That Seattle Muzak Sound

In the early 1990s, Sarah DeBell was a musician living in New York City, waiting tables to make ends meet.

They were playing Nirvana Never Mind over the house speakers.

It was just

like, what is this?

It was just heavy and driving and powerful and pop.

I just loved the music.

Nirvana, led by its angel face lead singer, Kurt Cobain, released its second album, Nevermind, in September of 1991.

Months later, it would replace Michael Jackson's Dangerous on the top of the billboard charts.

The type of music Nirvana made, grunge music, had arrived.

Nirvana was from Seattle, which was also home to the grunge bands Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Mud Honey, and Alice in Chains.

These groups were united by a sound, a city, and an anti-corporate sensibility, which didn't stop companies from immediately seizing on grunge as a great way to sell things.

I always loved the music because the music itself was authentic.

But then you see it on TV commercials.

They'd have these models with flannel shirts tied around their waists and Doc Martins.

All of a sudden I'm thirsty.

Give me a ball eye.

So I go to the refrigerator.

I can't say embalm.

I just know how it's going to taste.

Was just like me rolling my eyes and saying, oh, here we go again.

Sarah, who had moved to Seattle herself by this point, decided she wanted to lampoon the co-optation and commercialization of grunge.

So she started recording covers of popular grunge songs, but in a style that seemed to be antithetical to grunge, one that just sounded corporate and soulless.

Easy listening music.

If you know this song, this cover is very funny.

It makes me laugh every time I hear it.

But the joke is a pointed one.

Grunge was just an instrumentation away from being everything that it purported to hate.

Sarah called the album Grunge Light, spelled L-I-T-E.

The homemade cassettes had a couple in flannel and Doc Martens on the cover.

And the tagline was a whole big buttload of easy listening favorites.

Pretty quickly, it got noticed, earning a couple of short segments on MTV News.

Grunge Light, an appallingly perky post-musak synthesizer dismemberment of actual songs by such local bands as Nirvana, Soundgarden, and Temple of the Dog, among others.

A demonstration of how easily good music can be transformed into Drek.

Here for yourself.

It even found its way to Kurt Cobain, who mentioned it in an interview shortly before his death.

What is your comment on Muzak being here in Seattle?

Oh, oh, I thought you were talking about the Muzak from that they, this Muzak record that they put out of Grunge Light.

Oh, the Grunge Light.

Oh, what do you think of that?

It's my girl.

Sure.

It's the last

chapter on the book of Grunge.

Oh, my God.

So this is the place where most Muzak comes from?

Seattle is the capital of Muzak.

Thanks for letting me know about that.

You thought it was Grunge?

No.

It turns out that Sarah had brought together two things that were already connected.

In the 1990s, as the world was coming to know Seattle for its sound, there was another sound based in Seattle that was already known far and wide: music.

And this, the pleasant background music of a dentist's waiting room.

And this, the noisy and authentic howl of Gen X torment.

Though they could not be more different, they're also more connected than you might think.

This is Decodering, a show about cracking cultural mysteries.

I'm Willip Haskin.

When you hear the term musak, maybe you think of some corny, tinkly tunes, the kind you sometimes still hear when a major corporation puts you on hold.

But Muzak isn't just a generic term for elevator music.

It's a company that was one of the most important and innovative musical institutions of the 20th century, the first business to insert music into all modes of American commercial life.

In today's episode, Dakota Rings producer Benjamin Frisch is going to take us through the story of Musak, a former cultural powerhouse turned laughingstock that, despite its diminished reputation, is still having the last laugh.

So, today, on Decodering, what happened to Muzak?

Listen.

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Dakota Rings producer Benjamin Frisch has been wanting to tell this story for years.

I've always been fascinated by musak, but it took a long time for me to take it seriously.

Because by the time I was a conscious person, music was already a punchline.

Isn't that Mrs.

Robinson playing on the music there?

That's terrible, isn't it?

That's from a 1986 Saturday Night Live sketch.

In it, a young Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel sell their souls to the devil in exchange for fame and fortune.

At the end of the sketch, the devil, played by John Lovett, steps into an elevator to escort Paul Simon, playing himself to hell.

You recognize that song, Mr.

Simon?

Yes, it's the Musak version of The Sound of Silence.

It's terrible.

Well, let's get out of here.

Come on.

I'm afraid that's not possible, Mr.

Simon.

What do you mean?

You see,

we're already there.

There?

