen eighty.
(08:23):
We'll say where everywhere you went in public, including if
you took a Greyhound bus, or if you were on
a plane, or you happened to be an Air Force one,
or you were at the mall, in an elevator at
your office, everywhere muzak was playing. There was musach playing everywhere.
It was just a part of life that you was inescapable.
Speaker 2 (08:47):
Actually. Yeah, so let's go back in time and talk
about the inventor of muzak. And this is sort of
a fun fact of muzak. The man's name is George Square.
It is spelled Squire, but he swears it's pronounced square.
Speaker 1 (09:04):
I'm really impressed, man, I had not come up with.
Speaker 2 (09:06):
That one or he swore it was pronounced square. Yeah,
this is kind of one of the funny jokes, like
the guy who invented mus x was Square. But Major
General George Square was born in eighteen sixty five, if
you believe that, And he is just a laundry list
of accomplishments as a human being. He was he earned
(09:26):
a doctorate from Johns Hopkins in electrical science. He was
an Army engineer with a PhD. I think the first one. Yeah,
and he was I believe the lead Signal Corps officer
for the Army as well.
Speaker 1 (09:40):
He was. He also was inducted into the National Academy
of Sciences, which connects this episode to the other one today.
That's right, because he came up with something called a
tree telephone. He figured out how to use any tree,
but preferably one with fully leaved I guess, I don't
know what you'd call that as a as a receiver
(10:02):
and transmitter for radio signals. He figured out how to
use a tree, a living tree for that.
Speaker 2 (10:07):
He was. Here's another fun fact. He was one of
the first airplane passengers ever because he was way into
human flight and got together with the Wright brothers and
a nineteen oh six, consulted with them, and they said, hey,
why don't you take a ride in our new little biplane.
You'll probably live right.
Speaker 1 (10:28):
I looked at our I looked at the document for
our Wright Brothers episode, and he did not appear. I
don't think we mentioned him, but he might. He might
have been the first airline passenger from what I saw.
Speaker 2 (10:40):
Yeah, where he really made a big name for himself
pre Musaic was this invention, which is what we call multiplexing,
which is he figured out or maybe wire wireless communications,
which is something he worked on with the Army. He
basically figured out how to get multiple uses out of
(11:01):
single telephone lines. Telephone wires were you know, there are
only so many, so you were really limited as to
what you could do with them and how many people
could use them. So he basically figured out a way
to increase their output and efficiency by multiplexing and by
sending super imposing high frequency radio signals over those low
(11:22):
frequency telegraph signals, basically just allowing you to use the
wire at the same time, the same wire.
Speaker 1 (11:28):
Yeah, yeah, I mean it's like, if you think of
like a wave, if it's low frequency, there's big, wide
gaps in between. You can fit a higher frequency that's
tighter and squished together in those gaps, and but you're
still using the same line. And you know, this was
the guy who came up with that. That's an enormous
advancement in telecommunications that were still put in use today
(11:50):
in some applications, but definitely helped like the early Internet along.
It was just a huge contribution to humanity, like forget
even just music, like just that alone would would probably
warrant like an episode for George Square.
Speaker 2 (12:07):
Yeah, and I think he was like, everyone should be
able to use this, So I'm going to open source
it and everyone can use this new multiplexing technology. AT
and T came along and said, we'll use it, and
then you know what, you've stole it from us.
Speaker 1 (12:20):
Actually right, he came up with it, but since he
left it open, they decided to just take it from
him and sue him for it.
Speaker 2 (12:28):
I think he sued them, but it didn't work.
Speaker 1 (12:30):
That's right, you're right, so he but he still was
able to use this wire wireless technology with multiplexing. And
at the time people were starting to get into radio broadcasts.
But radio wireless radio like that you would just have
in your house. It's picking up radio waves at a
station that was not widespread at the time. So George
(12:53):
Square said, you know what, I understand people want music
in their house. I'm going to give it to them.
I'm going to use that multiplexing technology and I'm going
to run sound waves over the electrical wires that go
into the house, and I'm going to sell this it
is brilliant. I'm going to sell this service to people's
homes for a dollar fifty a month, about twenty dollars today,
(13:15):
and it's just part of your utility bill because it's
coming in through your electrical company. And there's actually a
section of Cleveland called the Lakewood I believe Lakewood area
that was the pilot for this wired wireless radio that
George Square invented. The problem was is, by the time
(13:36):
they deployed it, wireless radio was already a thing, and
so we had this really great idea that just no
longer had an application.
Speaker 2 (13:46):
Yeah, he was. He basically invented the first music subscription
service exactly.
Speaker 1 (13:51):
Yeah. And he had multiple channels too, Like when you subscribed,
you got news, you got dance music. There was like
I think three different channels you could choose.
Speaker 2 (14:01):
From Howard Stern.
Speaker 1 (14:03):
Yep, Howard Stern was on back.
Speaker 2 (14:05):
Then Baba Boobie. So he had that technology though, and
he said, you know what, this is a good idea,
though maybe I can think of how to use this
in offices and stores. And in nineteen thirty four he
looked up at Kodak, very successful corporation and said, I
love that name, and I love music. Let's just call
(14:26):
it music and history changed and maybe we should take
a break.
Speaker 1 (14:31):
Okay, let's do it all right, We'll be right back. So,
(15:02):
in the parlance of today, Chuck George Square and his
Musak Corporation pivoted from home consumer markets to business markets.
And that just knocked it out of the park because
it turned out that there were a lot of companies, hotels, restaurants, clubs.
(15:23):
I think the Stork Club was an early customer that said,
you know what, it's really going to make our place
seem fancy if we've got music piping in all the time.
So yes, we would like to sign up for your service.
And that's really where music kind of started to take off.
Speaker 2 (15:40):
Yeah, so Musak, I mean we haven't even said what
it is, surely people know, but muzak are instrumental tracks.
And you did mention that there were no vocals, so
we kind of hinted the big one. Yeah, but there
are instrumental tracks that are cover songs of kind of
anything you can think of. I mean that have hearts,
(16:01):
some music of some heavy rock. It can be classical music,
it can be old standards. But the point is they
are instrumental versions that are re recorded. They don't just
take the vocals out. It's not carry oukay style, right,
It is re record arranged and recorded by professional, really
good musicians orchestras. Sometimes, Yeah, and it is, that's what
(16:25):
it is, and it's great the end.
Speaker 1 (16:27):
And very very frequently it's it's made into a much
more mellow version of itself, Like any rough edges are
taken off. Since they take the vocals out, it's not
like there's no there that vocal melody is non existing
any longer. They just replace it with something else. So
if they're trying to go for something like a little
more upbeat or up tempo, they'll replace the vocals with,
(16:51):
say like a saxophone. If they're trying to do something
a little more mellow, they'll replace the vocals with a
string section.
Speaker 2 (16:57):
Or harp perhaps.
Speaker 1 (16:59):
Yeah. That's one of the things that that musaic is
very famous for, is like what's called masses of strings,
just strings upon strings. In fact, one of the early
I guess big name groups that produced musak was called
one hundred and one Strings. They probably were absolutely accurate
in that, like there's just a lot tons of strings everywhere, violins,
(17:24):
cello's violas, every string instrument you can throw at it.
They just layer upon layer in these songs. It's one
of the hallmarks of musak.
Speaker 2 (17:33):
Yeah, and there are many versions of Antonio Carlos Shobiam's
Go from Epanima, but the music version is one of
the most popular, and that one hundred and one strings
version is the most ubiquitous from that lot. I do
encourage people to go watch the YouTube though, of Frank
Sinatra and Joe Beim singing that song live on TV,
(17:56):
because it's great and every way they're just sitting next
to each other, and the shot isn't wide at first,
and they're just sort of singing back and forth to
each other and Frank Stone is saying, then it cuts
to the wide and Frank is like totally kicked back
with his legs crossed with a cigarette in his hand,
exactly like you would hope. But he looks like, I mean,
it looks like he just not rolled out of bed
(18:17):
because he's put together, but he looks like he rolled
from his wicker bag to his wicker chair right for
this performance.
Speaker 1 (18:24):
Can I get some cocaine in here? Baby?
Speaker 2 (18:27):
So it's Joe Piscopos, Frank Sinatra.
Speaker 1 (18:30):
Do you ever listen to Joe beam stuff?
Speaker 2 (18:33):
Oh yeah, dude, I love that old lounge stuff. It's
really great Brazilian stuff.
Speaker 1 (18:37):
Yeah. His record Stone Flower is just a masterpiece from
beginning to end.
Speaker 2 (18:42):
Yeah. But that's a good party music.
Speaker 1 (18:44):
Yeah. That's another thing though too. It's like it's so
mellow that to take that kind of music and then
make it into musak is like it's almost like it
takes a certain amount of audacity, Like I was listening
to I found so there's want to I want to
point people the two different music records that are on YouTube.
(19:08):
One is called More Than Music, Period and Environment. It's
a nineteen eighty one musak record and it has a
version of Sailing Christopher Crosses Sailing.
Speaker 2 (19:18):
One of the most area music sleep.
Speaker 1 (19:21):
Yeah exactly. They figured out how to basically make you
lose control of your bladder listening to this exactly. Yeah,
that's a good one. And then the other one is
called the Blue Album, uh, and it is from nineteen
seventy four, I believe, And it's just both of them
(19:41):
are really great. That's good good introductions to musaic if
you're not into it already, all right.
Speaker 2 (19:47):
So music is trucking along in the thirties. They get
to the forties and they think, you know what, we
need a better way to sell this stuff and to
pitch this to businesses and corporations. So why don't we
hire some people to research music and to figure out
what kinds of music keep people happy and working? And
(20:10):
because people, you know, they work hard in the morning,
and then they sort of lag a bit before lunch,
and then they really lag sort of a couple of
hours after lunch. So why don't we do this? So
why don't we study it? Let's call it stimulus progression.
It's a bit pseudoscience. It makes sense it is in
that it's not been proven. It makes sense to everyone
(20:32):
who I feel like knows about it, Like sure, music
can pick you up and make you work harder, But
it's pseudoscience in that it's I don't think it's ever
been scientifically proven.
