HAHAHA! Starbucks has really painted themselves into a corner this time!

http://echonews.com/921/images/lismore_john_butler.jpg

I go to Starbucks for the clientele and the lavatory. And the PSHHHH sound.

XM has an entire channel devoted to starbucks-esque music: "XM Cafe".

You remember that dude on your dorm floor who had the acoustic guitar? Well, check it out: an entire CHANNEL of the songs he'd play to try to dupe 1st-year-chicks into putting out.

the official description:

...Good to the Last Note

Growing up doesn't mean growing old. But it does increase your enjoyment of more challenging rock artists. If your ear can discern the difference, come to the XM Cafe - where we showcase adult alternative rock in a sophisticated, artist-friendly programming presentation.

At XM Cafe, the music doesn't blare and it doesn't bore. You won't hear wailing guitar solos...but you will hear thoughtful musicians doing more than just their hit singles...plus the first sounds off albums from artists like the Wallflowers, Dave Matthews Band, Sheryl Crow, Elvis Costello all in the XM Cafe!

[...]

What You'll Hear:

Dave Matthews Band
-Crash Into Me

Tracy Chapman
-Telling Stories

David Gray
-Babylon

Natalie Merchant
-Carnival

Sting
-Brand New Day

Shawn Colvin
-Sunny Came Home

Santana
-Love of My Life

Bonnie Raitt
-Nick of Time

Van Morrison
-New Biography

Sarah McLachlan
-Building a Mystery

All the Aimee Mann and Melissa Ethridge you could ever want, without any Los Lobos, tho they did play a Paul Westerberg solo track once. We tried to play "Find the Distortion Pedal" for a while, but after about 3 tracks, you really do want to hang yourself.

i do resent their implication that Led Zeppelin is not thoughtful music.

What You'll Hear:

Diana Krall
-Stop This World

Cesaria Evora
-Sodade

Jill Scott
-A Long Walk

Nina Simone
-I Shall Be Released

John Coltrane
-My Favorite Things

Ray Charles & Norah Jones
-Here We Go Again

The Shins
-Gone For Good

Wilco
-A Muzzle of Bees

Josh Ritter
-Kathleen

Aretha Franklin
-I Never Loved A Man...

Crystal Waters?

haha I guess. Starbucks doesn't really serve coffee. ;-)

hahaha, just check out the channel description:

Live More Musically...

Hear Music™, the Voice of Music at Starbucks, brings you Hear Music - XM 75.

Hear Music is dedicated to helping you discover your next favorite artist. Whether it's an emerging singer songwriter that shouldn't be passed up or a legendary artist essential to anyone's music collection, you'll hear it on Hear Music.

and there's a link to here: http://www.starbucks.com/hearmusic/

"but but but my personal most favorite singer songwriter is Guy Picciotto! Surely you have room for his music!"

"Santana"

Which sounds funny from this vantage point, because it seems to sell the opposite of the actual appeal; it's assumed over here that the point of stuff like Shawn Colvin in the first place isn't that it's a challenging, "sophisticated" listen, but that's it's comfortable and relaxing and friendly and such. But I get the sense that plenty upon plenty of people who like this stuff actually look at it from the XM line -- that they used to go for obvious excitement (pop, maybe even hip-hop), and now they're getting into arty, sophisticated, high-art serious-musicians, like including people from other countries and people with jazz backgrounds. In image this stuff puts a big premium on trained musicianship + modesty, that whole "I'm a regular guy but music is my profession and my soul" NPR thing where they theoretically have dinner parties with their friends at their lake homes and then write songs about it.

Long-winded, but it's still weird to me: much of this stuff is all comfort-and-ease, and yet it reads to its fans as sophistication and difficulty and obscurity. Which I guess isn't so different from the way plenty of early-teenagers get into poppy indie-rock.

heh. both genres, of course, were predominant in coffee shops. NOTHING EVER CHANGES.

christ, even talking about this stuff lends to an over-deluging of quote marks.

Which is the opposite of the ILM / music-elite view, which holds that the newest musical developments are the challenging vanguard, subtle and challenging developments that you enjoy right up until you're old and tired enough to revert to comforting traditions -- sort of like kids being filled with revolutionary idealism until they're old enough to think more about property taxes and lumbar pain.

you have nailed every radio station's programming philosophy--sell them one thing but make them think it's another. But in their world it is the same so perception is reality etc etc.

yeah, it reminds me of some sorta early-mid '60s thing, where "rock & roll"(read: pop) was seen as "children's music", and look how special you were for "growing up" and embracing such "adult" music like jazz or folk.

Nabisco totally OTM here. But I don't quite agree with Kingfish about the analogy to jazz and folk in the 60s -- these genres were often associated with people who fancied themselves intellectuals, who believed their revolutionary politics were more sophisticated and well-thought-out than the hippies' and rock and rollers'.

Newcoustic crapternative is more for the guy or girl who landed a great job in sales and is going to buy a boat soon but still fires up a doob once in a while.

one wonders what would happen when the two different threads of elite folks would meet. One could only play that it'd end in knife-fights.

these genres were often associated with people who fancied themselves intellectuals, who believed their revolutionary politics were more sophisticated and well-thought-out than the hippies' and rock and rollers'.

i would hold that the first part is still true, but the other parts have faded aways in the winds of time. i'm reminded much about one of the hipster-backlash threads we did where the article was posted, talking about how mid-60's hipsters were kinda the last of their kind, before any and all underground subcultures lost any guiding philosophies and became little else but just another commodity.

as mentioned upthread, the pitch line for this stuff is the congradulatory "now that you're adult, look how smart and worldly you and your tastes have become. here's some new shit to buy". Still playing on the self-perceptions of the consumer/participant that they were better than the rest/masses/mooks/mouthbreathers/etc.

also: the john butler trio is unbelievably huge huge huge in australia. they are also fucking crap.

The biggest plus of mushrooming chain stores and restaurants in New York is that most of those places include public bathrooms as a matter of corporate policy. Mostly because they're used to opening stores in strip malls and "power centers," where they don't worry so much about homeless people taking 25-minute baths in the sinks and junkies shooting up in the stalls. I notice, however, that Kmart and Barnes & Noble at Astor Place have both closed their bathrooms. No wonder there's lines at Starbucks. (Old Navy has very nice bathrooms, if you ever need one in the vicinity of Madison Square Garden. Is there an online list somewhere of decent public bathrooms in New York? There sure should be.)

the amount of venom reserved for artists working in this style - sort of transparent (or evidently transparent) production, largely "organic" instrumention, listen-or-ignore-at-your-leisure dynamics - always surprises me rather a lot. I always want to ask: wait, how much Jason Mraz have you actually listened to? (If the answer is "enough to know he sucks!" then y'know very clever and all but isn't there more interesting discussion to be had than "this sucks"?) It's a flipside of rock fans avoiding music with synths, really.

-- Banana Nutrament (straightu...), August 14th, 2005.

I turn on WFUV (NYC AAA station) fairly often, actually. I hear stuff I think is good often enough to flip to it when I'm in the car from time to time. I just really dislike this small group of reggae-funk tinged singer-songwriter-jammers that seem to be all the rage lately.

And yes, I think I have heard enough to know what I think, and I've also looked at their lyrics. And I sat through this entire XM CD while in Starbucks, and it was not just bad, but actually opressive.