Listening to Muzak is hell.

You get the joke.

But that is not at all how Muzak started.

Communications are the nerves of an army.

The Signal Corps is responsible for army communications.

Muzak was founded by a World War I Army veteran named George Owen Square, who had an illustrious career in the Signal Corps, the part of the Army that was charged with creating communication systems for military operations.

When he left the Army, he decided to apply his knowledge to radio.

Today we think of radio signals as being completely wireless, but in the 1920s, this technology was still relatively new, and Square thought that he could compete with wireless radio by introducing wired radio.

He created a company called Wired Radio Incorporated to serve homes in the Cleveland area with wired music and news bulletins.

Square was wrong about being able to compete with wireless radio, but he found a market for his product anyway.

Not family homes, but businesses that wanted to play music for their customers, uninterrupted by radio commercials.

And in 1934, shortly before his death, Square landed on the fateful name for his product.

Among the major companies of his day, Square was especially impressed by the Eastman Kodak Company.

And so he combined the term music with Kodak, and voila, Musak was born.

Musak provided clients with 17 and a half hours of music a day, piped in and played over loudspeakers.

Songs like this one, Solitude, performed by the Dorsey Brothers Orchestra.

Musak turned background music into an industrial commodity like heating oil or electricity delivered by a single convenient provider.

It was also founded on a radical insight for corporate America that music has a concrete effect on how we behave and feel.

It just used this insight in a pretty unradical way to keep clients and workers calm and content with mellow renditions of songs they already knew.

Solitude, the song you're hearing, was a jazz standard and was a recognizable song to Americans at the time.

In the late 1930s, Musak moved its headquarters from Cleveland to New York City and began exploring the idea of having different channels and different moods for different settings.

It started to designate what kinds of songs could be played at specific times.

No tangos after 12.30 a.m., for example.

By the 1940s, Muzak had adopted the slogan, Muzak while you work for increased efficiency, which was a well-timed motto for a country ramping up production for World War II.

The war helped turn Muzak into a commercial and cultural institution, both in the factories and offices that played its music, but also for the military itself, where it provided music and training instructions inside of military institutions.

That's Musak's Two Hearts in Three Quarters Time from 1946, another recognizable song for mid-century Americans.

Post-war, Musak became the single largest consumer of phone lines in the world, using them to transmit music to Bell Telephone, the Federal Reserve, Reserve, Prudential Life Insurance, and Palmolive, among other major companies.

And the public at the time, according to Muzak at least, seemed to love it.

On a questionnaire, only 1.6% considered background music a nuisance, while an overwhelming 83% preferred it to a silent environment.

Not everyone was a fan.

The avant-garde artist John Cage famously hated the way Muzak eliminated silence from the environment and developed the idea for his music-free composition, 4 Minutes 33 Seconds in Response.

But it's not surprising that Muzak was generally popular.

It sounded a lot like popular music.

That's the 1951 Musak version of a song called Stardust, one of the most covered songs of the 20th century, here performed by Ralph Flanagan.

I don't think there's anything that notably distinguishes this from a maybe more famous band from this time period playing a similar arrangement.

Kirk Hamilton is a musician and composer and the host of the podcast Strong Songs.

Compare the Muzak version with another, much more famous version of Stardust by Louis Armstrong.

My memory of love remains.

Mama, love rebrain.

You can hear that it's different in some pretty notable ways.

There are vocals in Armstrong's version, and none in Musak's.

Musak's recordings were always instrumental because they thought vocals pulled the song too far into the foreground.

Hearing the Musak version again, you can tell how the sonic edges have been sanded down.

There's maybe a little bit less spark there, so it never reaches that point of sort of explosive, you know, unpredictability that a jazz band that was really trying to do jazz music more as an art would do.

The whole thing is just kept at kind of a low simmer.

But even if the musak version is a little less challenging, it isn't unrecognizable or unskilled.

And this was true of most Musak songs, which were often performed by bands and orchestras that were also cutting commercial records.

And the results of Musak's recordings were popular.

So popular that in the 1950s, Musak had to start contending with copycats, other services offering background music to clients, plus the rise of easy listening records for the home.

In order to keep distinguishing itself from its competition, Musak leaned into what it was already doing, productivity music, or as they called it, functional music.

They'd already experimented with programming specific kinds of music at different times to lift moods, but now they wanted to make their findings seem concrete, technical, scientific, ish.

You can't just play soft tunes all day that would put people to sleep.

