Stuff You Should Know - Muzak: Easy Listening Goodness

Episode Date: April 8, 2021

Muzak got a bad reputation as bland garbage music. We aim to set the record straight. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to

believe. You can find in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and there's Charles W. Chuck Brian over there and there's Dave C. Couston. I said it right this time. I thought it was Couston, no? If you're

in France, that's how you would say it, but here in the United States you say Couston. Can I start this off by saying something? Oh boy, I'm worried about what you're going to say, but okay. Well, this episode is on Muzak and I started thinking last night I was thinking about your love of Muzak, which is not at all ironic. Not in the least, but you can't say that kind of thing these days. People don't believe you. I know, it's true. Everyone, I know Josh very well and I was thinking of your, and I like all kinds of music too, but you know, in my heart I'm a rock and roll guy, and I was thinking about your top musical genres that are above rock and roll in your picking order. Not in order. I counted easy listening, Muzak, disco, art rock, crowd rock,

and I probably missed a couple. Crowd rock is below rock and roll. I want to like crowd rock, it just doesn't quite jive with me. I like some, but not all of it. And then stuff, I think art rock is sort of that avant-garde, like I don't, you don't love Yoko, but you certainly are a bit of a Yoko apologist. Sure. Grace Jones, stuff like that. Oh, I love Grace Jones for sure. What about talking heads? They go in there too, right? Oh, they'd probably be. I mean, they literally went to art school together. Yeah, I mean, they kind of span from art rock to new wave to like world music by the time they finished. Yeah. Yeah, I know. But yeah, I mean, I certainly love the talking heads, but all of those for you are above good old fashion

rock and roll, I think. Yeah, you also left out 90s techno. I've been listening to a lot of that alternate and the prodigy and everything. But you love Muzak. You really do. I do, too, actually. I don't know. I'm so glad. I don't know how much I like. I will listen to some of that stuff. And we'll talk about, we'll talk about Eno in here, of course, old sourpuss Brian Eno. But I love listening to his ambient stuff, which he sort of wrote as an antidote to Muzak. Again, we'll talk about that more later. But I do like in certain circumstances that Muzak thing is really great to have on in my house as background music. And it serves that same purpose. One of the big reasons why, too, is because you can get stuff done with it. Like lyrics can be

so distracting. They just latch on to your brain and say, no, no, no. Pay attention to me. I'm talking to you now. Muzak does the opposite of that. It says, go, be free, but also enjoy this. There's a whole part of your brain that Muzak can tap into that doesn't require your conscious thought, but it still produces good feelings. People just smack Muzak around like it's so bland and it's so soulless. And I totally disagree with that. If you actually stop and listen to Muzak, it's really, really technically proficient. It's frequently well done. It's often very clever and creative and inventive, which is really saying something because you're doing this in the confines of covering an existing song in a way that makes

it familiar and easy to recognize, but also takes away any intrusiveness that it might have. It's tough to do. And I really, I just, I love Muzak. You're absolutely right. Like I listened to Muzak this whole time, not just when we were, when we were researching Muzak today, but also when I was researching the Havana syndrome. And I realized like, this is my normal thing. This is the same stuff I listened to when I'm researching anyway. Yeah. And we can go ahead and dispel a couple of, or not myths, but clear up a couple of things right off the bat. First of all, Muzak is a name brand. And people can kind of collectively use the term Muzak or have collectively use that term for what's called like potted plant music or elevator music or

shopping music. But it is actually a brand name, which we'll get to the history of. And then the second thing is it gets the name elevator music. Part of the myth is that people said, well, they put it on elevators because people were afraid to death of elevators early on. And it calmed people down or it covered up the noise of the clanking elevators. I'd never heard that before. Would you? Yeah. Neither one of those things are true. Total myth. My guess is that it was played on elevators. And because you're in such a closed little box that's usually quiet, it just was way more noticeable than like in a big office full of people working. So people call it elevator music. That's my guess.

