Starbucks MusicWhy do wimpy indie balladeers sound good with a tall latte?

Remarks from the Fray:

The point of Starbuck's is to pretend you are comfortable, that you are smart enough, and you are pretty enough, and gosh darn it, people like you. You don't want to be so smart you don't like Beck, or too pretty to like Joni Mitchell, or too likeable to like Alanis, however. But what you can buy on a cd isn't the same as you will be listening to in the genetically engineered edginess of the store itself...so expect five Maroon 5 tunes for every Beastie Boys, if any.

I don't mind. I bought a Ray Charles cd at Starbucks. It has been on the front seat of my Saturn Ion for over a year. Oh yeah, Saturn Ion, Starbucks, the whole bag of chips.

Not incidentally, in the Hall of Reflexive Infinite Regress Media sweepstakes, a podcast about starbucks cds on Slate gets four of five stars. Now, if you could compress the podcast to a ringtone for downloading, you would take the gold.

--zeitguy

(To reply, click here.)

I want to reject Starbucks: I don't like the parasitical way they enter a neighborhood, driving out local businesses; I don't like their deals with exploitative coffee growers, and the way they co-opted and then undermined the Fair Trade movement; I don't like the precious, faux-bohemian design of their shops; and I don't like the way they steam milk well past the scalding point, giving their lattes an unpleasant carbon aftertaste.

But I'm finding it impossible to avoid occasionally patronizing Starbucks. They're just too darn convenient, offering drinkable coffee, wi-fi and other amenities in communities that lack them. My justification mechanism is in full gear, producing the following line: most independent coffee shops aren't any better on labor, political, aesthetic or gastronomic issues than Starbucks is. Indeed, as was pointed out on the podcast, they're all playing the same music.

A generation ago it was classical music; now it's Sonic Youth. It's interesting that Angelique Kidjo, Ray Charles, Bob Dylan, Buena Vista Social Club and the occasional White Stripes song now have the same relationship to the dominant culture that Vivaldi, Bach, Mozart and Handel did in the eighties. At that time, Baroque music played on "period instruments" represented freshness, taste, clean lines, and the expectation of shared values and education levels with one's fellow espresso-sippers. See, it couldn't be just any classical music--Rachmaninoff or Puccini would be too crass--it would be like playing Madonna or Whitney Houston. But the occasional Beethoven piece is fine despite its rough edges, because it's canonical, like Ray Charles.

But now classical music has gone the way of croissants: they're still there, relics of the past, but fewer and fewer people are eating them. Now they're eating individually wrapped Rice Krispies treats and listening to the music they heard when they encountered Rice Krispies for the first time. That combination of comfort food/cultural identification with the worldly/chic trappings of espresso and afro-pop---I guess that's why Starbucks is a success. Who needs local businesses--we're all just one big tasteful global community.

--kalaresh

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So many of the "straight down the center" choices on Starbucks CDs are indeed old favorites of old guys, like me. Only now this "Best of" stuff is on CD or played through the endless tape of digital radio. Great. If I can afford to pay the outlandish prices Starbucks charges for a cup of coffee, I can afford to finally cover some of the best I have on tape and vinyl by buying a shiny CD. But one more price increase on that cup of Joe and I'm outta there.

By the way, just about every cultural commentator I read or listen to slips into "generationalese." Whether they chop and dice people by decades or music styles and categories, little chunks of time often stand-in for true analysis for what's being heard, seen or read. Is this valid?

I don't know. Here's my shot at it.

Everyone is deserving to live in a context of their own making. Take Starbucks music. I tend to give it an OK, or at least a pass, because the vocalists are generally respectful in regard to the lyrics they are singing. Is this just the yearnings of an old guy (me) looking for, hoping for, dreaming of a more coherent, understandable world? When rap, or the next new thing that branches off from rap comes on whatever box I'm listening to it seems to provide word sounds that are so self-consciously stylized and over-produced that these musicians might as well be playing a Beatles song backward. I heave mightily to find content, meaning to match the beat–almost always without success.

I look around and see head-bobbing. Personally, I tap my toe, you head-bob, and so it goes. I can't really think when my brain is physically pistoning. But that's just me.

So the smooth singers of contemporary ditties may not have much in the way of "edge" or "danger" or "out there" or, to find safer ground vocabulary-wise, "whatever," but they do honor a lyric, enunciate and give the listener a chance to think about or sink into–a reverie. Hey, when you're seventy, you're angry about Bush and the insanity of war. Rap, etc, etc. just doesn't speak to those issues, or if/when it does: I'm listening but you're not communicating.

So, how's that for "generationalese?" I know, I know, "they" just didn't understand me either back in the fifties when I was tuning into Al Benson on WGES in Chicago and paying a thin dime for a cup of Joe.

--hidaily

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(7/3)

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