Speaker 1 (20:43):
I gotcha, okay, yeah, because I keep seeing it just
like dismissed as pseudoscience. But then there were plenty of
early studies that were done by legitimate industrial psychologists and
other like efficiency experts, that kind of thing that showed
that there really was a significant like improvement and productivity
or less sick days, that kind of stuff in places
(21:05):
that have musaic compared to places that didn't have music
pumped into the office.
Speaker 2 (21:10):
Yeah, I think maybe they're specific claims about a work day. Okay,
might have been a little I mean everywhere I read
said it was basically not a marketing scam, but a
marketing tool that they kind of invented.
Speaker 1 (21:24):
I gotcha. But so one thing to say about this
we're going to talk about it in a second stimulus progression,
is that they did kind of plow money that they
were making. We're making a lot of money starting in
the late forties early fifties, they plowed it back into
research to basically come up with scientific evidence to back
(21:45):
up their claims, which you can really kind of see
the ghost of George Square still looming over the company,
you know, this decade or so after he died. That
it's always been this kind of science interested, if not
science based company that's also been an early adopter of technology,
(22:07):
as we'll see.
Speaker 2 (22:08):
Yeah, I mean that is certainly fair. It was never
just like, hey, we're just going to play a bunch
of what people might consider droll background music, like they
really did. I think I don't think it was a scam.
I think they really did try to study working environments.
And what they did with his stimulus progression was they
divided the work day into fifteen minute increments and basically
(22:32):
set a DJ playlist every fifteen minutes, and they assigned
a stimulus value from one to six, one being really
really mellow, six being you know, super up. And they
basically went through and almost like a Pandora sort of
curated playlist type of thing to get people to work
(22:52):
hard and efficiently throughout a day, and companies bought in,
including the US Army.
Speaker 1 (22:59):
Yeah, I think we're World War two is basically cited
as the moment when music kind of proved itself enough
at least to start being adopted by very large companies.
And then within a few years after the war, by
like the very early fifties, they started to spread more
and more to even smaller and smaller companies. And it
was this idea that if you played music and music's
(23:21):
you know, patented stimulus progression model, you know you're going
to avoid that mid morning slump that like every worker
goes through, you know, in productivity, and then the mid
afternoon slump. You could avoid that too, and think about
how many more widgets you could make if your employees don't,
you know, slack off productivity wise at ten, from ten
(23:44):
thirty to lunch, and then from like two thirty until
they go home. Like imagine if this this very pleasant
music is just kind of keeping them humming along what
people call a forward it's just an unconscious sense of
forward momentum. The tempo in your environment is moving subtly
(24:04):
faster and faster, and so to keep people from going insane,
part of the stimulus progression was that the songs in
a fifteen minute increment would kind of go up in tempo,
and then you'd have a fifteen minute break of silence,
and then the music would come back on again. But
then this fifteen minutes their first song, the tempo of
(24:26):
their first song would probably start a little faster than
the tempo of the first song of the last fifteen minutes,
And so all of a sudden, next thing, you know,
you're making whidge. It's like a maniac because you're being
manipulated by this stimulus progression model. At least again, according
to muzak I, get what you're saying. Like, it's not like,
(24:46):
you know, Harvard came along and said, yes, we've studied
this thoroughly, and this is exactly what happens. This is
you know, company claims, but it is intuitively sensible at least.
Speaker 2 (24:57):
Well. Yeah, I mean you need only to host house
party and play music yourself to determine how music can
affect the mood of a group of people. Put on
groove is in the heart, and you know what's gonna happen.
Speaker 1 (25:12):
Yeah, everybody's gonna shake their groove thing.
Speaker 2 (25:14):
Everyone's gonna shape their group thing, shake their group thing.
If you put in old sour pus. Brian ENO's music
for Airports not a good party thing.
Speaker 1 (25:25):
No it's not. And since you brought him up for
the second time, I say we discuss Brian you know
momentarily sure.
Speaker 2 (25:33):
I mean I love that record, and I love a
lot of his stuff, including his ambient music experimental records.
I think it's really really good stuff to have on
if it's a nice gray day outside and you're getting
work done. I really enjoyed his background music, but it's
definitely not up in any way.
Speaker 1 (25:54):
You know, what I found is a really good one
for what you just described. You ever listen to Future
Sound of lund No. They have an album, like a
double album called life Forms, and it's it's about as
amazing as ambient gets. So you should check that one out.
Speaker 2 (26:10):
Embly, Emily got me into ambient I call her Embly
when she's listening to that stuff. She really got me.
She called it ambient groove. She really got me into
that stuff. Over the years. Is that like like zero
seven and you know, stuff that's she calls it ambient groovy,
just sort of sort of mellow and groovy and like
(26:31):
zero seven and more Chiba. And it was a certain
era I think where that stuff peaked Massive Attack a
little bit. Oh yeah, it's good stuff.
Speaker 1 (26:39):
Yeah, I think you'd like life Forms then the Future
Sign of London stuff is normally at a little more
you know, it's super cerebral and intelligent, but it's also
fairly dancy. Life Forms is way it's probably their most
ambient stuff around.
Speaker 2 (26:52):
So Ino though, let's get back to him. He kind
of came up with this as an as an antidote
to music, right.
Speaker 1 (26:59):
Yes, if you like ambient music, you better thank your
lucky stars for muzak because we're not for muzak. You
might not have ambient music, at least not now. Maybe
it would becoming fifty years from now, who knows.
Speaker 2 (27:11):
Yeah, he said, I loved that. In this article, it says,
as reported by Red Bull Music, Eno said this, and
this was I think for the liner notes actually to
airport or music for airports. Whereas can music's intention is
to brighten the environment by adding stimulus to it, ambient
music is intended to induce calm and space into space
to think, ambient music must be able to accommodate many
(27:35):
levels of listening attention without enforcing one. In particular, it
must be as ignorable as it is interesting.
Speaker 1 (27:42):
So he hits on something though, that people would come
to really resent about musak is not even just necessarily
the syrupiness of the music itself, but the intent behind
the music. That it was always intended to basic manipulate
your mood into making you a better worker, a more
(28:04):
docile consumer. That it was poking at your brain to
again to get you to do things that you may
or may not want to do. Maybe you will be
less likely to punch some guy on the bus because
there's musac playing, which is a good thing. We should
not be punching other people on the bus. But the
point is that you're being mind controlled in a certain way.
(28:27):
And eventually people got kind of resentful of that.
Speaker 2 (28:31):
Yeah, no, that's true.
Speaker 1 (28:33):
We're not there yet, though. We're not there yet. Though.
There was actually a point in time, though, Chuck, where
musak and popular music were basically one and the same.
Speaker 2 (28:43):
Yeah, that was sort of I mean, one of the
heydays of musac certainly was in that. When you know,
when Glen the Glenn Miller Orchestra was pop music on
the radio. Music wasn't a far stretch from some of
that stuff, so it was sort of all one and
the same. I think it was as that as styles
changed and the sixties and seventies start rolling along, that
(29:07):
musaic became really sort of a bad word to a
lot of people, right.
Speaker 1 (29:11):
And one of the reasons I saw that really explained
it to me, because you know, things change. The society
just changed between the nineteen fifties and the nineteen sixties.
It just abruptly changed. But that doesn't fully explain why
musaic just was suddenly looked down upon. A good explanation
(29:31):
I saw is that lyrics became really really important in
the late sixties. People had something to say, and music
does not include lyrics. It completely undermines the point of
music if you put lyrics in, or don't you know,
don't rearrange the lyrics with strings. So music kind of
(29:52):
couldn't couldn't keep up with that. It's not like it
went away, it doubled down. It kept doing what it
was doing. And in fact, it would take some of
those pop hits that had really monumentally important lyrics and
just take the lyrics out and replace it with a
saxophone or something like that.
Speaker 2 (30:07):
Yeah, they didn't think do that. I think it's interesting.
They could have had a really mellow singer at a
certain point come in and they I really respect the
fact that they were like, Nope, the singer is a
violin and I don't want to hear it anymore. Right.
Speaker 1 (30:20):
But a lot of these songwriters, in particular, like I
think Joan Baez, Bruce Springsteen, Boz Skaggs, all of them
refused to let their music be covered by MUSAK or
any of its competitors. But Paul Simon I saw, said
he always knew he had a hit when he heard
(30:41):
a musaic version of it like at the mall or
something like that, which it's kind of like weird Al
covering Nirvana, Like Cobain said that he knew that Nirvana
had made it when weird Al covered smells like teen Spirit.
I think it's basically the same thing. Oh.
Speaker 2 (30:57):
I think most musicians, unless you're a Ted Nugent who
uh And we'll get to that. But very famously sort
of offered to buy music when they fill upon hard
times so he could basically burn it to the ground.
I think most musicians deep down think it's kind of
an honor when one of their songs is musicified.
Speaker 1 (31:16):
It's got yeah, you'd have to play right. I just
want to find out what somebody's going to do with it, because,
like I was saying at the beginning, like it really
takes some creativity to come up with, Okay, what can
I replace this with that's not just completely predictable or boring,
but also isn't going to grab everybody's attention, because that's
again not the point of music. It's it's one of
(31:37):
the the I don't know if it was a slogan
of the Musaic Corporation or not, but they basically said
that they fill in the awkward pauses in life m
to where it's, yeah, you don't like It's like you
were saying at the party, if you're at a party
that doesn't have any music on, you just probably just
get smashed out of your skull because you're just trying
(31:59):
to lose kate the social situation so much. Whereas if
you put on music, it's like it takes a lot
of that edge off. That was one of the points
too with Musak, and then also to kind of get
you to linger a little longer when you were shopping
in a store that was part of it as well.
Speaker 2 (32:16):
Yeah, I mean music. We almost always have music on
in our house unless you know, it's night and we're watching,
you know, a movie or watching something on TV. But
it almost all waking hours we have music playing in
our home, and it just feels weird and quiet and
not full of life when it's when there's no music happening, Right,
(32:38):
It's strange. It can be strange for sure. Should we
take a break?
Speaker 1 (32:43):
Yeah, we're we have reached basically the early seventies when
it is Musak's first crisis point, and we'll come back
to that after this.
Speaker 2 (33:20):
All right, So I'm born in nineteen seventy one, and
muzak starts to die a little bit because a real
rock and roller came into the world.