All right. Yeah. I mean, yeah, there wasn't music on elevators before. But for several decades in the 20th century, like there weren't many elevators you could get on because people didn't have elevators in their house. So it was a public building you're in where they weren't playing music of some form, very frequently music. That great blues brother scene. Yeah. Because they're going up to the Cook County Assessor's office and like there's the entire Chicago police department is after them. But they're forced to get on this elevator and the girl from Ipanema is playing. I think my favorite part of that scene is there's just dozens and hundreds of cops and SWAT guys just, you know, hut, hut, hut, hut, hut when

they're repelling and doing all this stuff. And then there's the one shot of the lone guy repelling down the side of the building and he's by himself just going, hut, hut, hut, hut. Yeah. That's a good one. So funny. There's another scene too from around the era a few years later from airplane two where it's like Rip Torn. I believe it's Rip Torn, the already from the Larry Sanders show. Yeah. And I don't know the other guy he's talking to, but anyway, they're walking and talking and they have to get on an elevator. The elevator door opens and it's just blaring like, like eardrum shattering decibel MacArthur Park and they have to get on. People are coming off the elevator like with their hands to their ears, like

with splitting headaches from this, but it's just completely the opposite of what elevator music is supposed to be like. But it's a good little scene too as far as elevator music goes. Well, I mean, that's kind of one of the points too is music has long been a movie trope and a TV trope and then been lampooned in scenes just like the Blues Brothers scene where there's something chaotic going on and then you cut back to the sound of music playing wherever the other scene is setting. Right. Yeah. Very, very fun stuff. But that started, I guess it started with the Blues Brothers, which came out in 1980. But before that, that was like music was not really lampoon. I mean, not everybody liked it. It really kind of started to get a little backlash

in the late 60s, early 70s, as we'll see. But there was a very significant chunk of the 20th century again, from maybe 1950 to 1980, we'll say, where everywhere you went in public, including if you took a Greyhound bus, or if you were on a plane, or you happened to be in Air Force One, or you were at the mall in an elevator at your office, everywhere, music was playing. There was music playing everywhere. It was just a part of life that was inescapable actually. Yeah. So let's go back in time and talk about the inventor of Muzak. And this is sort of a fun fact of Muzak. The man's name is George Square. It is spelled Squire, but he swears it's pronounced Square. I'm really impressed, man. I had not come up with

that one. Or he swore it was pronounced Square. Yeah, that's kind of one of the funny jokes, like the guy who invented Muzaks was Square. Yeah. But Major General George Square was born in 1865, if you believe that. And he has just a laundry list of accomplishments as a human being. He earned a doctorate from Johns Hopkins in electrical science. He was an army engineer with a PhD, I think the first one. Yeah. And he was, I believe, the lead signal core officer for the army as well. He was. He also was inducted into the National Academy of Sciences, which connects this episode to the other one today. That's right. Because he came up with something called a tree telephone. He figured out how to use any tree, but preferably one

with fully-leaved, I guess. I don't know what you'd call that. As a receiver and transmitter for radio signals, he figured out how to use a tree, a living tree for that. Here's another old fun fact. He was one of the first airplane passengers ever because he was way into human flight and got together with the Wright brothers. And in 1906, consulted with them and they said, hey, why don't you take a ride in our new little biplane? You'll probably live. Right. I looked at the document for our Wright brothers episode and he did not appear. I don't think we mentioned him, but he might have been the first airline passenger from what I saw. Yeah. Where he really made a big name for

himself, Premuzak, was this invention, which is what we call multiplexing, which is he figured out or maybe wire wireless communications, which is something he worked on with the army. He basically figured out how to get multiple uses out of single telephone lines. Telephone wires were, you know, there are only so many. So you were really limited as to what you could do with them and how many people could use them. So he basically figured out a way to increase their output and efficiency by multiplexing and by sending superimposing high frequency radio signals over those low frequency telegraph signals, basically just allowing you to use the wire at the same time, the same wire. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's like if you think of like a wave, if it's low

frequency, there's big wide gaps in between, you can fit a higher frequency that's tighter and squish together in those gaps, but you're still using the same line. And, you know, this was the guy who came up with that. That's an enormous advancement in telecommunications that we're still put in use today in some applications, but definitely helped like the early internet along. It was just a huge contribution to humanity. Like forget even just music. Like just that alone would probably warrant like an episode for George Square. Yeah. And I think he was like, everyone should be able to use this. So I'm going to open source it and everyone can use this new multiplexing technology. AT&T came along and said, we'll use it. And then, you know what,

you stole it from us actually. Right. He came up with it, but since he left it open, they decided to just take it from him and sue him for it. I think he sued them, but it didn't work. That's right. You're right. So, but he still was able to use this wire wireless technology with multiplexing. And at the time, people were starting to get into radio broadcasts, but radio wireless radio, like that you would just have in your house that's picking up radio waves at a station, that was not widespread at the time. So George Square said, you know what, I understand people want music in their house. I'm going to give it to them. I'm going to use that multiplexing technology and I'm going to run sound waves over the electrical wires that go into the house.