You can't play jumpy tunes all day because that would have the opposite effect and that would defeat the purpose.

Joseph Lanza is the author of multiple books, including Easy Listening Acid Trip and Elevator Music, a surreal history of music, easy listening, and other mood song, which was indispensable while recording this episode.

They decided to have 15-minute blocks throughout the day, starting with milder music and working up the tempo, working up the rhythm, changing the instruments.

And they would do that throughout the day in 15-minute increments.

That's a musac recording of Moritat from Three Penny Opera.

You might know it as Mac the Knife, and it's the kind of song that would have been programmed into one of these 15-minute blocks.

They gave these increments a name, stimulus progression.

The science around stimulus progression was pretty fuzzy, but it sounded reasonable.

Sure, well-paced music could keep workers on track.

Stimulus progression became the company's most important product.

They marketed the hell out of it, running ads with slogans like, they're more efficient with muzak in the air.

Throughout the 1950s, musak was only getting bigger and more popular.

It was installed in Eisenhower's White House and LBJ's ranch.

It seemed like muzak could go on forever.

But all songs end.

eventually.

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This song is a cover of The Beatles All My Loving by the group at the Holly Ridge Strings, who specialized in lush string versions of popular songs released on commercial records.

It was released just months after the original came out in the U.S.

in 1964.

This song came out as Beatlemania was sweeping America, but the Holly Ridge Strings version of the song was still so popular that it managed to crack the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart.

They would later go on to release five, five full albums of instrumental Beatles songs.

Today we think of songs like these as covers and the Beatle song as the original, but people didn't always think in such stark terms.

In the 40s and 50s, you'd have different versions of the same RB song or the same pop song or the same country song competing with each other on the charts.

Carl Wilson is Slate's music critic and the author of Let's Talk About Love, a book about Celine Dion and our relationship with taste.

Part of what made music old-fashioned seeming in a sort of 70s, 80s, 90s context was that it ignored that revision where all of a sudden the performer and the songwriter were intended by some kind of romantic artist myth to be the same person.

What happens starting in the 1960s, thanks to acts like The Beatles and Bob Dylan, is that young people begin to hear that Holly Ridge string song and think, hey, that's a Beatles song.

Weird.

Initially, Musak didn't pay this change much mind.

It didn't have to.

It was wildly successful and omnipresent in everyday life.

It served 43 of the 50 largest industrial companies in America.

It was even reportedly played on the Apollo 11 mission to help keep Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong calm.

But in retrospect, this was a crucial moment for Musak.

A whole new way of thinking about music was on the rise, and it would soon become mainstream.

And muzak was not in line with the new mainstream at all.

If in decades past they more or less swam in line with the currents of popular music, now they started to actively swim against them.

It's most notable in their adaptations of pop songs.

They were still recording standards by composers like Cole Porter and George Gershwin at this time, but they would look at the singles charts and see what they could reasonably adapt.

Harder rock and roll songs were ignored, but they would take on softer tracks from groups like Simon and Garfunkel and the Beatles, and they sounded and felt really different from the originals.

Take this song, Everybody's Talking by Harry Niels, which was made famous in the X-rated best picture winner, Midnight Cowboy.

Nilsson's version is a beautiful rolling tune, but its lyrics are about alienation and estrangement, and that contrast gives the song so much of its power.

It's an upbeat song, but it's not really a happy one.

Now here's the Muzak version.

I think that this is a nicely arranged piece of music in its own right.

It's swinging and fun, but if you know the Nilsson version at all, Muzak's recording seems inanely cheery and inauthentic, a corporate entity totally missing the point of the original.

This highlights another problem for Muzak in this era.

Muzak was the man.

The 1960s counterculture was notoriously disillusioned with authority, convention, and long-standing institutions, and Musak represented all three.

Moreover, the company had flaunted that its songs could help turn people into better worker bees.

It treated music like a product, as a functionality, just as young people were increasingly thinking about popular music as a form of self-expression, as saying something about who you are.

It's hard to say that Musak was ever cool, but I think it's safe to say that for younger people at this point, it became radically uncool.

For them, it didn't matter that the 1960s and 70s may have been Muzak's aesthetic peak.

Take this early 70s track, an original song composed for Muzak called Muzak on the Move, made at a time when their songs were incredibly thought-through.

The arrangements here are picked with care.

It's bouncy, it's fun, it's unusual, it's even a little bit moody.

I'd be so happy to hear this in a supermarket today.