Speaker 1 (33:32):
That's right, born with a gene jacket with the Van
Halen logo on marker in the back.
Speaker 2 (33:39):
It did not go away completely though, it was just
sort of, I guess, the beginning of the end. But
that didn't mean there wasn't still a business model for
musak because music was never about its popularity.
Speaker 1 (33:52):
No, but there was a time where it was popular.
Like JFK had it on Air Force one, Eisenhower had
it piped into the White House, it was playing on
board Apollo eleven. Yeah, like it was like it was everywhere.
Like it's really hard to get across how ubiquitous it was.
But I found a quote from a guy named Professor
(34:13):
Gary Gumpert of Queens College in New York.
Speaker 2 (34:16):
Nice.
Speaker 1 (34:17):
He said that that at the time, music was just
kind of amniotic fluid that surrounds us. It never startles us.
It is never too loud, it's never too silent. It's
always there. And that was what it was like. You
were just kind of moving from one placid bucolic field
to the next, going from mall to mall, store to store,
(34:37):
elevator to elevator, bus ride to bus ride. It was
just absolutely everywhere. So compared to that, the idea that
it's absolutely everywhere unquestioned. Yeah. It really kind of started
to take a bit of a downturn in the seventies,
but it just didn't go anywhere yet. It took decades
for it to really take a hit. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (34:55):
I mean even in the eighties, that was syndicated in
nineteen countries. There were eighty million people listening, whether or
not they wanted to or not, listening to music every day. Yeah,
And the company ended up being bought and sold a
couple of times over the years. I think in eighty
one or in seventy two, a company called Teleprompter owned it, Yeah,
and eighty one Westinghouse bought it. And I don't know
(35:19):
if I believe this. The story goes that Westinghouse learned
later on when they were buying Teleprompter that they owned music,
and apparently they didn't know that.
Speaker 1 (35:28):
That's what funding Universe dot Com says.
Speaker 2 (35:30):
I don't know, I mean, who doesn't. Maybe back then
they didn't do research into purchasing entire corporations, but they.
Speaker 1 (35:37):
Were on a lot of Scotch at the time.
Speaker 2 (35:38):
Man, although we've had companies that bought websites. And then
they learned there was a podcast program attached.
Speaker 1 (35:45):
I think I've heard of that Things You Should Do
or something like that.
Speaker 2 (35:48):
Yeah, that was actually that could happen now that I
think about it, that's right.
Speaker 1 (35:53):
Yeah, I kind of actually felt a deeper affinity for
music when I learned how many times they've been passed
around corporation by corporation.
Speaker 2 (36:01):
And then I think in the I think it was
was when did Yesco come along? Was that the nineties?
Speaker 1 (36:06):
So Yesco was around from the sixties.
Speaker 2 (36:10):
Well when they finally came together though, right.
Speaker 1 (36:12):
Yeah, but they were early competitor, no, I guess that
kind of a mid midlife competitor to Musak. But by
the eighties Yesco had established a name for itself by
doing basically the opposite of what Musak did. Rather than
making you know, covers of canned music without lyrics, they
(36:36):
would just go get the licenses of like the hot
new song of the of the moment and play those
and so rather than background music, which is what Musac's
whole jam was, these guys were pioneering foreground music. And
they were just a small little outfit from Seattle that
you know. It was kind of like the little engine
that could. And they changed the entire landscape audio landscape
(37:01):
of the United States just by being persistent by getting
that word out that, hey, now, foreground's the way to go,
not background, that's old stuff.
Speaker 2 (37:12):
Yeah, And I think that's why today when you go
into publics to do your grocery shopping, you'll hear Christopher
Cross singing sailing instead of the music version of sailing.
Speaker 1 (37:21):
Yeah, can't we just get both? Though?
Speaker 2 (37:23):
Sure do we.
Speaker 1 (37:25):
Have to choose?
Speaker 2 (37:26):
I mean, I'm a big Christopher Cross fan. You're not
going to find a bigger fan than me.
Speaker 1 (37:31):
For real. You like him that much.
Speaker 2 (37:33):
He's great. I got his two big albums I still
have on my shelf.
Speaker 1 (37:38):
Oh yeah, well he's sitting in the other room at
my house right now.
Speaker 2 (37:42):
I guess you're the bigger fan. Yeah, you're like, no, no, no,
he's just tied up.
Speaker 1 (37:47):
Well, I was gonna say he's not here on his
will and his own will. In fact, you could make
a pretty strong cases here against his will.
Speaker 2 (37:54):
But so in nineteen eighty four of those when Yesco
got officially involved with Musak. I think Muzak was did
they actually file for bankruptcy or were they just at
that sort of Mount precipice.
Speaker 1 (38:09):
Not yet, they were teetering right there on the edge.
And it was actually they were bought by the Fields Company,
the company that owns Marshall Field. So Chicago makes another
appearance and the Fields Company said, we like where this
Yesco group is going, We're going to merge with them.
So Musak actually merged with Yesco, the smaller company, but
(38:29):
then ended up moving to Seattle right before the grunge
movement hit. So Seattle's big musical contribution before Grunge was
Musak exactly.
Speaker 2 (38:39):
I remember seeing the I remember seeing that logo. I
mean you'd probably seen the vans around before and really
not known it's that m with the circle around it, right.
I remember when I first saw that, I was like,
wait a minute, is that the Musac that's it?
Speaker 1 (38:54):
Yeah, And that was a big update. They apparently went
with some design group I can't remember the name of
it that just completely invented the brand because they went
from being in the background to manipulating your mood using
stimulus progression to this other thing, this new sound made
up sounding thing called what's it called quantum physics mechanics.
(39:20):
So keep guessing what else?
Speaker 2 (39:24):
Realm leap? Those are all the quantums.
Speaker 1 (39:28):
I know there's got to be another one, Chuck, because
I'm still looking. Sorry, is that thing called it's called
it's quantum leap? What was this called it? Quantum leap? Sure,
So with this quantum leap thing that they had going on,
the Bacula effect, quantum modulation, the Bacula effect, quantum modulation. Okay, okay,
(39:50):
I like Bacula effect, that's a great one. With quantum modulation,
it was we are evoking an emotion that is now
tied forever to this the brand that you're shopping, your store,
you're shopping and yeah, yeah, sure, so like this this one.
(40:10):
So they hire people who make playlists, who curate these
playlists that are start to finish. They all share this
one theme. They all kind of have this one like cool,
not scary, uh, super hip, beachy, you know, spring Break
two thousand and eight, whatever, the best, So that like
(40:35):
a company will will say this is this is what
our brand is all about. Give us playlists that fit this.
And so now you're you're kind of like you feel
cool because of the music of where you're shopping, and
so that makes you want to shop and associate yourself
with that place even more. That's what musak, That's what
the what's called neo musak is all about. That's that's
(40:57):
the current state of affairs and the industry.
Speaker 2 (41:00):
Yeah, like take if you want to use Armani Exchange
as an example, what they'll do is they will literally
try and make like a DJ mix with that has
beat matches and it doesn't break the momentums and it's
all cross faded. Whereas if Ann Taylor calls them up,
they don't want a cross fade. They want Selene Dion
songs and then a little bit of a small break
(41:22):
and then a sting song coming on and these gentle
fades in and fades out, and you know, it's the
same sort of stuff as just curated foreground music. What
I love about music is in the end, when they
were finally acquired, they had one point five million commercially
recorded songs in their catalog and they call that the Well,
(41:45):
that's amazing, almost eight hundred Beatles songs it is.
Speaker 1 (41:49):
I think that's why they never fully went under is
that catalog kept them commercially viable for sale.
Speaker 2 (41:54):
Super valuable. It's got to be.
Speaker 1 (41:56):
Yeah. So they were bought and I think two thousand
and nine maybe by a group called Mood Music twenty eleven,
and then two years later they retired the music name
forever just couldn't do anything with it. So now it's
Mood Music is the company that owns the well. But
they're doing that whole four okay, they're doing that whole
(42:18):
foreground music quantum modulation type thing where you know, you
just associate a brand with a certain kind of music.
Like you would walk into that Armani Exchange and hear
you know, Simon yeah, Christopher Cross, You'd be like, something's
off here? The mood mood what is it? Mood media?
(42:38):
Their their job is to make sure that there's nothing
off while you're in that store, that it all just
kind of fits together and you feel good about where
you're shopping.
Speaker 2 (42:46):
I don't know, though, Man, you want to you want
to move some Harmoni gear put on, you can call
me out. Just it fly off, man.
Speaker 1 (42:54):
Those kids would freak out there. Their frosted tips would
stand up on and.
Speaker 2 (43:00):
Then and then they're like what is this. This is amazing.
Speaker 1 (43:03):
I've never felt more alive.
Speaker 2 (43:05):
Why is Chevy Jason here?
Speaker 1 (43:08):
Oh Man.
Speaker 2 (43:09):
A really cool thing though, is what you were talking
about with Musaic being on the tech forefront. It's really
cool that over the years they were always early adopters
of tech, and it's funny to think about them that way,
but they were always on the leading edge and the
forefront of what technology was doing.
Speaker 1 (43:27):
Yeah, so they I don't know if they invented them,
but they certainly were early adopters, if not pioneers in
vinyl records. People were not using vinyl at the time.
Then they eventually ditched the vinyl records in favor of
an electronic brain called mater m the number eight and
the letter R, which basically was a big deck of
(43:50):
real the real tapes. They had a bunch of different
songs on it, but they had different inaudible pulses that
would trigger a different one to come on next. You
could curate lists on these huge reel to reels. It
was just amazing. They were using this thing starting in
the fifties, so the whole thing became automated. They launched
their own satellite in the seventies. They had a computer
(44:12):
database in the seventies. Like they were very much pioneers
and early adopters of a lot of different technology that
we take for granted today.
Speaker 2 (44:21):
Yeah, I mean that you could make an argument that
they were doing the Pandora Spotify think decades before they
were doing it.
Speaker 1 (44:27):
Absolutely. Yeah. I mean the whole point of it too,
was virtually unchanged. I mean, it's not necessarily to make
you a docile shopper anymore, but it's like they're trying
to make you feel like that brand is part of
your identity by evoking memories in you using songs to
(44:47):
unlock them. Totally pretty interesting stuff.
