The Beguiling Banana Republic Soundtrack
Written by Col. Hector Bravado // June 13, 2008 // Stuck in my Head // 16 Comments
The couple walks in, the guy pulling his girlfriend behind him like a wagon. I nod and greet them, get a tight-lipped response. I’m folding some summer-weight V-necks at the front, which had been ravaged just minutes earlier by a woman with a stroller. I watch them out of the corner of my eye as they mill about for a few minutes.
“You like polos?” I say to the man when he and his hard-looking girl rove back within earshot.
“Yeah.”
“I’m gonna show you the polo.”
“The polo?”
I grab it off a shelf and drop it on a table near them and go back to folding ten feet away. The shirt is a vivid orange; you hear sunny washes of synth when you look at it. It is like an ecstasy-laced tangerine being squeezed into your eyes. It’s a great shirt. I don’t have the skin tone to pull it off. It has a medium-weight stripe around the edge of the collar that matches the ivory elephant embroidered on the chest, with a second, smaller tan stripe. I don’t look at them as I speak.
“You’re gonna dream about that shirt. Twice.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Then you’re gonna sneak back in here and buy it when I’m not on shift just to avoid telling me I was right.” They both laugh out loud.
I don’t give a fuck if he buys the polo or not. The store is slow. I’ve had to ratchet up my patter over the last few months to keep myself entertained. I tell people not to touch the clothes. I tell them that dressing rooms cost money. I tell them that we set up a waffle bar in petites. After 17 or 18 shifts of mentally pairing all my favorites from the summer and vestigial spring offerings, there’s not a lot else to do.
Oh, and there’s the music; the officially-approved music employed to tell you exactly how it’s supposed to feel to stand at the clean-smelling, walnut-and-citrus center of the Banana Republic brand. Lightweight though it is, it’s surprisingly tolerable: lots of stuff with warm textures and snappy beats, bright little pieces of global flotsam, housey pop, poppy house, acid-jazzy departures with lots of vocals. Electro bops and what-nots. There are a few pieces of cloying, felching disco crap that make me feel like hurting myself and others, but it could be worse.
And for the most part, I don’t have a clue what any of it is. I used to be able to pick out artists and tracks. I can’t anymore.
Two years ago, exalting in a nitrous oxide lift during the many-clawed, consensual mouth-fucking that some refer to as dentistry, I envisioned a chart that showed music’s epicenter on a linear timeline of your life. Linear units were marked in years. There was a glowing bolus marking the period of maximum absorption, when you consumed almost everything that was being recorded just as a function of being alive. You saw all the shows, traded the CDs with your friends, watched it on TV, and sang along at the bars. This was when you could identify every contemporary single played on the radio.
In this chart, which appeared to me on a fizzing field of white, there were concentric circles radiating out from the crater that were spaced farther and farther out. It was my insight that as you moved farther down the timeline, the intersections of the timeline and the spreading circles represented the diminishing number of songs you can recognize while listening to radio or digital music channels in a public place for a given period of time. At the center, you recognize all of them, but as you age, it’s fewer and fewer, until the spreading rings dissolve into meaninglessness, or you realize you’ve become what you used to laugh at — the guy for whom music ceased to exist after Lynrd Skynyrd, except in your case, it’s Pixies and Public Enemy.
During the cavity filling, I was able to recognize only three songs of the many that played over the office speakers during my session.
Now, nothing. I can’t name a single track being played at my workplace. I did peg a Sarah MacLachlan song once. I also noted, to no small measure of delight, a really nice Latin cover of The Buzzcocks’ “Ever Fallen in Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t’ve Fallen in Love With)?” But who recorded it?
I asked one of my managers whether our retail soundtrack was a digital subscription channel or a proprietary mix handed down by the corporate brand shepherds. As it turns out, Banana Republic is a Muzak subscriber. The folks who designed elevator music decades ago figured out a way to stay relevant, apparently.
There was one track in the rotation that continually excited me: a hip-hop beat skipping along, an airy voice, and an economical little plink-plink-plink melody on the chorus. It was the best kind of candy, similar in spirit to Tom Tom Club’s “Genius of Love.” When unobserved I would roll my shoulders to it and do a little head snap. One night I asked a manager who she thought recorded it. She flatly said that all I had to do was look at the box in the closet behind the front registers. All this time! To know the artists and titles!
I strode briskly to the closet behind the registers. It was the Squeak E. Clean and Koool G. Murder remix of “Tiny Paintings” by Architecture in Helsinki, which I have since purchased from iTunes. And I could look up whatever song I wanted from then on. Access to this trivia was liberating, a new toehold on relevance.
Days later, I’m watching two doughy teenage boys take a tour around the store, moving too fast from garment to garment. They don’t seem entirely comfortable appraising the displays together. I’m not sure what is happening here, but it doesn’t look like shopping. I have already proffered my initial greeting and have let them mook around for awhile before I approach them with my palms pressed together.
“Gentlemen: is this a socks-and-underwear night or are we actually looking for something interesting tonight? What are we getting into? Talk to me.”
He starts to blush and stammer. Whatever process I interrupted, it is apparent that I’m not helping. I can hear that Mylo’s “Drop the Pressure” is playing. I just stare at the kid with my eyebrows raised, waiting for him to finish some kind of sentence. There’s not much else to do.
16 Comments on "The Beguiling Banana Republic Soundtrack"
Haaa, you’re an asshole for messing with those non paying customers. Nicely written folk, it really put me right there…in your misery.
You should submit this (Stop Smiling, Details, Esquire?), like the blurring of music and clothes, everything one now…
8===D~~
Stop complaining, CHB. You hate the monotony of Banana Republic, but at least you can escape into that world of new and obscure music. Try tolerating the calculated irony and token indie hipster inanity that is an Urban Outfitters. That shit will make your blood curl.
