Inflicted listening redux

Mixtapes, deleted scenes, field notes, pathologies

I’ve been really gratified by the response to my recent piece for the Paris Review about the soundtrack at CVS. Profuse thanks to everyone who read, shared, etc. This little sketch has been many years in the making. I’ve been rehearsing my apologia for CVS music mentally since I was a teenager. A few months ago I heard a Natalie Imbruglia song I had never heard before outside the store and starting thinking with a bit more focus about the whole weird scene.

One thing that I’ve learned from reader comments—see, for example, this thoughtful piece by Rob Horning, whose writing I’ve long admired—is that “CVS BANGERS,” which I reference in the essay in its form as a Spotify playlist, is something of a minor internet cult object. CVS BANGERS, it turns out, was originally a group of mixes created by DJ Hennessy Youngman, alter ego of artist Jayson Musson, and shared on Mixcloud. They are wonderfully strange artifacts. While the Spotify playlist is a rote ordering of songs, Musson’s mixes interpolate radio-DJ voiceovers and fragments of found audio. These framing elements often convey a sense of penumbral violence just out of focus: one mix opens with a clip of Liam Neeson’s much-memed promise of revenge from Taken, before segueing abruptly into “Sweet Child O’ Mine.” Later, “Eye of the Tiger” is interrupted to mourn the death of Game of Thrones character Oberyn Martell. A later mix bears the ominous subtitle “Antifascist blues at the end of the world.”

Deleted scenes

Originally, I had imagined that my piece would try to catalog, in very abbreviated form, the respective sonic environments of many retail/food chains. This turned out to be too much for a short essay to bear—especially one that ultimately tries to focus on one particular place. Here’s a paragraph from an early version that didn’t make it into the final piece:

In other places, things have gotten a little weird. One Bay-Area café/juice bar chain has started to favor the active-rock stylings of Three Doors Down. “Cool Kids,” an alt-pop earworm by Metric tribute band Echosmith, has worked its way into heavy rotation on the otherwise all-classic-rock-all-the-time playlist at Guitar Center, as if someone up in upper management had Googled “guitar band + women” in a panic. Starbucks does not seem to bother with all the restrained singer-songwriter vibes and lite world music anymore. I recently heard “Gasolina” at my local store, at something approaching club volume. It struck me as the perfect soundtrack for a store that has abandoned the dream of being a “third place” type hangout and embraced its new role as an anonymous node in the app-ordering economy. People walk in, grab their mobile order, and leave without saying a word. “Gasolina” presides over this speedup, even as it tells customers effectively to get out.

This is one of those gathering-steam grafs that one writes when one is trying to find a way into a piece. The observations are all true, but they’re treated in a slightly flip or callous way. At the level of flavor, the paragraph encourages ridicule rather than curiosity. Still, its content does resonate with a sense that Musson picks up on and amplifies in his mixtapes: in so many public sonic environments, especially since the relaxation of most COVID protocols, the vibes are majorly off.

Field notes

I’ve been feeling this sense of sonic off-ness especially this past week. Even CVS, which is usually dependable, has been playing some real dreck—though I did hear the Traveling Wilburys’ “Handle with Care” there; a true gem. My local Starbucks was playing classic Gaga at crushing volume. At a brewery I tried to write at, we heard “Margaritaville” (R.I.P. Jimmy Buffett), “Shake it Off,” Avril Lavigne’s “What the Hell,” and more classic Gaga. There was something malevolent about this playlist that I struggle to describe. I put on my headphones, which I have been trying to do less.

I sometimes wish I could un-notice this stuff. I think I am a likely sufferer from misophonia, a heightened and often viscerally negative sensitivity to specific sounds. For most of my life this has manifested as a feeling of overpowering anger that would wash over me whenever someone made smacking sounds while chewing. In more recent years the sensitivity has expanded to a broader range of mouth sounds. Now whenever I hear someone talking with a certain heavy vocal pressure or cutting timbre my attention is completely waylaid. I cannot focus on anything else. Just today, this happened to me at a café. The owner of this voice happened to be talking about how the Bible was written by a bunch of old white men. This is obviously wrong, but the content didn’t bother me at all. It’s the bare scraping of the sound that wrenches its way into my brain and refuses to let me go.

Maybe my obsession with store soundtracks is the happy obverse of these experiences of unaccountable rage. Some of my most vivid memories are of times when the exact right song was inflicted on me in a public or sort-of-public space. These songs, or sometimes pieces of songs, seized me with the same force as the loud chewers and resonant talkers. The Outfield’s “Your Love” over breakfast at a diner in New Hampshire—the sparkle of those guitars!—Belle and Sebastian’s “The Boy with the Arab Strap” over GRE prep books at a coffee shop in New Orleans, Ashlee Simpson’s “Pieces of Me” at my local liquor store. Even the pieces of corporate flotsam, the ones that barely rise to the level of songs, leave their mark. Pretty much every day I find myself subvocally humming a song my local airport commissioned to instruct passengers about COVID precautions: “Thanks for choosing SJC / Here’s some things you can do for me….” A sliver of the Home Depot commercial guitar riff has lodged itself in some deep reptilian layer of my consciousness. Ten years ago, I swear the NFL ran a radio commercial for their mobile app that featured a shouty jingle to the effect of “Football at breakfast / Football at lunch / Football at couples therapy.” No archival proof of this exists, but the words echo on. I still use them to check my mic whenever I play a show where I have to sing.