But in the early 1970s, few people were listening to it like that.

Jane Jarvis, a Musak VP who composed this piece, said of this period: Lots of people condemned Muzak, but never really heard it.

To be fair, this has always been the point of music.

It was for the background.

You weren't really supposed to listen, not closely at least.

But now, even in the background, musak was starting to stand out.

The backlash was on.

Starting in the late 1960s, Rock critics, a new phenomenon themselves, began using musak as an insult in their reviews of rock albums with delicate, upbeat arrangements, like Love's 1967 cult classic Forever Changes album.

One critic said, like Musak in the Elevator, this album is elevated musak.

In 1971, John Lennon used Musak to insult his former bandmate, Paul McCartney, in the song, song, How Do You Sleep.

He sang, the sound you make is musak to my ears.

In the late 70s, Brian Eno would coin the term ambient music, in part to help distinguish his background music compositions from easy listening and musak.

Musicians like Joni Mitchell and Bruce Springsteen refused to license music to musak altogether.

Philip Glass trashed it, and at one point the hard rocker Ted Nugent threatened to buy the Musak company to put it out of business forever, calling it an evil force causing people to lapse into uncontrollable fits of blandness.

Compounding the problem of its plummeting reputation is that heading into the 1980s, Musak started to sound...

not so great.

If the music of the 1960s and 70s wasn't nearly as thin and chintzy as Musak's reputation would have you believe, by the 1980s, Musak was looking to cut corners.

First, they found cheaper musicians, and then they started using the synthesizer.

And it's hard to imagine a greater gift to the cost-conscious, easy-listening producer than the synthesizer, capable of mimicking other instruments in perfect time.

You started hearing fewer lush arrangements.

It became much cheaper, but also emptier.

Where the best music instrumentals seem like grandly sedate alternate universe versions of the original song, this version of 1983's Every Breath You Take by the Police sounds like it's being plinked out by a robot.

By the late 1980s then, musak seemed soulless, corporate, and lousy.

All things that were antithetical to what people thought good music was.

And nothing demonstrates this problem quite like Musak's encounter with Grunge.

Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

I lit the fuse and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

He's going the distance.

He was the highest paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, no, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

Now, Charlie's sober.

He's going to tell you the truth.

How do I present this with any class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

Aka Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.

So finally, we arrive in Seattle, Washington, where all the cultural tensions that have been building up around Musak since the 1960s become extremely plain to see.

Musak still has a huge client base, but it had changed hands multiple times during the 70s and found itself with a poor reputation and steeper competition.

By the 1980s, much of that competition was in Seattle.

One of these competitors, called Yesco, had noticed that the hippest restaurants were playing rock music as originally recorded.

It turned out the background music you could conduct your life to was a much larger category, sonically speaking, than Musak had ever imagined.

So Yesco made a then radical calculation.

Instead of selling Musak-style, easy-listening covers, Yesco would license original recordings, typical pop songs, to match the mood of a given establishment, the same way we hear music in most public spaces today.

In the early 1980s, Yesco rebranded itself as Yesko Foreground Music to distinguish itself from Musak's famous background music, and it was a success.

In the mid-1980s, it was purchased by the same conglomerate that had already purchased Musak, and they decided to merge the two businesses together.

Bruce Funkhauser ran Yesco's programming and production department.

I was pleased that we were Yesco, the Ford Round Music Company.

We were doing the opposite of what Musak was doing.

But they bought Musak and they bought us and they put us on top of Musak because we were growing so fast and Musak was just stagnating.

So our job was to drag Musak kicking and screaming into the late 20th century.

As part of the merger, Musak moved their headquarters from New York to Seattle and combined their their workforces.

Yesko was already a day job for a number of musicians and players in the burgeoning Seattle music scene, who now found themselves working under the Musak umbrella.

These musicians were inheritors of many of the ideas that first emerged in the 1960s.

People who thought of popular music as anti-authoritarian, authentic, change-making, expressive art.

The irony of working at Musak did not escape them.

Musak was the enemy, you know.

So I loved it.

It was the irony of my life that I should, suddenly my paycheck says musak.

Amy Denayo is a composer, multi-instrumentalist, and member of the Seattle Jazz Hall of Fame.

And she worked a day job in the programming department at Yesco and Muzak while making experimental music on the side.

I really didn't care for instrumental music or the concept of Simon's progression really at all.

I found it very insidious and evil.

But, you know, what can you do?

