Tuesday, December 9, 2008
Restaurants The annual destruction of aural ambiance
Posted by Cliff Bostock @cliffbostock on Tue, Dec 9, 2008 at 8:02 PM
I'm at Starbucks and I'm in agony. It's not because I just spilled half a cup of espresso on my shirt. It's not even the view. I can tolerate the gold-foil bags of coffee stenciled with Christmas trees.
What I can't handle is the constantly playing Christmas music. I've been ranting about the crime of broadcasting holiday music in stores and restaurants for as long as I can remember. And no matter how much I complain, people just keep playing the stuff. What's wrong with them?
Over the years, I've asked many people if they liked Christmas music and I don't recall anyone enthusiastically saying "yes." I've asked myself what it is about the music that makes my skin crawl. Among the things I've come up with:
1. It's repetitious. The genre is limited, so you hear the same songs over and over. This results in many misguided "artists" attempting cuter or more emotionally dramatic interpretations. Everyone seems to think its his obligation to make an Xmas album.
2. It's an insidious form of cultural conditioning. You grow up hearing this stuff everywhere and by the time you are a teenager, your lips move automatically when a speaker blares Frank Sinatra singing "Oh by gosh by golly, it's time for mistletoe and holly." It turns you into a holiday pod person.
3. It evokes mandatory nostalgia. It's so sickly sentimental for the most part that people are often thrown into the past and a yearning for the most wonderful time of the year, even though there may have been nothing wonderful about it. In other words, it contributes to seasonal depression. It makes you wish you were a sunbeam for Jesus and feel like an outsider because you are not or don't want to be one.
4. It's a tool of fundamentalists to try to compel the rest of us to fear for our souls, even though it actually performs as Christian aversion therapy. The Mormon Tabernacle Choir is holding the gun of salvation at your head. OK, maybe that's overstating it.
If nothing else, it just ruins ambiance. It can be a restaurant where someone paid the Johnson Studio a gazlllion billion dollars to -- I don't know -- recreate Versailles. But if you fill it with "Have a Holly Jolly Christmas," it instantly becomes a trailer park.
Do your part and tell restaurant owners to turn the stuff off.
(Top image courtesy of neuralgourmet.com, second image courtesy of Big Sinister.)
Comments (10)
Showing 1-10 of 10
its funny... I was just telling my co-worker that now that I am no longer a waitron I can finally begin enjoying Christmas music again. As long as I don't have it constantly drilled into my head I can deal with a little bit of "Jingle Bell Rock"
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I LOVE Christmas music! And by Christmas music, I mean traditional stuff sung by really good choirs, Handel's Messiah, etc. etc. The crap they play in stores is fun maybe the first time you hear it and painful for the next 3 months it's on rotation. I don't know how anyone in retail survives the season.
I enthusiasticaly enjoy holiday music, but I get seriously sick of hearing the same ones over and over when there's *so much* good stuff out there that never gets the time of day. Check out A John Waters Christmas - now that's the good stuff.
I smell what you're cooking, Cliff. Last week I bribed a bartender: "Gee, I'd love to stay for an after dinner cocktail, but if I have to listen to the Jackson 5 singing the Little Drummer Boy, I'm going to go postal". He changed it, and thanked me profusely for asking, as he hated it as much as I did.
Y'all are just listening to the wrong Christmas music, and the local businesses are not being creative with what is available. In a tradition my Dad started, I have made Christmas CD compilations for friends over the past few years. I do not include any "traditional" songs by traditional pop stars, but rather music by artists like the Flaming Lips, Kate Bush, Charles Brown (the late Blues singer) and Charlie Brown (Vince Guaraldi's work - the BEST Christmas music), El Vez and Elvis P. (deep cuts from his Christmas albums), Allison Krauss & Alan Jackson, Jethro Tull, Emerson, Lake, & Palmer... etc. Everyone loves them, and they are a much needed change from the ususual drivel. But I agree, the crap played in stores and retaurants is annoying as hell.
One major point you're missing is that not everyone celebrates Christmas. As a member of a different faith, I feel that shoving your religious music down my throat is extremely offensive.
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