Speaker 2 (44:51):
Man, I'm going to go, what were those two records again?
I want to write this down.
Speaker 1 (44:55):
Okay, one is more than music period and environment nineteen
eighty one musak record that has not just sailing on
It has Olivia Newton John's Magic has take your Time,
Do It Right, which I don't care if the lyrics
are there or not. If you're sitting next to your
mom in a doctor's office and baby, you can do it.
(45:18):
Take your Time, Do It Right comes on. You both
know what that song's about. You know it may even
be more uncomfortable in that situation, and then it ends
with funky Town Nice. It's a good one. The other
one is called the Blue Album. It's a complete stimulus
progression album, and it has a bunch of good songs
on it, including Orlean's Dance with Me, which is, if
(45:40):
you ask me, the musaic covers way better than the original.
Speaker 2 (45:43):
So not to be confused with Weezer's Blue Album.
Speaker 1 (45:47):
No, that's a little different. And then if you're like, oh,
it's music's floating my boat, go start looking up Ronnie Aldrich,
Frank Checksfield, Montevanni, and just start yeah.
Speaker 2 (46:00):
And if eventually you're like, I'm feeling really goosey, how
about some actual vocalists going on? And then you'll just
go right into Josh's other favorite, which is yacht rock,
easy listening.
Speaker 1 (46:12):
I like yacht rock a lot too. I'm super right
now into West Coast cool jazz. Stan Getz chet Baker. Yeah, oh,
I can't remember. I can't remember his name, but I
just got into him. He's a great jazz pianist from
that era. Bill Evans, the Bill Evans Trio, Oh love
Bill Evans. You're just getting into Bill Evans. Yeah, I
(46:34):
just just started getting into him. I started with Chet
Baker and just started working my way out.
Speaker 2 (46:40):
Vincecaraldi is another great one. And I know he's known
for the Charlie Brown stuff, but all of Vincecaraldy is great.
Speaker 1 (46:44):
Yeah, he is. You can tell just by the Charlie
Brown album that he's an amazing jazz good stuff. So, Chuck,
I have one more thing. There's you know, people hate
music a lot, so there's some artists who have like
tried to a lot of artists have tried to make
hey out of the whole thing. But one guy, David Schaeffer,
had something from back in two thousand or two thousand
(47:05):
and two something. He had X ten R Dot one
and X ten R Dot two, these two CDs that
he released that were basically his weird unnerving remixes of
Musak that just turns the whole thing on its head
so much so that like you may laugh out loud
(47:25):
when you first hear them. And I believe they're on
his website, but it's like a it's like Musak, but
what you would hear in your nightmares. Okay, it's really good,
and I believe he's got it on his website to
go listen to and I think you can buy the
CDs too, so check that out.
Speaker 2 (47:42):
We'll check it out.
Speaker 1 (47:42):
Okay, Well, if you want to know more about Musak,
just start listening and loving. Just just don't prejudge. How
about that? And since I said don't prejudge everybody, that
means it's time for listener male.
Speaker 2 (47:57):
I'm gonna call this from Lauren. Hey, guys, a man
walks down the street and says, why am I soft
in the middle? The rest of my life is so hard?
Oh wait a minute, Sorry.
Speaker 1 (48:07):
What a perfect email for this one.
Speaker 2 (48:09):
I was reading my forearm tattoo by accident. Hey, guys,
been listening to stuff you should know for a few years.
Off and turn up the volume and play an episode
while I cooked dinner. My seven year old daughter Lila
used to complain, oh, you're listening to this again. But
I recently caught her singing the beat to the intro music,
and she'll casually mention things she's heard from time to time.
I suspect she's fond of the animal episodes. Anyway, you'll
(48:33):
jokingly sometimes say Jerry, well, you have to edit that.
You're gonna have to edit that part out, and it
has me curious how often things are cut from an
episode and why bad jokes too long? Have you ever
had to completely redo one? I think it'd be really
interesting to know, and I bet Lilah would find it
encouraging since she likes to make videos of herself singing
and dancing for the record, y'all make it effortless and
(48:56):
see effortless and it's always a joy to listen to.
That is Lauren from Montablo, Alabama, and she said, yes that. Yeah,
you're probably right.
Speaker 1 (49:06):
You put a little too much mustard on there.
Speaker 2 (49:09):
She says, ps, how cool if a mom would I
be if my daughter heard her names on the podcast?
Speaker 1 (49:13):
Yeah? Cool?
Speaker 2 (49:13):
So there you go, Lauren and Lilah. The answer is.
Speaker 1 (49:18):
Very little gets edited out, just the singing and dancing.
Speaker 2 (49:22):
Like that siren in the background.
Speaker 1 (49:23):
We'll probably just leave that into proven leave that in.
Speaker 2 (49:26):
No, we don't edit a lot out occasionally, like we
found out when we said this before. Early on, we
left in the words stumbles and the ums and the
uzz and just because it's a conversation and we didn't
want to make it seem too scripted because it's not,
or canned because it's not. And so we just left
that stuff in there. And the only time, like like
(49:48):
I think today you had to look something up real quick.
But that doesn't happen much.
Speaker 1 (49:51):
Yeah, I had to poke my head out of the
studio and look at my record collection to come up
to Evans name.
Speaker 2 (49:56):
So I mean that's gone now, but very little is
edit it out. It's especially after this many years. It's
we're not one take wonders, but it's Cherry doesn't have
the harness job in the world.
Speaker 1 (50:06):
You know, we've taken it easy on her for years. Yeah, yeah,
that's about it, Chuck. I can't think of anything else
we really added out.
Speaker 2 (50:16):
But that's not to say that shows that are heavily
edited and varies kind of scripty and slick, like there's
a room for those two. Oh yeah, we're not the
only way to do it now.
Speaker 1 (50:27):
We're like the Musac of podcasts. There's other people who
are all like the Ted NuGen of podcasts, and there's
room for both.
Speaker 2 (50:33):
Yeah, like Roman Mars, the Ted NuGen of podcasting.
Speaker 1 (50:35):
That's right, man, that guy's always wearing like a studded
leather wrist band and stuff.
Speaker 2 (50:40):
I keep waiting on Roman to text me and being
like you guys are consistently talking smack about me.
Speaker 1 (50:45):
He doesn't listen, and no one he knows listens listens.
That's impossible, So who is that? Lila and Lauren correct nice. Well,
thank you very much for writing in hope. We answered
your question, and if you want to get in touch
with us, like Lila and Lauren did, you can send
us an email. Send it off to stuff podcast at
(51:08):
iHeartRadio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.
Hey, there, everybody, it's me Josh, and for this week's
SYSK Selects, I've chosen our twenty twenty one episode on Musak.
And you might ask, who could possibly like the noisome,
omnipresent annoyance that was Musak? Well me, I like Muzak.
So there. But if you're not over forty, you might
not even know that there was a time you couldn't
(00:21):
step out in public from department stores. Those are in
something we call malls to elevators without smalltzy string arrangements
of pop music pummeling you with their saccharine sound, and
you know what, you're the worst offtware not having experienced it. Instead,
you can experience this episode, and I hope you enjoy it.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:55):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and
there's Charles w You, Chuck Bryan over there, and there's Dave.
See Coustin. I said it right this time.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
I thought it was Coustain.
Speaker 1 (01:10):
No, if you're in France, that's how you would say it.
But here in the United States, you say Coustin.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
Can I start this off by saying something, Oh.
Speaker 1 (01:21):
Boy, I'm worried about what you're going to say about.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
Okay, well, this episode is on muzak, and I started
thinking last night. I was thinking about your love of musak,
which is not at all ironic.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
Not in the least, but you can't say that kind
of thing these days. People don't believe you.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
I know it's true everyone. I know Josh very well,
and I was thinking of your and I like all
kinds of music too, but you know, at my heart,
I'm a rock and roll guy. Sure, And I was
thinking about your top musical genres that are above rock
and roll, and you're picking order, not in order. I
counted easy listening, musak, disco, art rock, crowd rock, and
(02:03):
I probably missed a couple.
Speaker 1 (02:05):
Crowd rock is below rock and roll. I want to
like crowdrock, it just doesn't quite jibe with me. I
like some, but not all of it.
Speaker 2 (02:11):
And then stuff I think art rock because it's just
sort of that avant garde, like I don't you don't
love Yoko, but you certainly are a bit of a
Yoko apologist. Sure, Grace Jones stuff like that, But I.
Speaker 1 (02:23):
Love Grace Jones for sure. What about talking heads? They
go in there too, right, they'd probably be. I mean
they literally went to art school together.
Speaker 2 (02:31):
Yeah, I mean they kind of span from art rock
to new wave to like world music by the time
they finished.
Speaker 1 (02:37):
Yeah, yeah, I know, but uh yeah.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
I mean, I certainly love the Talking Heads, but all
of those, for you are above good old fashioned rock
and roll.
Speaker 1 (02:46):
I think, Yeah, you also left out nineties tech noo.
I've been listening to a lot of that accutely too,
like Alternate and the Prodigy and everything.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
But you love music, you really do.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
I do too.
Speaker 2 (02:58):
Actually, I don't know, so I don't know how much
I like. I will listen to some of that stuff
and we'll talking about we'll talk about emo in here,
of course, old sourpust Brian Eno, but I love listening
to his ambient stuff, which he sort of wrote as
an antidote to music. Again. We'll talk about that more later.
(03:20):
But I do like in certain circumstances that music thing
is really great to have on in my house as
background music, and it's sorts that same purpose.
Speaker 1 (03:32):
One of the big reasons why too, is because you
can get stuff done with it. Like lyrics can be
so distracting, they just latch onto your brain and say no, no,
pay attention to me. I'm I'm talking to you now.