Brilliant. And I'm going to sell this, it is brilliant. I'm going to sell this service to people's homes for $1.50 a month, about $20 today. And it's just part of your utility bill, because it's coming in through your electrical company. And there's actually a section of Cleveland called the Lakewood, I believe Lakewood area that was the pilot for this wired wireless radio that George Square invented. The problem was is by the time they deployed it, wireless radio was already a thing. And so we had this really great idea that just no longer had an application. Yeah. He basically invented the first music subscription service. Exactly. Yeah. And he had multiple channels too. Like when you subscribed, you got news,

you got dance music. There was like, I think three different channels you could choose from. Howard Stern. Yeah. Howard Stern was on back then. Baba Buwi. So he had that technology though. And he said, you know what, this is a good idea though. Maybe I can think of how to use this in offices and stores. And in 1934, he looked up at Kodak, very successful corporation, and said, I love that name and I love music. Let's just call it music. And history changed. And maybe we should take a break. Okay, let's do it. All right, we'll be right back. Boy bands give me in this situation. If you do, you've come to the right place because

I'm here to help this. I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael, um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that Michael and a different hot sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking this is the story of my life. Oh, just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular. And to be honest, I don't believe in astrology.

But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get second hand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention. Because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, major league baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had a handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer,

I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. So in the parlance of today, Chuck, George Square and his Musac Corporation pivoted from home consumer markets to business markets. And that just knocked it out of the park because it turned out that there were a lot of companies, hotels, restaurants, clubs. I think the Stork Club was an early customer that said, you know what, it's really going to make our place seem fancy if we've got music piping in all the time. So yes, we would like to sign up for your service. And that's really where Musac kind of started to take off.

Yeah. So Musac, I mean, we haven't even said what it is. Surely people know. But Musac are instrumental tracks. And you did mention that there were no vocals. So we kind of hinted at it. That's a big one. Yeah. But they're instrumental tracks that are cover songs of kind of anything you can think of. I mean, I've heard some some Musac of some heavy rock. It can be classical music. It can be old standards. But the point is they are instrumental versions that are re-recorded. They don't just take the vocals out. It's not karaoke style. Right. It is re-record, arranged and recorded by professional really good musicians, orchestras

sometimes. Yeah. And it is that's what it is. And it's great. The end. And very frequently, it's made into a much more mellow version of itself. Like any rough edges are taken off. Since they take the vocals out, it's not like that vocal melody is non-existent any longer. They just replace it with something else. So if they're trying to go for something like a little more upbeat or up tempo, they'll replace the vocals with, say, like a saxophone. If they're trying to do something a little more mellow, they'll replace the vocals with a string section. Or harp, perhaps. Yeah. That's one of the things that Musac is very famous for is like what's called masses of strings, just strings upon strings. In fact, one of the early,

I guess, big name groups that produced Musac was called 101 Strings. And they probably were absolutely accurate in that. Like there's just a lot tons of strings everywhere. Violins, cellos, violas, every string instrument you can throw at it, they just layer upon layer in these songs. It's one of the hallmarks of Musac. Yeah. And there are many versions of Antonio Carlos Chobhiem's Girl from Epinema. But the Musac version is one of the most popular in that 101 Strings version is the most ubiquitous from that lot. I do encourage people to go watch the YouTube, though, of Frank Sinatra and Chobhiem singing that song live on TV. Because it's great and every way they're just sitting next to each other and the shot isn't wide at first and they're

just sort of singing back and forth to each other and Frank's doing his thing and then it cuts to the wide. And Frank is like totally kicked back with his legs crossed with a cigarette in his hand exactly like you would hope. But he looks like, I mean, he looks like he just not rolled out of bed because he's put together, but he looks like he rolled from his wicker bag to his wicker chair for this performance. Can I get some cocaine in here, baby? That's Joe Piscopo as Frank Sinatra. Do you ever listen to Joe Biem's stuff? Oh, yeah. I love that gold lounge stuff. It's really great. Brazilian stuff. Yeah. His record Stone Flower is just a masterpiece from beginning to end.

