Sit down, You're Safe Now
The room was hazy with collective depression...bad vibes had struck everyone independently and soon the fog became thick enough to slice up and chuck out the window at passers-by. Nobody knows why the week tumbled into such a rotten place...hell, newspaper reports were claiming that today was the best day of the year. Shit...If that was the best day, I’m off for a walk in the woods with my revolver.
Unpleasant situations were cropping up all over the office. For three hours this morning the place was made useless and deafening by a series of fire alarm tests. It was hellish...many silent screams of frustration were overheard by the telepathists today, who went scuttling off in shock to the nearest monastery and will need to spend the next year hiding under the bed before they are able to claw back their sanity. The smart money is on the Piano Man having spent the last few years working in our office.
But whatever the reason, when the bad planets align the only thing to do is grimace and bear it.
Through the gloom, then, came the sound of a CD player. And what son of a bitch chose this elevator music? This is wrong, wrong, wrong, goddamn it. This is King Wrong, Lord of the Wrongs, Wrongford, Valley of the Wrongs, Wrong Kong Phooey, the Book of Five Wrongs, the Hunchback of Notre Wrong, the Postman Only Wrongs Twice...it’s just wrong. The only explanation is somebody has brought in a CD of Ceefax music, the type of diseased lounge music they play at night when BBC2 is too weary to broadcast real programmes. Either that or a bunch of Satanists are spooling a cassette of lift music backwards through some kind of fire-damaged, urine-soaked tape deck.
Lift music of course has been derided by every half-arsed comedian in the last twenty years. Perhaps it is part of the ongoing campaign by the service industry to fill up our lives with a barrage of noise and information. Nowhere should be safe, they decide...wherever you are and whatever you are doing, you must be shouted at, you must be informed that a new product is out, you must be played across the room like a fucking chat show guest... no space is sacred.
So if we are going to be fucked over this way for the rest of our lives, can we not at least take control over the content of such bad noise? Lift music should be less ambient for a start. Music must only ever take one of three forms...stuff to listen to, stuff to dance to and stuff to get high to. Anything else is a waste of scales. So we cannot have lifts being filled with the kind of crap with no beginning, no end and no balls. We need a jukebox of some kind...
The songs must be short, ideally the length of the lift ride...although this could prove impractical in your average busy skyscraper when the lift stops at every floor. But very short songs do exist, and They Might Be Giants formulated a series of such songs near the end of their Apollo 18 album under the Fingertips banner...generally one or two lines of lyrics, lasting on average ten seconds. This would be ideal but perhaps a little disconcerting for the nervous travellers when their lift begins to sing “everything is catching on fire” to them in a cheerful tone.
Any jukebox has the potential to cause arguments, and in such an enclosed space this would prove lethal. So the simple solution would be to create a mix tape of songs with appropriate lyrics...”The Only Way is Up” by Yazz would be suitable, although it may distress anyone getting in on the top floor. And everyone else, to be honest. “Get Higher” by Black Grape, “Welcome to the Machine” by Pink Floyd and “To the Moon and Back” by Savage Garden would all work well.
Some songs must be avoided. “The Man Who Fell To Earth” by David Bowie, “Sink to the Bottom” by Fountains of Wayne and “Metal Machine Music” by Lou Reed should all be avoided because they would frighten people or, in the latter case, because it is shit.
But I would rather the music in a lift simply provided a little sanctuary, a tiny box of sanity in a world of turmoil. We need to provide an atmosphere of beauty without lapsing into blank dinner party ambience. Being in a lift is one of the few times strangers are forced to share such an intimate space without being kinky, so we must make the situation as relaxing as possible without actually having to talk to one other...after all, we do have standards. Goldfrapp’s Felt Mountain album would be ideal, as would anything by Nightmares on Wax or the early Massive Attack. And did Brian Eno ever do a Music for Lifts?
Well, whatever. The only trouble is that if we provide such spaces of wonder and togetherness then people will never want to leave...everybody will be late for work. So perhaps it is for the best that we want to get the hell out of that infernal box before the music drives us to the inevitable belly full of Jack Daniels and paracetamol. Or perhaps that is one rationalisation too far.