Music does the opposite of that. It says, go be free,
but also enjoy this, Like there's there's like a whole
part of your brain that music can tap into that
(03:55):
doesn't require your conscious thought, but it still produces like
good feeling. And you know, like Peo, people just smack
music around like it's just it's so bland and it's
so soulless, and I totally disagree with that. Like if
you actually stop and listen to music, it's really really
technically proficient. It's frequently well done. It's often very clever
(04:19):
and creative and inventive, which is really saying something. Because
you're doing this when they in the confines of covering
an existing song in a way that makes it familiar
and easy to recognize but also takes away any intrusiveness
that it might have. It's tough to do. And I really,
I just I love music. You're absolutely right, Like I
(04:39):
listened to music this whole time. Yeah, not just when
we were when we were researching music today, but also
when I was researching the Havana syndrome, and I realized,
like this is my normal thing. This is the same
stuff I listen to when I'm researching anyway.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
Yeah, and we can go ahead and dispell a couple
of or not myths, but clear up a couple of
things right off the bat. First of all, Musak is
a name brand, and people can kind of collectively use
the term music or have collectively use that term for
what's called like potted plant music or elevator music or
shopping music. But it is actual actually a brand name,
(05:17):
which we'll get to the history of. And then the
second thing is it gets the name elevator music. Part
of the myth is that people said, well, they put
it on elevators because people were afraid to death of
elevators early on, and it calmed people down, or it
covered up the noise of the clanking elevators.
Speaker 1 (05:35):
I'd never heard that before. You.
Speaker 2 (05:37):
Yeah, neither one of those things are true. Total myth.
My guess is that it was played on elevators, and
because you're in such a closed little box that's usually quiet,
it just was way more noticeable than like in a
big office full of people working. So people call the
elevator music.
Speaker 1 (05:56):
That's my guess, right, Yeah, I mean, yeah, there wasn't
music gone elevators before? Before several decades in the twentieth century, Like,
there weren't many elevators you could get on because people
didn't have elevators in their house. It was a public
building you were in where they weren't playing music of
some form very frequently music.
Speaker 2 (06:17):
That Great Blues Brothers scene, Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (06:22):
Because they're they're going up to what the Cook County
Assessor's office and the like. There there's the entire Chicago
Police Department is after them, but they're forced to get
on this elevator and the girl from Ipanema is playing.
Speaker 2 (06:37):
I think my favorite part of that scene is there's
just dozens and hundreds of cops and swat guys just
you know, hut when they're repelling and doing all this stuff.
And then there's the one shot of the lone guy
repelling down the side of the building and he's by
himself just going hut.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (06:57):
That's a good one, so funny.
Speaker 1 (06:59):
There's another scene from around the era a few years
later from Airplane two where it's like ripped Torn. I
believe it's Ripped Torn. The party from the Larry Sanders Show. Yeah, yeah,
and I don't know the other guy he's talking to.
But anyway, they're walking and talking and they have to
get on an elevator and the elevator door opens and
(07:20):
it's just blaring, like ear drum shattering decibel MacArthur Park
and they have to get on. People are coming off
the elevator like with their hands and their ears like
with splitting headaches from this. But it's just completely the
opposite way elevator music's supposed to be like. But it's
a good little scene too, as far as elevator music
(07:40):
goes well.
Speaker 2 (07:41):
I mean that's kind of one of the points too,
is Musak has long been a movie trope and a
TV trope and then been lampooned and scenes just like
the Blues brother scene where there's something chaotic going on
and then you cut back to the sound of Musaic
playing wherever the other scene is setting. Right, Yeah, very
very fun stuff.
Speaker 1 (07:59):
But that's started, a guess it started with The Blues Brothers,
which came out in nineteen eighty, But before that that
was like Musak was not really lampoon I mean, not
everybody liked it. It really kind of started to get
a little backlash in the late sixties early seventies, as
we'll see, but there was a very significant chunk of
the twentieth century again from maybe nineteen fifty to nineteen eighty.
(08:23):
We'll say where everywhere you went in public, including if
you took a Greyhound bus, or if you were on
a plane, or you happened to be an Air Force one,
or you were at the mall, in an elevator at
your office, everywhere muzak was playing. There was musach playing everywhere.
It was just a part of life that you was inescapable.
Speaker 2 (08:47):
Actually. Yeah, so let's go back in time and talk
about the inventor of muzak. And this is sort of
a fun fact of muzak. The man's name is George Square.
It is spelled Squire, but he swears it's pronounced square.
Speaker 1 (09:04):
I'm really impressed, man, I had not come up with.
Speaker 2 (09:06):
That one or he swore it was pronounced square. Yeah,
this is kind of one of the funny jokes, like
the guy who invented mus x was Square. But Major
General George Square was born in eighteen sixty five, if
you believe that, And he is just a laundry list
of accomplishments as a human being. He was he earned
(09:26):
a doctorate from Johns Hopkins in electrical science. He was
an Army engineer with a PhD. I think the first one. Yeah,
and he was I believe the lead Signal Corps officer
for the Army as well.
Speaker 1 (09:40):
He was. He also was inducted into the National Academy
of Sciences, which connects this episode to the other one today.
That's right, because he came up with something called a
tree telephone. He figured out how to use any tree,
but preferably one with fully leaved I guess, I don't
know what you'd call that as a as a receiver
(10:02):
and transmitter for radio signals. He figured out how to
use a tree, a living tree for that.
Speaker 2 (10:07):
He was. Here's another fun fact. He was one of
the first airplane passengers ever because he was way into
human flight and got together with the Wright brothers and
a nineteen oh six, consulted with them, and they said, hey,
why don't you take a ride in our new little biplane.
You'll probably live right.
Speaker 1 (10:28):
I looked at our I looked at the document for
our Wright Brothers episode, and he did not appear. I
don't think we mentioned him, but he might. He might
have been the first airline passenger from what I saw.
Speaker 2 (10:40):
Yeah, where he really made a big name for himself
pre Musaic was this invention, which is what we call multiplexing,
which is he figured out or maybe wire wireless communications,
which is something he worked on with the Army. He
basically figured out how to get multiple uses out of
(11:01):
single telephone lines. Telephone wires were you know, there are
only so many, so you were really limited as to
what you could do with them and how many people
could use them. So he basically figured out a way
to increase their output and efficiency by multiplexing and by
sending super imposing high frequency radio signals over those low
(11:22):
frequency telegraph signals, basically just allowing you to use the
wire at the same time, the same wire.
Speaker 1 (11:28):
Yeah, yeah, I mean it's like, if you think of
like a wave, if it's low frequency, there's big, wide
gaps in between. You can fit a higher frequency that's
tighter and squished together in those gaps, and but you're
still using the same line. And you know, this was
the guy who came up with that. That's an enormous
advancement in telecommunications that were still put in use today
(11:50):
in some applications, but definitely helped like the early Internet along.
It was just a huge contribution to humanity, like forget
even just music, like just that alone would would probably
warrant like an episode for George Square.
Speaker 2 (12:07):
Yeah, and I think he was like, everyone should be
able to use this, So I'm going to open source
it and everyone can use this new multiplexing technology. AT
and T came along and said, we'll use it, and
then you know what, you've stole it from us.
Speaker 1 (12:20):
Actually right, he came up with it, but since he
left it open, they decided to just take it from
him and sue him for it.
Speaker 2 (12:28):
I think he sued them, but it didn't work.
Speaker 1 (12:30):
That's right, you're right, so he but he still was
able to use this wire wireless technology with multiplexing. And
at the time people were starting to get into radio broadcasts.
But radio wireless radio like that you would just have
in your house. It's picking up radio waves at a
station that was not widespread at the time. So George
(12:53):
Square said, you know what, I understand people want music
in their house. I'm going to give it to them.
I'm going to use that multiplexing technology and I'm going
to run sound waves over the electrical wires that go
into the house, and I'm going to sell this it
is brilliant. I'm going to sell this service to people's
homes for a dollar fifty a month, about twenty dollars today,
(13:15):
and it's just part of your utility bill because it's
coming in through your electrical company. And there's actually a
section of Cleveland called the Lakewood I believe Lakewood area
that was the pilot for this wired wireless radio that
George Square invented. The problem was is, by the time
(13:36):
they deployed it, wireless radio was already a thing, and
so we had this really great idea that just no
longer had an application.
Speaker 2 (13:46):
Yeah, he was. He basically invented the first music subscription
service exactly.
Speaker 1 (13:51):
Yeah. And he had multiple channels too, Like when you subscribed,
you got news, you got dance music. There was like
I think three different channels you could choose.
Speaker 2 (14:01):
From Howard Stern.
Speaker 1 (14:03):
Yep, Howard Stern was on back.
Speaker 2 (14:05):
Then Baba Boobie. So he had that technology though, and
he said, you know what, this is a good idea,
though maybe I can think of how to use this
in offices and stores. And in nineteen thirty four he
looked up at Kodak, very successful corporation and said, I
love that name, and I love music. Let's just call
(14:26):
it music and history changed and maybe we should take
a break.
Speaker 1 (14:31):
Okay, let's do it all right, We'll be right back. So,
(15:02):
in the parlance of today, Chuck George Square and his
Musak Corporation pivoted from home consumer markets to business markets.
And that just knocked it out of the park because
it turned out that there were a lot of companies, hotels, restaurants, clubs.
(15:23):
I think the Stork Club was an early customer that said,
you know what, it's really going to make our place
seem fancy if we've got music piping in all the time.
So yes, we would like to sign up for your service.
And that's really where music kind of started to take off.
Speaker 2 (15:40):
Yeah, so Musak, I mean we haven't even said what
it is, surely people know, but muzak are instrumental tracks.
And you did mention that there were no vocals, so
we kind of hinted the big one. Yeah, but there
are instrumental tracks that are cover songs of kind of
anything you can think of. I mean that have hearts,
(16:01):
some music of some heavy rock. It can be classical music,
it can be old standards. But the point is they
are instrumental versions that are re recorded. They don't just
take the vocals out. It's not carry oukay style, right,
It is re record arranged and recorded by professional, really
good musicians orchestras. Sometimes, Yeah, and it is, that's what
(16:25):
it is, and it's great the end.
Speaker 1 (16:27):
And very very frequently it's it's made into a much
more mellow version of itself, Like any rough edges are
taken off. Since they take the vocals out, it's not
like there's no there that vocal melody is non existing
any longer. They just replace it with something else. So
if they're trying to go for something like a little
more upbeat or up tempo, they'll replace the vocals with,
(16:51):
say like a saxophone. If they're trying to do something
a little more mellow, they'll replace the vocals with a
string section.
