To Like It Is Almost The Same As To Recognize It

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Whereas in the 1930s Muzak was essentially the same as popular music and radio, by the 1940s it had gone its own way, creating a different level of attention and its own medium. Muzak had pioneered the use of long playing 33 1/3 rpm records in order to create more seamless soundscapes for its functional music. In contrast, RCA Victor’s 1949 introduction of the smaller and less expensive 45rpm disc format allowed popular hits and youth-oriented rock music to be taken almost anywhere and listened to over and over, analyzed repeatedly.

One of the most important consumer objects of the twentieth century, record players helped to create radically new communities based on consumption and consumer identity, rather than work itself. After a tremendous period of economic and technological growth from the first two world wars, a surplus of income allowed teenagers unprecedented freedom from familial restraints and societal mores. As the first purely consumer market, youth culture relied heavily on the purchasing and playback of music to express itself and create identity. Young listeners would take apart songs, transcribing lyrics and music and playing the songs themselves. The resulting rock and roll music of the 1950s was the most dramatic singular youth culture movement in history, cutting across class.

Muzak was apprehended through distraction whereas rock and roll was the subject of constant, engaged attention. This marked a schism. Whereas rock and roll became increasingly abrasive and strove for shock value, Muzak desired not to be heard. Unlike rock, popular with young people but hated by their elders, by the early 1950s Muzak consciously eliminated genres that were perceived as objectionable.

Architectural gestures that signal “individuality,” such as those of Art Deco, Postmodernism, or Deconstructivism require difference or shock-value in order to be effective. None of these gestures can be sustained indefinitely. Muzak lasted much longer than any twentieth century architectural movement precisely because it is neither static nor physical.

Theodor W. Adorno may well have outlined the program for postwar Muzak in his 1938 “On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening” when he states that since contemporary music is “perceived purely as background,” it no longer has anything to do with taste: “To like it is almost the same as to recognize it.” In a world of completely identical choices, recognition itself has become impossible. Preference, Adorno suggests, “depends merely on biographical details or on the situation in which things are heard.” Adorno contends that active listening is at odds with contemporary music as it would reveal the banality of its arrangement. Instead, of attention, Adorno suggests, contemporary music is based on mindless repetition of certain material and performers.

next: Muzak Enables the Culture of Horizontality