Let’s go shopping

It’s bizarre what one can develop nostalgia for, and sometimes it’s for things you didn’t even know existed. Once upon a time, before what Bill Griffith aptly called “the rock-n-rollization of everything,” grocery and department stores would no more have thought of playing rock music on the loudspeakers than you would think of inviting Amy Winehouse to your family reunion. Now that every store blasts some level of rock — and the “edgier” the fashion store, the more obnoxious the music, and there are plenty of stores I just won’t enter because who needs the headache? — it seems inconceivable, but there was a time when even a hint of contemporary music would have sent old ladies screaming to the management. By the time I worked in a grocery store in the late ’70s, things had progressed to the point where we played what was called “easy listening,” which mixed bland instrumentals with some of the less peppy Carpenters songs, making up a mind-paste that could only be countered by young stockboys keeping an ongoing, much-more-rocking inner soundtrack going at all times, turned up as loud as the brain could make it. (No, kids, we didn’t have iPods. Or even Walkmans.) But if the radio dial strayed for even a moment into somewhat rockier territory, the bluehairs would scatter from the store like mice before the broom.

But even easy listening was a huge concession to the guitar-and-drums revolution, and it took a long time for stores to go there. For the most part, there was a thing called Muzak, which took standards and popular songs from 20 years before, set them to strings, and sweetened the living hell out of them. To anyone with any sort of musical taste, this was evidence of the existence of evil. This kind of music was poured from every corner of every store, seeping into your brain, ultimately beating you into a spending-ready submission. There’s really nothing quite like it any more — even if you were to dig up some old Mantovani or Ferrante and Teicher 8-tracks, you wouldn’t quite capture the exquisite awfulness of this variety of music.

But now there’s the internet, the final triumph of zombie culture where nothing ever really dies. And for every 100 anonymous rotting zombies seeking brains, there’s one that lights the flicker of recognition in your eyes: Hey, I KNOW this one! And so I give you something I thought I would never hear again — official music from Kresge’s Department Store (the forerunner to KMart), 1964. I dare you not to listen. By the way, the rest of the site contains many nice links to legal, free online music sources.

So while we’re traveling down retail memory lane, I highly recommend a visit to the geeky retail graveyard, Groceteria.com, on whose message boards people like me with long memories and nothing else to do post fond memories of what stores used to be where, debate whether a particular store closed in 1974 or 1976, and generally contribute to the culture.