When I was a kid, there was music you heard in department and grocery stores as well as in elevators that you heard nowhere else on earth. It had/has a name, Muzak (often with a lower case m) and it is very much more than some random collection of background sounds while you do your shopping, as I discovered in the early seventies when I authored a research paper on it for Dr. Budd at the Rutgers School of Communication (got a decent grade as I recall, too).
Now, when I visit my local Stop & Shop I'm as likely to hear The Clash's Police and Thieves as I am some nearly forgotten strings and things rendition of the Yellow Rose of Texas. I tell myself it's because I shop in really hip grocery stores but just as likely it's the people who run those stores are my age, and even if we went to different high schools together, we all grew up listening to the same music which means, for better or for worse, everyone else is gonna grow up listening to the same music no matter how old or young they are.
I'm not sure that's a good thing in much the same way as I'm never going to believe Motley Crue should be considered classic rock, or that we even need 'classic rock radio stations,' be it over the air or on satellite. Not because I don't love me some classic Beatles or Stones (a double dollop, yes please!) but rather because there are just so many minutes in an hour and hours in a day and when you fill them up with U2 or The Police, the bands who are struggling to be the next U2 or The Police, or Whatever never get heard, so they never get purchased so they never become successful enough to end up as the soundtrack to my journey down the produce aisle.
As Yossarian asked in Catch-22, 'where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?' I don't have a clue. Don't laugh! I'm being serious about this. And I'm not alone.
Support local music, of all flavors and stripes, where you live and work. It really is one of the wonders of the world.
-bill kenny
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