On the other hand, you could always walk, you lazy bastard.
Unpleasant situations were cropping up all over the office. For three hours this morning the place was made useless and deafening by a series of fire alarm tests. It was hellish...many silent screams of frustration were overheard by the telepathists today, who went scuttling off in shock to the nearest monastery and will need to spend the next year hiding under the bed before they are able to claw back their sanity. The smart money is on the Piano Man having spent the last few years working in our office.
But whatever the reason, when the bad planets align the only thing to do is grimace and bear it.
Through the gloom, then, came the sound of a CD player. And what son of a bitch chose this elevator music? This is wrong, wrong, wrong, goddamn it. This is King Wrong, Lord of the Wrongs, Wrongford, Valley of the Wrongs, Wrong Kong Phooey, the Book of Five Wrongs, the Hunchback of Notre Wrong, the Postman Only Wrongs Twice...it’s just wrong. The only explanation is somebody has brought in a CD of Ceefax music, the type of diseased lounge music they play at night when BBC2 is too weary to broadcast real programmes. Either that or a bunch of Satanists are spooling a cassette of lift music backwards through some kind of fire-damaged, urine-soaked tape deck.
Lift music of course has been derided by every half-arsed comedian in the last twenty years. Perhaps it is part of the ongoing campaign by the service industry to fill up our lives with a barrage of noise and information. Nowhere should be safe, they decide...wherever you are and whatever you are doing, you must be shouted at, you must be informed that a new product is out, you must be played across the room like a fucking chat show guest... no space is sacred.
So if we are going to be fucked over this way for the rest of our lives, can we not at least take control over the content of such bad noise? Lift music should be less ambient for a start. Music must only ever take one of three forms...stuff to listen to, stuff to dance to and stuff to get high to. Anything else is a waste of scales. So we cannot have lifts being filled with the kind of crap with no beginning, no end and no balls. We need a jukebox of some kind...
The songs must be short, ideally the length of the lift ride...although this could prove impractical in your average busy skyscraper when the lift stops at every floor. But very short songs do exist, and They Might Be Giants formulated a series of such songs near the end of their Apollo 18 album under the Fingertips banner...generally one or two lines of lyrics, lasting on average ten seconds. This would be ideal but perhaps a little disconcerting for the nervous travellers when their lift begins to sing “everything is catching on fire” to them in a cheerful tone.
Any jukebox has the potential to cause arguments, and in such an enclosed space this would prove lethal. So the simple solution would be to create a mix tape of songs with appropriate lyrics...”The Only Way is Up” by Yazz would be suitable, although it may distress anyone getting in on the top floor. And everyone else, to be honest. “Get Higher” by Black Grape, “Welcome to the Machine” by Pink Floyd and “To the Moon and Back” by Savage Garden would all work well.
Some songs must be avoided. “The Man Who Fell To Earth” by David Bowie, “Sink to the Bottom” by Fountains of Wayne and “Metal Machine Music” by Lou Reed should all be avoided because they would frighten people or, in the latter case, because it is shit.
But I would rather the music in a lift simply provided a little sanctuary, a tiny box of sanity in a world of turmoil. We need to provide an atmosphere of beauty without lapsing into blank dinner party ambience. Being in a lift is one of the few times strangers are forced to share such an intimate space without being kinky, so we must make the situation as relaxing as possible without actually having to talk to one other...after all, we do have standards. Goldfrapp’s Felt Mountain album would be ideal, as would anything by Nightmares on Wax or the early Massive Attack. And did Brian Eno ever do a Music for Lifts?
Well, whatever. The only trouble is that if we provide such spaces of wonder and togetherness then people will never want to leave...everybody will be late for work. So perhaps it is for the best that we want to get the hell out of that infernal box before the music drives us to the inevitable belly full of Jack Daniels and paracetamol. Or perhaps that is one rationalisation too far.
On the other hand, you could always walk, you lazy bastard.
posted by Jamie at 3:57 PM
2 Comments:
You're wasted on here.
Frequently.
Ah, but not nearly enough.
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