Speaker 2 (16:57):
Or harp perhaps.
Speaker 1 (16:59):
Yeah. That's one of the things that that musaic is
very famous for, is like what's called masses of strings,
just strings upon strings. In fact, one of the early
I guess big name groups that produced musak was called
one hundred and one Strings. They probably were absolutely accurate
in that, like there's just a lot tons of strings everywhere, violins,
(17:24):
cello's violas, every string instrument you can throw at it.
They just layer upon layer in these songs. It's one
of the hallmarks of musak.
Speaker 2 (17:33):
Yeah, and there are many versions of Antonio Carlos Shobiam's
Go from Epanima, but the music version is one of
the most popular, and that one hundred and one strings
version is the most ubiquitous from that lot. I do
encourage people to go watch the YouTube though, of Frank
Sinatra and Joe Beim singing that song live on TV,
(17:56):
because it's great and every way they're just sitting next
to each other, and the shot isn't wide at first,
and they're just sort of singing back and forth to
each other and Frank Stone is saying, then it cuts
to the wide and Frank is like totally kicked back
with his legs crossed with a cigarette in his hand,
exactly like you would hope. But he looks like, I mean,
it looks like he just not rolled out of bed
(18:17):
because he's put together, but he looks like he rolled
from his wicker bag to his wicker chair right for
this performance.
Speaker 1 (18:24):
Can I get some cocaine in here? Baby?
Speaker 2 (18:27):
So it's Joe Piscopos, Frank Sinatra.
Speaker 1 (18:30):
Do you ever listen to Joe beam stuff?
Speaker 2 (18:33):
Oh yeah, dude, I love that old lounge stuff. It's
really great Brazilian stuff.
Speaker 1 (18:37):
Yeah. His record Stone Flower is just a masterpiece from
beginning to end.
Speaker 2 (18:42):
Yeah. But that's a good party music.
Speaker 1 (18:44):
Yeah. That's another thing though too. It's like it's so
mellow that to take that kind of music and then
make it into musak is like it's almost like it
takes a certain amount of audacity, Like I was listening
to I found so there's want to I want to
point people the two different music records that are on YouTube.
(19:08):
One is called More Than Music, Period and Environment. It's
a nineteen eighty one musak record and it has a
version of Sailing Christopher Crosses Sailing.
Speaker 2 (19:18):
One of the most area music sleep.
Speaker 1 (19:21):
Yeah exactly. They figured out how to basically make you
lose control of your bladder listening to this exactly. Yeah,
that's a good one. And then the other one is
called the Blue Album, uh, and it is from nineteen
seventy four, I believe, And it's just both of them
(19:41):
are really great. That's good good introductions to musaic if
you're not into it already, all right.
Speaker 2 (19:47):
So music is trucking along in the thirties. They get
to the forties and they think, you know what, we
need a better way to sell this stuff and to
pitch this to businesses and corporations. So why don't we
hire some people to research music and to figure out
what kinds of music keep people happy and working? And
(20:10):
because people, you know, they work hard in the morning,
and then they sort of lag a bit before lunch,
and then they really lag sort of a couple of
hours after lunch. So why don't we do this? So
why don't we study it? Let's call it stimulus progression.
It's a bit pseudoscience. It makes sense it is in
that it's not been proven. It makes sense to everyone
(20:32):
who I feel like knows about it, Like sure, music
can pick you up and make you work harder, But
it's pseudoscience in that it's I don't think it's ever
been scientifically proven.
Speaker 1 (20:43):
I gotcha, okay, yeah, because I keep seeing it just
like dismissed as pseudoscience. But then there were plenty of
early studies that were done by legitimate industrial psychologists and
other like efficiency experts, that kind of thing that showed
that there really was a significant like improvement and productivity
or less sick days, that kind of stuff in places
(21:05):
that have musaic compared to places that didn't have music
pumped into the office.
Speaker 2 (21:10):
Yeah, I think maybe they're specific claims about a work day. Okay,
might have been a little I mean everywhere I read
said it was basically not a marketing scam, but a
marketing tool that they kind of invented.
Speaker 1 (21:24):
I gotcha. But so one thing to say about this
we're going to talk about it in a second stimulus progression,
is that they did kind of plow money that they
were making. We're making a lot of money starting in
the late forties early fifties, they plowed it back into
research to basically come up with scientific evidence to back
(21:45):
up their claims, which you can really kind of see
the ghost of George Square still looming over the company,
you know, this decade or so after he died. That
it's always been this kind of science interested, if not
science based company that's also been an early adopter of technology,
(22:07):
as we'll see.
Speaker 2 (22:08):
Yeah, I mean that is certainly fair. It was never
just like, hey, we're just going to play a bunch
of what people might consider droll background music, like they
really did. I think I don't think it was a scam.
I think they really did try to study working environments.
And what they did with his stimulus progression was they
divided the work day into fifteen minute increments and basically
(22:32):
set a DJ playlist every fifteen minutes, and they assigned
a stimulus value from one to six, one being really
really mellow, six being you know, super up. And they
basically went through and almost like a Pandora sort of
curated playlist type of thing to get people to work
(22:52):
hard and efficiently throughout a day, and companies bought in,
including the US Army.
Speaker 1 (22:59):
Yeah, I think we're World War two is basically cited
as the moment when music kind of proved itself enough
at least to start being adopted by very large companies.
And then within a few years after the war, by
like the very early fifties, they started to spread more
and more to even smaller and smaller companies. And it
was this idea that if you played music and music's
(23:21):
you know, patented stimulus progression model, you know you're going
to avoid that mid morning slump that like every worker
goes through, you know, in productivity, and then the mid
afternoon slump. You could avoid that too, and think about
how many more widgets you could make if your employees don't,
you know, slack off productivity wise at ten, from ten
(23:44):
thirty to lunch, and then from like two thirty until
they go home. Like imagine if this this very pleasant
music is just kind of keeping them humming along what
people call a forward it's just an unconscious sense of
forward momentum. The tempo in your environment is moving subtly
(24:04):
faster and faster, and so to keep people from going insane,
part of the stimulus progression was that the songs in
a fifteen minute increment would kind of go up in tempo,
and then you'd have a fifteen minute break of silence,
and then the music would come back on again. But
then this fifteen minutes their first song, the tempo of
(24:26):
their first song would probably start a little faster than
the tempo of the first song of the last fifteen minutes,
And so all of a sudden, next thing, you know,
you're making whidge. It's like a maniac because you're being
manipulated by this stimulus progression model. At least again, according
to muzak I, get what you're saying. Like, it's not like,
(24:46):
you know, Harvard came along and said, yes, we've studied
this thoroughly, and this is exactly what happens. This is
you know, company claims, but it is intuitively sensible at least.
Speaker 2 (24:57):
Well. Yeah, I mean you need only to host house
party and play music yourself to determine how music can
affect the mood of a group of people. Put on
groove is in the heart, and you know what's gonna happen.
Speaker 1 (25:12):
Yeah, everybody's gonna shake their groove thing.
Speaker 2 (25:14):
Everyone's gonna shape their group thing, shake their group thing.
If you put in old sour pus. Brian ENO's music
for Airports not a good party thing.
Speaker 1 (25:25):
No it's not. And since you brought him up for
the second time, I say we discuss Brian you know
momentarily sure.
Speaker 2 (25:33):
I mean I love that record, and I love a
lot of his stuff, including his ambient music experimental records.
I think it's really really good stuff to have on
if it's a nice gray day outside and you're getting
work done. I really enjoyed his background music, but it's
definitely not up in any way.
Speaker 1 (25:54):
You know, what I found is a really good one
for what you just described. You ever listen to Future
Sound of lund No. They have an album, like a
double album called life Forms, and it's it's about as
amazing as ambient gets. So you should check that one out.
Speaker 2 (26:10):
Embly, Emily got me into ambient I call her Embly
when she's listening to that stuff. She really got me.
She called it ambient groove. She really got me into
that stuff. Over the years. Is that like like zero
seven and you know, stuff that's she calls it ambient groovy,
just sort of sort of mellow and groovy and like
(26:31):
zero seven and more Chiba. And it was a certain
era I think where that stuff peaked Massive Attack a
little bit. Oh yeah, it's good stuff.
Speaker 1 (26:39):
Yeah, I think you'd like life Forms then the Future
Sign of London stuff is normally at a little more
you know, it's super cerebral and intelligent, but it's also
fairly dancy. Life Forms is way it's probably their most
ambient stuff around.
Speaker 2 (26:52):
So Ino though, let's get back to him. He kind
of came up with this as an as an antidote
to music, right.
Speaker 1 (26:59):
Yes, if you like ambient music, you better thank your
lucky stars for muzak because we're not for muzak. You
might not have ambient music, at least not now. Maybe
it would becoming fifty years from now, who knows.
Speaker 2 (27:11):
Yeah, he said, I loved that. In this article, it says,
as reported by Red Bull Music, Eno said this, and
this was I think for the liner notes actually to
airport or music for airports. Whereas can music's intention is
to brighten the environment by adding stimulus to it, ambient
music is intended to induce calm and space into space
to think, ambient music must be able to accommodate many
(27:35):
levels of listening attention without enforcing one. In particular, it
must be as ignorable as it is interesting.
Speaker 1 (27:42):
So he hits on something though, that people would come
to really resent about musak is not even just necessarily
the syrupiness of the music itself, but the intent behind
the music. That it was always intended to basic manipulate
your mood into making you a better worker, a more
(28:04):
docile consumer. That it was poking at your brain to
again to get you to do things that you may
or may not want to do. Maybe you will be
less likely to punch some guy on the bus because
there's musac playing, which is a good thing. We should
not be punching other people on the bus. But the
point is that you're being mind controlled in a certain way.
(28:27):
And eventually people got kind of resentful of that.
Speaker 2 (28:31):
Yeah, no, that's true.
Speaker 1 (28:33):
We're not there yet, though. We're not there yet. Though.
There was actually a point in time, though, Chuck, where
musak and popular music were basically one and the same.