You need to work.

So there I was working.

Later, she'd cut a song inspired by her time there called Musak Blues.

That was my version of musak with a really syrupy saxophone.

Amy wasn't the only person in the Seattle music scene doing time at Muzak.

Mark Arm was a member of the band Green River, who would go on to form Mud Honey.

I mean, it was a shit job.

It was a shit job.

For the most part, I spent my time in this tiny little loud room inhaling toxic cleanser.

I think it's telling that the people who worked at the World Capital of Background Productivity Music weren't listening to Muzak on the job.

They played bands like Butthole Surfers, Television Personalities, and Dinosaur Jr.

on the boombox.

Someone brought through a group of prospective clients and of course like everyone in the duplication room is listening to the music of their choice so they actually put down a hammer on that like where you only got to listen to the music tapes and those

that was you know like soul-sucking they still got to listen to their music in the break room though the grand irony here is that the break room at music

worked as kind of a think tank for the Seattle music scene for a good couple of years.

Bruce Pabbitt is the founder of Subpop, the scrappy record label that would go on to release music by bands like Soundgarden, Mud Honey, and Nirvana.

He worked in the warehouse dealing with returned cassette tapes while managing subpop on the side.

I actually had boxes of subpop records underneath my desk.

And so when distributors would call me,

they would call Muzak.

And they would always be shocked to hear the receptionist say, hello, Muzak.

So in in a way, I really do have to thank Muzak for helping me get a start.

To be clear, Bruce hated Muzak.

It was the worst music imaginable.

One day, Bruce got passed a demo tape by his business partner at Subpop, Jonathan Ponnaman.

I brought it in and played it for Mark Arm from Mud Honey, and we spent some time kind of analyzing the tracks.

The first time I heard Nirvana's demo tape

was at Musak.

Mark Arm and I were not terribly impressed with the demo.

That was our honest opinion.

We thought Kurt had a good voice, but the songwriting was still

developing.

Jonathan Ponneman liked it though, and Subpop would eventually go on to release Nirvana's first album, Bleach.

Not so long after, Bruce scraped enough money to leave Musak.

Even though they were kind enough to throw a going-away party, I remember leaving some ridiculous note on the bulletin board.

May you two someday escape from Alcatraz or something like that, something really ridiculous.

But even as Bruce was getting out, other people wanted in.

People like Sarah DeBell, who you heard at the top of the show, and who created the Easy Listening Grunge Light album in the early 90s, with covers of songs like Nirvana Smells Like Peen Spirit.

By now, it's the early 90s, and Sarah knew that Grunge Light was never going to make her rich.

So, armed with her fresh skills as a composer of easy listening music, like so many other Seattle musicians, she applied for a day job at Musak.

I just sent them one of these cassettes.

She got a letter back, a firm no thank you.

There was also a real like, oh, we don't do that.

Oh, what do you, what do you think we are?

Sarah was way too late.

By the time she applied, Musak didn't want to sound like Grunge Light, in part because it was a chintzy-sounding parody record, I'm sure.

But even an elevated, fully orchestrated version of the same idea would have been behind the times for Musak.

By this point, Musak was trying all sorts of things to shake its reputation for being a musical alcatraz.

The business focused on foreground music and original original artist recordings, and it updated the sound of many of its instrumental songs, reportedly re-recording 5,000 of the ones in regular rotation in order to sound more contemporary and close to the originals.

Sometimes they got pretty close.

This music version of Fast Car, originally by Tracy Chapman, sounds like the original, except with Chapman's distinctive vocals replaced by an acoustic guitar.

But sometimes this new mandate seems to have made their music even stranger, like this Velveeta smooth 90s musak rendition of George Gershwin's Summertime, which I sort of love, but probably not for the reasons Muzak was going for.

But as hard as they tried, none of it really worked.

It's hard to listen to these songs and hear anything except

musak.

The style has become and remains a kind of sonic shorthand for an Ursat's empty product.

And what was once a brand name has become a curse.

The term musak started to seem like a perversion of the word music itself, itself, a perfect symbol for all the things people already hated about it.

A stand-in for bad music, an easy punchline on SNL, musical schlock.

For the rest of the 90s and into the 2000s, the company puttered along, with multiple owners trying and failing to make it work again.

Finally, in 2011, it was purchased by a new parent company that retired the name Musak.

But it's at this time, the 2010s, Musak's funeral hour, that Musak returns, transformed and arguably stronger than ever.

