Elevator Music: A Surreal history of Muzak, Easy-Listening, and Other Moodsong by Joseph Lanza
I’m a huge fan of quirky history, so I thought this book and I were going to be fast friends.
Oh. My. Gosh. I hated this freaking book.
What really sucked me in was the book designer. The cover has this blue photo of a whole bunch of men in gray flannel suits from the 50’s with little comment bubbles coming out of their mouth, all reading, “Fascinating!” from a whole bunch of different critics. Then you open it up and every chapter begins with groovy martini lounge graphics. How could this book be boring?
Because it’s bad history writing, that’s how. I read better papers coming out of History 103.
First and foremost, there is absolutely no thesis to this book. The authors bio says that Lanza is a “writer who concentrates on ‘speculative’ non-fiction.” Whatever that means. But he’s sure not an historian. Good history interprets the events, puts them into a larger context, extracts some meaning or precedent. This book is a timeline in written form, full of page after page of playlists, names of audio engineers, discographies. There were SO many times he could have come out with something really interesting. One chapter begins with a few anecdotes of how background music has has had a deleterious effect on listeners, including one woman who used to have seizures when easy-listening was played. Instead of dwelling on this bizarre and fascinating phenomenon, Lanza uses that as a segue to discuss the timeline of one specific man’s career.
There were some fascinating things to read about, but every single time they are mentioned and dropped without further development. Bonneville, a company owned by us Mormons, was a competitor to Muzak for a while. This intrigued me and I wondered if he was going to speculate on why a religion would want to get into this type of music? No, he didn’t. He moved on with the timeline.
He mentioned how carefully Muzak’s programmers arranged songs to take into consideration the time of day and even within one hour to increase productivity and not distract. Did he fully flesh this out or discuss the ethical questions of mood control? No. Did he comment on the fact that Muzak’s philosophy has changed over time and they now include vocals when that was strictly forbidden in the early days? No. He moved on with the timeline.
Lanza’s writing reminds me of a doctor character in a movie I just watched. He wants to be a researcher and considers his interactions with the patients to be a waste of time and consequently has no bedside manner. Lanza has no bedside manner. He never takes the time to explain who Percy Faith was, we’re just supposed to know. He describes some of the music as if he’s writing a musicology text, not a piece of non-fiction, we’re just supposed to understand. He doesn’t flesh out his timeline to address some of the more interesting developments, he just pats us on the head and continues with his research.
It’s a real shame, because there is so much here that could have been fascinating if he’s ignored the precious timeline and just focused on where the meat was. Muzak was responsible for incredible technological advances in the field of recording; there’s a complicated relationship between people and background music: many dismiss it as shlock, and yet the demand for it increases daily; it changed the way songwriter royalties are protected; how do popular artists feel about it?; all of these subjects I learned about through this book, but they were all mentioned, with at best one or two anecdotes, before Lanza pressed on with the timeline. It was maddening.
And. AND! Cardinal sin of historians! There were no citations! Every once in a great while there’d be something at the bottom of a page, but no real footnotes, a HUGE bibliography full of interviews and monographs that were not once cited in a proper sense throughout the book, but no endnotes, nothing.
And there was no conclusion. Not in any of the individual chapters, nor at the end of the book. In once case, the chapter ended at the end of an interview with a Muzak programmer. It just stopped. No interpretation, no context, no repeat of the thesis -BECAUSE THERE WAS NO THESIS – bleck. I’m amazed I made it through.
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