Yeah. That's good party music. Yeah. That's another thing though too is like it's so mellow that to take that kind of music and then make it into music is like, it's almost like it takes a certain amount of audacity. Like I was listening to, I found, so there's, I want to point people to two different music records that are on YouTube. One is called More Than Music Period and Environment. It's a 1981 Muzak record and it has a version of Sailing. Christopher Cross is Sailing. One of the most- Already music to sleep too. Yeah. Exactly. They figured out how to basically make you lose control of your bladder listening to this. He's addicted to what your bed do. Yeah. That's a good one. And then the other one is called

The Blue Album and it is from 1974, I believe. And it's just both of them are really great. That's good introductions to Muzak if you're not into it already. All right. So Muzak is trucking along in the 30s. They get to the 40s and they think, you know what? We need a better way to sell this stuff and to pitch this to businesses and corporations. So why don't we hire some people to research music and to figure out what kinds of music keep people happy and working? And because people, you know, they work hard in the morning and then they sort of lag a bit before lunch and then they really lag sort of a couple of hours after lunch. So why don't we do this? Why don't we study it? Let's call it stimulus progression. It's a bit pseudoscience. It makes sense.

It is in that it's not been proven. It makes sense to everyone who I feel like knows about it. Like, sure, music can pick you up and make you work harder, but it's pseudoscience in that it's I don't think it's ever been scientifically proven. I got you. Okay. Yeah, because I keep seeing it just like dismissed as pseudoscience. But then there were plenty of early studies that were done by legitimate industrial psychologists and other like efficiency experts, that kind of thing that showed that there really was a significant like improvement in productivity or less sick days, that kind of stuff in places that have Muzak compared to places that didn't have Muzak pumped into the office. Yeah, I think maybe there's specific

claims about a workday. Okay. Might have been a little, I mean, everywhere I read said it was basically not a marketing scam, but a marketing tool that they kind of invented. I got you. But so one thing to say about this, what we're going to talk about it in a second stimulus progression is that they did kind of plow money that they were making. They were making a lot of money starting in the late 40s, early 50s. They plowed it back into research to basically come up with scientific evidence to back up their claims, which you can really kind of see the ghost of George Square still looming over the company this decade or so after he died. It's always been this kind of science interested, if not science-based company that's also been an early

adopter of technology as we'll see. Yeah. I mean, that is certainly fair. It was never just like, hey, we're just going to play a bunch of what people might consider droll background music. They really did, I think, I don't think it was a scam. I think they really did try to study working environments. And what they did with his stimulus progression was they divided the workday into 15 minute increments and basically set a DJ playlist every 15 minutes. And they assigned a stimulus value from one to six, one being really, really mellow, six being super up. And they basically went through and almost like a Pandora curated playlist type of thing to get people to work hard and efficiently throughout a day. And companies bought in,

including the US Army. Yeah. I think World War II is basically cited as the moment when music kind of proved itself enough at least to start being adopted by very large companies. And then within a few years after the war, by like the very early fifties, they started to spread more and more to even smaller and smaller companies. And it was this idea that if you played music and music's patented stimulus progression model, you're going to avoid that mid-morning slump that like every worker goes through in productivity. And then the mid-afternoon slump, you could avoid that too. And think about how many more widgets you could make if your employees don't slack off productivity-wise from 10.30 to lunch and then from like 2.30 until they go home.