On another note, this is well-written. I got a kick out of it.
The Hood Internet does a remix of Tiny Paintings (i think it’s Tiny Paintings) by Architecture in Helsinki. It’s awesome. If i wasn’t so lazy i’d find you the link. But i am. Lazy.
The hood internet has a new kick ass mixtape featuring all of chi towns finest.. Free to download too
http://www.zshare.net/audio/126411587faabd44/
For those who care to hear the A.I.H. remix in question, you can find it on imeem here: http://tinyurl.com/62da7e
Dude, you nailed it.
I checked out sometime before Korn. I still wonder at what a so-named band could sound like.
The flip-side, though, is this: the people in the center, knowing everything in rotation, probably don’t know all that much. I was sitting around Good Ol’ Burgers (The ravished ranchhand says “let’s eat!” chasing a longhorn with two halves of a gigantic bun. The cow says “let’s don’t”) waiting for my son’s corn dog to go, listening to the digital satellite radio country music made by computer committees channel (I ain’t high class and I ain’t white trash, I’m no good but I’m good enough for you), and a couple of tracks that were so present in the AOR radio of my youth that I think of them as audio wallpaper came, as music, into my head: The Revolution Will not Be Televised and Walk on the Wild Side. That regular old music would sound pretty radical in the G.O.B.
“I think all that music is called Trip-hop. ‘Cause you Trip over your customers, and you hoppin’ all over the stoe!”
-Rudy
It can be a positive sign of maturity – graduating from memorizing the top 40 to exploring more diverse and local music. I much prefer where I am now…
This is so on point!
Not only was this so well written, but you are completely correct about your timeline of music knowledge. Part of this is just the nature of more and more audio shit being piled on to other shit, making it harder to sift through. Another part of it is maturity (as was already mentioned) and the fact that we have better things to do with our life than know who’s number one on the countdown this week.
Personally, what I’ve noticed is that I listen to much more music than I did in my youth, but I have a hard time telling you who it is. I have a huge cache of songs that I love, but, for every ten songs I listen to, there are seven bands to remember. There are so many bands these days making really good music that it is harder and harder to be a big fan of just a handful of groups. Who has a favorite band any more? I mean, I will find myself saying I’m a huge fan of Sally Shapiro (for example), but that’s based off of pretty much one or two songs. Why? Because I don’t have the time or energy anymore to be buying and listening to any one artists whole catalog. Sometimes it bums me out, but more often than not, I could care less. Just so long as I have a good mix of songs from the past that I love and new songs that I like by people I can’t name.
Great post for sure – my favorite of the Stuck in My Head series (thus far).
I disagree, though, with some of the points above, at least as a general theorem. When you’re younger (or rather, more of a musical naif), it makes sense that the artists you are initially exposed to are more commercially high-profile acts. It’s much more probable that someone will work their way down the musical food chain (in terms of popularity) than up it. Thus, it’s easier to see a video for Green Day on MTV and then work out relationships to less popular acts: Green Day are friends with the guys from Rancid, who are on a label run by Brett from Bad Religion, who used to play with or were influenced by Circle Jerks and Adolescents and so on until the kid is into the Au Pairs and weird LTM post-punk re-issues.
Or at least that COULD happen. It’s much less likely that the person starts with an old record by The Durutti Column and works their way up through associations that ultimately lead them to Green Day.
More importantly though, is the fact that when you are younger and your personality and range of interests are not as fully developed, this limited musical palette MEANS a lot more in terms of defining your personality. In this case, listening to (or actively NOT listening to) the Top 40 becomes an extension of your own identity in a way that it isn’t for a reasonably adjusted thirty year old.
Personally, I can listen to a band once and have fairly good recall as to what they sound like, but that’s just how my brain works. I have friends who can’t do it with music but can do it with films or paintings or vintages of wine or any number of other kooky things. Your retention of new music is guided by a host of small factors.
That is, of course, different from the desire to seek out new music, which you are either compulsively driven to do because it’s your biggest passion (the way some people need to eat at every new restaurant or watch every new pornographic film–looking at you, Sarducci) OR the desire fizzles away over time as you become a self-actualized human being. And let’s not forget that for some people, music is wholeheartedly enjoyable but not important enough to actively hunt down.
That is, after all, partially what we’re here for.
This paragraph is going to be the central premise of my next piece: “When you’re younger (or rather, more of a musical naif), it makes sense that the artists you are initially exposed to are more commercially high-profile acts. It’s much more probable that someone will work their way down the musical food chain (in terms of popularity) than up it. Thus, it’s easier to see a video for Green Day on MTV and then work out relationships to less popular acts: Green Day are friends with the guys from Rancid, who are on a label run by Brett from Bad Religion, who used to play with or were influenced by Circle Jerks and Adolescents and so on until the kid is into the Au Pairs and weird LTM post-punk re-issues.”
Nicely done: imagistic, metaphorical, clever — precisely what your fans have come to expect from you.
One thing that chapped my hide a bit was this:
You purchased music that was first delivered to you via Muzak in a chain store.
Come on, man, we’re just a little older and not much wiser, but we ain’t dead yet. I’m sure it’s a fresh beat and all, but… I dunno, it disturbed me to my core.
Finally! I figured out who this piece reminded me of. Well, it is a couple people, really. Have you ever seen the old Tom Hanks movie JOE vs THE VOLCANO? There is a finicky tailor that attends to the character’s formal dining attire and then a quirky luggage salesman that lines out his traveling boxes. “Ah, an ocean voyage,” he intones. Nate is the mix of these two guys; a dedicated clothesman with an appreciate of finery and focused accoutrement peddler who understands the fine balance of form and function.
there’s a waffle bar in petities? oh, to be slim again.