Who's for strict limits on background music at social gatherings?

I mean it's emotional, music is, more or less, fairly intrinsically. Not sopping, necessarily, but- let's just say it does something, ok? Now why, when you're out with your friends in a public place and trying to make light conversation, should you be involuntarily subjected, by background music, to subliminal waves of sadness, or nostalgia, or whatever else? This includes, maybe especially, music you love. That's a mild, everyday case, but suppose YOUR sister had insisted on playing Joni Mitchell during Thanksgiving and looked at you like a sourpuss when you suggested, after a decent interval, that it could just be turned down. Am I being a baby about this?

Yes.

Which album?

Because a world without background music, in which we are subjected to every random idiot's inane conversations would be so much better.

Court and Spark I think, but lets say it was one YOU listened to a lot when you were in your candle phase.

having feelings about music is great. insisting in public situations that other people need to understand your musical limits and live in accordance with them is maybe not so great. depending on the situation and how it's handled, of course.

having to endure feelings-laden music for 40 minutes or so doesn't sound like a huge cross to bear in the name of pleasant family relations. but that's just me...

At one point this past week my girlfriend cued up a song she loves that happens to depress the shit out of me. She spent the rest of the day asking me what was wrong, long after I thought I'd done a great job of hiding my :/

If we can make the trains run on time we can enforce people only ever playing songs that make me happy goddammit

was in a record shoppe the other day and one of the clerks was playing some sort of horrid, moany, feelings-laden indie music and it was making my entire life bad. not for sadness, just cuz i literally could not be hearing it at that particular moment, or maybe ever probably. so i stood in the back flipping through used records and occasionally shaking my head and muttering swears like a drunkbum. eventually one of her coworkers made her change it to amadou & miriam and my whole world suddenly became beautiful.

so, to that extent, i understand.

you all need to find the strength inside u - but yeah some people suck @ dj

For most people, background music is just that - it barely registers. For folks here, I imagine there is no such thing as "background" music. It all registers prominently and impacts us disproportionately compared to regular folks. It's our blessing and our curse.

the answer is simple: when it's just background music, play ONLY HAWAIIAN KITSCH LPs from a thriftstore- everybody gets it, nobody's weeping and getting all emo, and its functionality and "ignore me" factor is built-in

All I want to hear in bars during happy hour is Katrina and the Waves. On permanent repeat.
― max (maxreax), Friday, January 12, 2007 11:47 AM (2 years ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

I once lived with a girl whose flatmate would sing along loudly to all the African chanting in Paul Simon's Graceland....

but at all times like when we were all eating dinner or just relaxing and chatting.

I think she thought it made her look worldly and in touch with an ethnic soul & nuance we would never understand.

The same goes for her appalling off-beat & arrhythmical African drumming at house parties, which is the last thing you even want to have to deal with when DJing.

Had lunch today in a rather high end department store cafeteria which contains a white grand piano, generally used for showtunes and Christmas songs.

Today there was a pianist doing an endless, stream of consciousness improv, sort of new age but more dissonant, and because his touch was heavy it occasionally TURNED! INTO! POUNDING!!! It was like having lunch with Cecil Taylor, and the longer he went on the more it was fraying my nerves.

I couldn't see him all the while he was playing, but as I left I discovered it was a young 20s dude wearing a flannel shirt and backpack. Couldn't figure out if he just wandered in off the street and no one thought to stop him, or maybe he was their dishwasher just getting off work and waiting for his bus.

ha. ridic thread title.

i will say that, when i used to tend bar, the unofficial rule was to play stuff people didn't already know, so they wouldn't have formed negative associations. but that's only b/c rent money was at stake.

good thread though

they used to play Blue pretty much on loop at the campus coffee shop in the student center, and it's just so not what you need to hear when you're a depressive college student taking a break from finals studying.

I dunno, eiffel 65 is pretty upbeat

this 'let's leave a piano in a public place' craze is seriously getting out of hand now

i want to have lunch with cecil taylor.

xp irritatingly twee sentence construction in wikipedia articles

A street piano is a piano placed in the street which passersby are encouraged to play. The best known example comes from the Play Me, I'm Yours project by artist Luke Jerram. The concept originated quite by accident in Sheffield, England.

When I worked at a bar in college there was this prof that was a lush and a regular that liked to drop a few bucks into the jukebox and play a 9 minute 'Not Fade Way/Going Down the Road Feeling Bad' by the Dead over and over and over.