Speaker 2 (28:43):
Yeah, that was sort of I mean, one of the
heydays of musac certainly was in that. When you know,
when Glen the Glenn Miller Orchestra was pop music on
the radio. Music wasn't a far stretch from some of
that stuff, so it was sort of all one and
the same. I think it was as that as styles
changed and the sixties and seventies start rolling along, that
(29:07):
musaic became really sort of a bad word to a
lot of people, right.
Speaker 1 (29:11):
And one of the reasons I saw that really explained
it to me, because you know, things change. The society
just changed between the nineteen fifties and the nineteen sixties.
It just abruptly changed. But that doesn't fully explain why
musaic just was suddenly looked down upon. A good explanation
(29:31):
I saw is that lyrics became really really important in
the late sixties. People had something to say, and music
does not include lyrics. It completely undermines the point of
music if you put lyrics in, or don't you know,
don't rearrange the lyrics with strings. So music kind of
(29:52):
couldn't couldn't keep up with that. It's not like it
went away, it doubled down. It kept doing what it
was doing. And in fact, it would take some of
those pop hits that had really monumentally important lyrics and
just take the lyrics out and replace it with a
saxophone or something like that.
Speaker 2 (30:07):
Yeah, they didn't think do that. I think it's interesting.
They could have had a really mellow singer at a
certain point come in and they I really respect the
fact that they were like, Nope, the singer is a
violin and I don't want to hear it anymore. Right.
Speaker 1 (30:20):
But a lot of these songwriters, in particular, like I
think Joan Baez, Bruce Springsteen, Boz Skaggs, all of them
refused to let their music be covered by MUSAK or
any of its competitors. But Paul Simon I saw, said
he always knew he had a hit when he heard
(30:41):
a musaic version of it like at the mall or
something like that, which it's kind of like weird Al
covering Nirvana, Like Cobain said that he knew that Nirvana
had made it when weird Al covered smells like teen Spirit.
I think it's basically the same thing. Oh.
Speaker 2 (30:57):
I think most musicians, unless you're a Ted Nugent who
uh And we'll get to that. But very famously sort
of offered to buy music when they fill upon hard
times so he could basically burn it to the ground.
I think most musicians deep down think it's kind of
an honor when one of their songs is musicified.
Speaker 1 (31:16):
It's got yeah, you'd have to play right. I just
want to find out what somebody's going to do with it, because,
like I was saying at the beginning, like it really
takes some creativity to come up with, Okay, what can
I replace this with that's not just completely predictable or boring,
but also isn't going to grab everybody's attention, because that's
again not the point of music. It's it's one of
(31:37):
the the I don't know if it was a slogan
of the Musaic Corporation or not, but they basically said
that they fill in the awkward pauses in life m
to where it's, yeah, you don't like It's like you
were saying at the party, if you're at a party
that doesn't have any music on, you just probably just
get smashed out of your skull because you're just trying
(31:59):
to lose kate the social situation so much. Whereas if
you put on music, it's like it takes a lot
of that edge off. That was one of the points
too with Musak, and then also to kind of get
you to linger a little longer when you were shopping
in a store that was part of it as well.
Speaker 2 (32:16):
Yeah, I mean music. We almost always have music on
in our house unless you know, it's night and we're watching,
you know, a movie or watching something on TV. But
it almost all waking hours we have music playing in
our home, and it just feels weird and quiet and
not full of life when it's when there's no music happening, Right,
(32:38):
It's strange. It can be strange for sure. Should we
take a break?
Speaker 1 (32:43):
Yeah, we're we have reached basically the early seventies when
it is Musak's first crisis point, and we'll come back
to that after this.
Speaker 2 (33:20):
All right, So I'm born in nineteen seventy one, and
muzak starts to die a little bit because a real
rock and roller came into the world.
Speaker 1 (33:32):
That's right, born with a gene jacket with the Van
Halen logo on marker in the back.
Speaker 2 (33:39):
It did not go away completely though, it was just
sort of, I guess, the beginning of the end. But
that didn't mean there wasn't still a business model for
musak because music was never about its popularity.
Speaker 1 (33:52):
No, but there was a time where it was popular.
Like JFK had it on Air Force one, Eisenhower had
it piped into the White House, it was playing on
board Apollo eleven. Yeah, like it was like it was everywhere.
Like it's really hard to get across how ubiquitous it was.
But I found a quote from a guy named Professor
(34:13):
Gary Gumpert of Queens College in New York.
Speaker 2 (34:16):
Nice.
Speaker 1 (34:17):
He said that that at the time, music was just
kind of amniotic fluid that surrounds us. It never startles us.
It is never too loud, it's never too silent. It's
always there. And that was what it was like. You
were just kind of moving from one placid bucolic field
to the next, going from mall to mall, store to store,
(34:37):
elevator to elevator, bus ride to bus ride. It was
just absolutely everywhere. So compared to that, the idea that
it's absolutely everywhere unquestioned. Yeah. It really kind of started
to take a bit of a downturn in the seventies,
but it just didn't go anywhere yet. It took decades
for it to really take a hit. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (34:55):
I mean even in the eighties, that was syndicated in
nineteen countries. There were eighty million people listening, whether or
not they wanted to or not, listening to music every day. Yeah,
And the company ended up being bought and sold a
couple of times over the years. I think in eighty
one or in seventy two, a company called Teleprompter owned it, Yeah,
and eighty one Westinghouse bought it. And I don't know
(35:19):
if I believe this. The story goes that Westinghouse learned
later on when they were buying Teleprompter that they owned music,
and apparently they didn't know that.
Speaker 1 (35:28):
That's what funding Universe dot Com says.
Speaker 2 (35:30):
I don't know, I mean, who doesn't. Maybe back then
they didn't do research into purchasing entire corporations, but they.
Speaker 1 (35:37):
Were on a lot of Scotch at the time.
Speaker 2 (35:38):
Man, although we've had companies that bought websites. And then
they learned there was a podcast program attached.
Speaker 1 (35:45):
I think I've heard of that Things You Should Do
or something like that.
Speaker 2 (35:48):
Yeah, that was actually that could happen now that I
think about it, that's right.
Speaker 1 (35:53):
Yeah, I kind of actually felt a deeper affinity for
music when I learned how many times they've been passed
around corporation by corporation.
Speaker 2 (36:01):
And then I think in the I think it was
was when did Yesco come along? Was that the nineties?
Speaker 1 (36:06):
So Yesco was around from the sixties.
Speaker 2 (36:10):
Well when they finally came together though, right.
Speaker 1 (36:12):
Yeah, but they were early competitor, no, I guess that
kind of a mid midlife competitor to Musak. But by
the eighties Yesco had established a name for itself by
doing basically the opposite of what Musak did. Rather than
making you know, covers of canned music without lyrics, they
(36:36):
would just go get the licenses of like the hot
new song of the of the moment and play those
and so rather than background music, which is what Musac's
whole jam was, these guys were pioneering foreground music. And
they were just a small little outfit from Seattle that
you know. It was kind of like the little engine
that could. And they changed the entire landscape audio landscape
(37:01):
of the United States just by being persistent by getting
that word out that, hey, now, foreground's the way to go,
not background, that's old stuff.
Speaker 2 (37:12):
Yeah, And I think that's why today when you go
into publics to do your grocery shopping, you'll hear Christopher
Cross singing sailing instead of the music version of sailing.
Speaker 1 (37:21):
Yeah, can't we just get both? Though?
Speaker 2 (37:23):
Sure do we.
Speaker 1 (37:25):
Have to choose?
Speaker 2 (37:26):
I mean, I'm a big Christopher Cross fan. You're not
going to find a bigger fan than me.
Speaker 1 (37:31):
For real. You like him that much.
Speaker 2 (37:33):
He's great. I got his two big albums I still
have on my shelf.
Speaker 1 (37:38):
Oh yeah, well he's sitting in the other room at
my house right now.
Speaker 2 (37:42):
I guess you're the bigger fan. Yeah, you're like, no, no, no,
he's just tied up.
Speaker 1 (37:47):
Well, I was gonna say he's not here on his
will and his own will. In fact, you could make
a pretty strong cases here against his will.
Speaker 2 (37:54):
But so in nineteen eighty four of those when Yesco
got officially involved with Musak. I think Muzak was did
they actually file for bankruptcy or were they just at
that sort of Mount precipice.
Speaker 1 (38:09):
Not yet, they were teetering right there on the edge.
And it was actually they were bought by the Fields Company,
the company that owns Marshall Field. So Chicago makes another
appearance and the Fields Company said, we like where this
Yesco group is going, We're going to merge with them.
So Musak actually merged with Yesco, the smaller company, but
(38:29):
then ended up moving to Seattle right before the grunge
movement hit. So Seattle's big musical contribution before Grunge was
Musak exactly.
Speaker 2 (38:39):
I remember seeing the I remember seeing that logo. I
mean you'd probably seen the vans around before and really
not known it's that m with the circle around it, right.
I remember when I first saw that, I was like,
wait a minute, is that the Musac that's it?
Speaker 1 (38:54):
Yeah, And that was a big update. They apparently went
with some design group I can't remember the name of
it that just completely invented the brand because they went
from being in the background to manipulating your mood using
stimulus progression to this other thing, this new sound made
up sounding thing called what's it called quantum physics mechanics.
(39:20):
So keep guessing what else?
Speaker 2 (39:24):
Realm leap? Those are all the quantums.
Speaker 1 (39:28):
I know there's got to be another one, Chuck, because
I'm still looking. Sorry, is that thing called it's called
it's quantum leap? What was this called it? Quantum leap? Sure,
So with this quantum leap thing that they had going on,
the Bacula effect, quantum modulation, the Bacula effect, quantum modulation. Okay, okay,
(39:50):
I like Bacula effect, that's a great one. With quantum modulation,
it was we are evoking an emotion that is now
tied forever to this the brand that you're shopping, your store,
you're shopping and yeah, yeah, sure, so like this this one.
(40:10):
So they hire people who make playlists, who curate these
playlists that are start to finish. They all share this
one theme. They all kind of have this one like cool,
not scary, uh, super hip, beachy, you know, spring Break
two thousand and eight, whatever, the best, So that like
(40:35):
a company will will say this is this is what
our brand is all about. Give us playlists that fit this.