It turns out that even as we were mocking Musak out of business, we were coming around on its central premise, without even realizing it.

I'm not talking about what's playing in the grocery store, though chances are that was programmed like Musak.

I'm also not talking about what's playing in a chain retail outlet, even though that was probably calibrated much more finely than Musak ever was in order to move you through the store and encourage you to spend as much money as possible.

What I'm talking about is what you do at home.

I'm talking about how we're musacking ourselves.

The platforms would like us to think that everything is music or they sort of treat everything as if it has the potential to be.

Liz Palli is a freelance writer who writes on the streaming economy and how it shapes music.

Because a lot of listening isn't happening through the decision to like search for an artist or an album, but instead just kind of being like late night focus.

That sounds good to me.

Liz is talking about playlists.

When you open Spotify, the first thing you see isn't albums or artists, it's playlists.

Prominently, mood playlists, Feelin' Myself for getting pumped up, Mood Booster for getting happy, or Focus Flow to help you stay productive, filled with hip-hop instrumentals like this one, Backrest by Mama Gecko.

A playlist of relaxed, unobtrusive, instrumental music to work to.

Muzak would be jealous.

To be clear, I'm not shading playlists.

People want music to work to, to walk to, to cook dinner to, to listen to while scrolling through their phones.

And programming your own music is work, as Musak knew.

It's easier to just throw in a playlist and let it run in the background while you go about your business.

It's very convenient, and in some key ways, it's musak.

I'm not saying there are no differences, the most obvious being that this stuff doesn't sound like classic era musak or easy listening.

But the songs are calibrated to whatever emotion they're chasing.

Subdued instrumental hip-hop for studying, soaring pop songs for getting ready to go out, soft ambient tunes for yoga and meditation.

And these songs may have been created in conditions closer to Musak's ethos than you might realize.

Several years back, interviewed this producer who talked about how he would go into sessions with pop songwriters and pop musicians, and they would mention specific Spotify playlists, the vibe they wanted to write for.

like a late night playlist or a workout playlist or, you know, a yoga playlist, but also a party playlist.

Earlier this year, Spotify received a patent for a technology allowing them to recommend music to you based on your emotions and surroundings.

By using context clues, like the tone of your voice and crowd noise to tell if there's another person there or if you're having a party, Spotify wants to match music to your mood and environment without any input from you at all.

These playlists give us the functionality of music while allowing us to maintain the notions that first began in the 1960s, that the art that we consume is an authentic expression of our identities and ought to be made by real artists, even if the playlist you're listening to is filled up by interchangeable instrumental songs by bands you've never heard of.

Now that we're decades past the musical politics of the musak era, where hating or loving musak felt like a meaningful statement, I think it's worth trying to appreciate Musak's music for what it is.

Because to me, what it is is a lot more interesting than a lot of the sonic wallpaper you hear on so many chill-out playlists.

These sedate, occasionally baffling interpretations of popular songs are an artifact from a time when new and old ideas about pop music were still in competition.

And that produced music that is, if not cool, pretty fascinating.

But in order to appreciate Muzak, you have to do the one thing Muzak didn't expect you to do.

You have to listen to it.

This Muzak version of I Am Woman from the early 70s may be a bit odd, it may be a bit corny, but I love it.

Muzak is dead, but long live Muzak.

This is Decoder Ring.

I'm Benjamin Frisch.

And I'm Willip Haskin.

A very special thanks this episode to Joseph Lanza, whose expertise and book, Elevator Music, a surreal history of music, easy listening, and other mood song, was essential to researching and reporting this episode.

His newest book, Easy Listening Acid Trip, an elevator ride through 60s psychedelic pop, is also out now.

Also, thanks to Carlo McCormick, Jim Meyering, Bruce McHagan, Amanda Krause, Jeremy Passarelli, Evan Chung, June Thomas, Gabriel Roth, Chris Barubay, and everyone else who gave us help and feedback along the way.

If you're interested in hearing more musak, we're putting the playlist Ben put together while he was writing this episode on our show page.

It's called Ben's Musak, an easy listening playlist, and it's on Spotify.

If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, you can email us at decodering at slate.com.

If you haven't yet, subscribe and rate our feed and Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

Even better, tell your friends.

This podcast was written by Benjamin Frisch.

It was edited by Willip Haskin.

Decodering is produced by Willip Haskin and Benjamin Frisch.

Cleo Levin is our research assistant.

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