And so now you're you're kind of like you feel
cool because of the music of where you're shopping, and
so that makes you want to shop and associate yourself
with that place even more. That's what musak, That's what
the what's called neo musak is all about. That's that's
(40:57):
the current state of affairs and the industry.
Speaker 2 (41:00):
Yeah, like take if you want to use Armani Exchange
as an example, what they'll do is they will literally
try and make like a DJ mix with that has
beat matches and it doesn't break the momentums and it's
all cross faded. Whereas if Ann Taylor calls them up,
they don't want a cross fade. They want Selene Dion
songs and then a little bit of a small break
(41:22):
and then a sting song coming on and these gentle
fades in and fades out, and you know, it's the
same sort of stuff as just curated foreground music. What
I love about music is in the end, when they
were finally acquired, they had one point five million commercially
recorded songs in their catalog and they call that the Well,
(41:45):
that's amazing, almost eight hundred Beatles songs it is.
Speaker 1 (41:49):
I think that's why they never fully went under is
that catalog kept them commercially viable for sale.
Speaker 2 (41:54):
Super valuable. It's got to be.
Speaker 1 (41:56):
Yeah. So they were bought and I think two thousand
and nine maybe by a group called Mood Music twenty eleven,
and then two years later they retired the music name
forever just couldn't do anything with it. So now it's
Mood Music is the company that owns the well. But
they're doing that whole four okay, they're doing that whole
(42:18):
foreground music quantum modulation type thing where you know, you
just associate a brand with a certain kind of music.
Like you would walk into that Armani Exchange and hear
you know, Simon yeah, Christopher Cross, You'd be like, something's
off here? The mood mood what is it? Mood media?
(42:38):
Their their job is to make sure that there's nothing
off while you're in that store, that it all just
kind of fits together and you feel good about where
you're shopping.
Speaker 2 (42:46):
I don't know, though, Man, you want to you want
to move some Harmoni gear put on, you can call
me out. Just it fly off, man.
Speaker 1 (42:54):
Those kids would freak out there. Their frosted tips would
stand up on and.
Speaker 2 (43:00):
Then and then they're like what is this. This is amazing.
Speaker 1 (43:03):
I've never felt more alive.
Speaker 2 (43:05):
Why is Chevy Jason here?
Speaker 1 (43:08):
Oh Man.
Speaker 2 (43:09):
A really cool thing though, is what you were talking
about with Musaic being on the tech forefront. It's really
cool that over the years they were always early adopters
of tech, and it's funny to think about them that way,
but they were always on the leading edge and the
forefront of what technology was doing.
Speaker 1 (43:27):
Yeah, so they I don't know if they invented them,
but they certainly were early adopters, if not pioneers in
vinyl records. People were not using vinyl at the time.
Then they eventually ditched the vinyl records in favor of
an electronic brain called mater m the number eight and
the letter R, which basically was a big deck of
(43:50):
real the real tapes. They had a bunch of different
songs on it, but they had different inaudible pulses that
would trigger a different one to come on next. You
could curate lists on these huge reel to reels. It
was just amazing. They were using this thing starting in
the fifties, so the whole thing became automated. They launched
their own satellite in the seventies. They had a computer
(44:12):
database in the seventies. Like they were very much pioneers
and early adopters of a lot of different technology that
we take for granted today.
Speaker 2 (44:21):
Yeah, I mean that you could make an argument that
they were doing the Pandora Spotify think decades before they
were doing it.
Speaker 1 (44:27):
Absolutely. Yeah. I mean the whole point of it too,
was virtually unchanged. I mean, it's not necessarily to make
you a docile shopper anymore, but it's like they're trying
to make you feel like that brand is part of
your identity by evoking memories in you using songs to
(44:47):
unlock them. Totally pretty interesting stuff.
Speaker 2 (44:51):
Man, I'm going to go, what were those two records again?
I want to write this down.
Speaker 1 (44:55):
Okay, one is more than music period and environment nineteen
eighty one musak record that has not just sailing on
It has Olivia Newton John's Magic has take your Time,
Do It Right, which I don't care if the lyrics
are there or not. If you're sitting next to your
mom in a doctor's office and baby, you can do it.
(45:18):
Take your Time, Do It Right comes on. You both
know what that song's about. You know it may even
be more uncomfortable in that situation, and then it ends
with funky Town Nice. It's a good one. The other
one is called the Blue Album. It's a complete stimulus
progression album, and it has a bunch of good songs
on it, including Orlean's Dance with Me, which is, if
(45:40):
you ask me, the musaic covers way better than the original.
Speaker 2 (45:43):
So not to be confused with Weezer's Blue Album.
Speaker 1 (45:47):
No, that's a little different. And then if you're like, oh,
it's music's floating my boat, go start looking up Ronnie Aldrich,
Frank Checksfield, Montevanni, and just start yeah.
Speaker 2 (46:00):
And if eventually you're like, I'm feeling really goosey, how
about some actual vocalists going on? And then you'll just
go right into Josh's other favorite, which is yacht rock,
easy listening.
Speaker 1 (46:12):
I like yacht rock a lot too. I'm super right
now into West Coast cool jazz. Stan Getz chet Baker. Yeah, oh,
I can't remember. I can't remember his name, but I
just got into him. He's a great jazz pianist from
that era. Bill Evans, the Bill Evans Trio, Oh love
Bill Evans. You're just getting into Bill Evans. Yeah, I
(46:34):
just just started getting into him. I started with Chet
Baker and just started working my way out.
Speaker 2 (46:40):
Vincecaraldi is another great one. And I know he's known
for the Charlie Brown stuff, but all of Vincecaraldy is great.
Speaker 1 (46:44):
Yeah, he is. You can tell just by the Charlie
Brown album that he's an amazing jazz good stuff. So, Chuck,
I have one more thing. There's you know, people hate
music a lot, so there's some artists who have like
tried to a lot of artists have tried to make
hey out of the whole thing. But one guy, David Schaeffer,
had something from back in two thousand or two thousand
(47:05):
and two something. He had X ten R Dot one
and X ten R Dot two, these two CDs that
he released that were basically his weird unnerving remixes of
Musak that just turns the whole thing on its head
so much so that like you may laugh out loud
(47:25):
when you first hear them. And I believe they're on
his website, but it's like a it's like Musak, but
what you would hear in your nightmares. Okay, it's really good,
and I believe he's got it on his website to
go listen to and I think you can buy the
CDs too, so check that out.
Speaker 2 (47:42):
We'll check it out.
Speaker 1 (47:42):
Okay, Well, if you want to know more about Musak,
just start listening and loving. Just just don't prejudge. How
about that? And since I said don't prejudge everybody, that
means it's time for listener male.
Speaker 2 (47:57):
I'm gonna call this from Lauren. Hey, guys, a man
walks down the street and says, why am I soft
in the middle? The rest of my life is so hard?
Oh wait a minute, Sorry.
Speaker 1 (48:07):
What a perfect email for this one.
Speaker 2 (48:09):
I was reading my forearm tattoo by accident. Hey, guys,
been listening to stuff you should know for a few years.
Off and turn up the volume and play an episode
while I cooked dinner. My seven year old daughter Lila
used to complain, oh, you're listening to this again. But
I recently caught her singing the beat to the intro music,
and she'll casually mention things she's heard from time to time.
I suspect she's fond of the animal episodes. Anyway, you'll
(48:33):
jokingly sometimes say Jerry, well, you have to edit that.
You're gonna have to edit that part out, and it
has me curious how often things are cut from an
episode and why bad jokes too long? Have you ever
had to completely redo one? I think it'd be really
interesting to know, and I bet Lilah would find it
encouraging since she likes to make videos of herself singing
and dancing for the record, y'all make it effortless and
(48:56):
see effortless and it's always a joy to listen to.
That is Lauren from Montablo, Alabama, and she said, yes that. Yeah,
you're probably right.
Speaker 1 (49:06):
You put a little too much mustard on there.
Speaker 2 (49:09):
She says, ps, how cool if a mom would I
be if my daughter heard her names on the podcast?
Speaker 1 (49:13):
Yeah? Cool?
Speaker 2 (49:13):
So there you go, Lauren and Lilah. The answer is.
Speaker 1 (49:18):
Very little gets edited out, just the singing and dancing.
Speaker 2 (49:22):
Like that siren in the background.
Speaker 1 (49:23):
We'll probably just leave that into proven leave that in.
Speaker 2 (49:26):
No, we don't edit a lot out occasionally, like we
found out when we said this before. Early on, we
left in the words stumbles and the ums and the
uzz and just because it's a conversation and we didn't
want to make it seem too scripted because it's not,
or canned because it's not. And so we just left
that stuff in there. And the only time, like like
(49:48):
I think today you had to look something up real quick.
But that doesn't happen much.
Speaker 1 (49:51):
Yeah, I had to poke my head out of the
studio and look at my record collection to come up
to Evans name.
Speaker 2 (49:56):
So I mean that's gone now, but very little is
edit it out. It's especially after this many years. It's
we're not one take wonders, but it's Cherry doesn't have
the harness job in the world.
Speaker 1 (50:06):
You know, we've taken it easy on her for years. Yeah, yeah,
that's about it, Chuck. I can't think of anything else
we really added out.
Speaker 2 (50:16):
But that's not to say that shows that are heavily
edited and varies kind of scripty and slick, like there's
a room for those two. Oh yeah, we're not the
only way to do it now.
Speaker 1 (50:27):
We're like the Musac of podcasts. There's other people who
are all like the Ted NuGen of podcasts, and there's
room for both.
Speaker 2 (50:33):
Yeah, like Roman Mars, the Ted NuGen of podcasting.
Speaker 1 (50:35):
That's right, man, that guy's always wearing like a studded
leather wrist band and stuff.
Speaker 2 (50:40):
I keep waiting on Roman to text me and being
like you guys are consistently talking smack about me.
Speaker 1 (50:45):
He doesn't listen, and no one he knows listens listens.
That's impossible, So who is that? Lila and Lauren correct nice. Well,
thank you very much for writing in hope. We answered
your question, and if you want to get in touch
with us, like Lila and Lauren did, you can send
us an email. Send it off to stuff podcast at
(51:08):
iHeartRadio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the
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