Like imagine if this very pleasant music is just kind of keeping them humming along. What people call a forward, just unconscious sense of forward momentum. The tempo in your environment is moving subtly faster and faster. And so to keep people from going insane, part of the stimulus progression was that the songs in a 15-minute increment would kind of go up in tempo and then you'd have a 15-minute break of silence. And then the music would come back on again. But then this 15 minutes, their first song, the tempo of their first song would probably start a little faster than the tempo of the first song of the last 15 minutes. And so all of a sudden, next thing, you know, you're making widgets like a maniac because you're being manipulated by this

stimulus progression model. At least again, according to Muzak, I get what you're saying. Like it's not like Harvard came along and said, yes, we've studied this thoroughly and this is exactly what happens. This is company claims, but it is intuitively sensible at least. Well, yeah. I mean, you need only to host a house party and play music yourself to determine how music can affect the mood of a group of people. You put on, groove is in the heart and you know what's going to happen. Yeah, everybody's going to shake their groove thing. Everyone's going to shape their groove thing, shake their groove thing. If you put in old sour plus Brian Eno's music for airports, not a good party thing. No, it's not. And since you brought him up for

the second time, I say we discuss Brian Eno momentarily. Sure. I mean, I love that record and I love a lot of his stuff, including his ambient music, experimental records. I think it's really, really good stuff to have on. It's a nice gray day outside and you're getting work done. I really enjoyed his background music, but it's definitely not up in any way. You know what I found is a really good one for what you just described. You ever listened to Future Sound of London? No. They have an album, like a double album called Life Forms and it's about as amazing as ambient gets. You should check that one out. Emily got me into ambient. I call her Emily when she's listening to that stuff. She really got me. She called it ambient groove.

She really got me into that stuff over the years. Is that like zero seven and you know, stuff that's, she calls it ambient groovy, just sort of sort of mellow and groovy and like zero seven and more chiba. And there was a certain era, I think, where that stuff peaked, massive attack a little bit. Oh yeah. It's good stuff. Yeah. I think you'd like Life Forms then. Future Sound of London stuff is normally a little more, you know, super cerebral and intelligent, but it's also fairly dancey. Life Forms is probably their most ambient stuff around. So, you know though, let's get back to him. He kind of came up with this as an antidote to music, right? Yes. If you like ambient music, you better thank your lucky

stars for Muzak, because were it not for Muzak, you might not have ambient music, at least not now. Maybe it would be coming 50 years from now. Who knows? Yeah. He said, I loved it in this article. It says, as reported by Red Bull Music. Right. Eno said this, and this was, I think, for the liner notes actually to airport or music for airports. Whereas can music's intention is to brighten the environment by adding stimulus to it, ambient music is intended to induce calm and space, and a space to think. Ambient music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular. It must be as ignorable as it is interesting. So, he hits on something though,

that people would come to really resent about Muzak is not even just necessarily the syrupy-ness of the music itself, but the intent behind the music, that it was always intended to basically manipulate your mood into making you a better worker, a more docile consumer, that it was poking at your brain to get you to do things that you may or may not want to do. Maybe you will be less likely to punch some guy on the bus because there's Muzak playing, which is a good thing. We should not be punching other people on the bus, but the point is, is you're being mind controlled in a certain way, and eventually people got kind of resentful of that. Yeah, no, that's true. We're not there yet though. We're not there yet though. There was actually a point in time though, Chuck,

where Muzak and popular music were basically one and the same. Yeah, that was sort of, I mean, one of the heydays of Muzak certainly was in that when Glenn Miller Orchestra was pop music on the radio, Muzak wasn't a far stretch from some of that stuff. So, it was sort of all one and the same. I think it was as that, as styles changed and the 60s and 70s start rolling along, that Muzak became really sort of a bad word to a lot of people. Right, and one of the reasons I saw that really explained it to me because, you know, things change, society just changed between the 1950s and the 1960s. It just abruptly changed, but that doesn't fully explain why Muzak just was suddenly looked down upon.

A good explanation I saw is that lyrics became really, really important in the late 60s. People had something to say and Muzak does not include lyrics. It completely undermines the point of Muzak if you put lyrics in or don't rearrange the lyrics with strings. So, Muzak kind of couldn't keep up with that. It's not like it went away. It doubled down. It kept doing what it was doing. And in fact, it would take some of those pop hits that had really monumentally important lyrics and just take the lyrics out and replace it with a saxophone or something like that. Yeah, they didn't have to do that. I think it's interesting. They could have had a really mellow singer at a certain point come in. And I really respect the fact

that they were like, nope, the singer is a violin and I don't want to hear it anymore. Right, but a lot of these songwriters in particular, like I think Joan Baez, Bruce Springsteen, Baz Gags, all of them refused to let their music be covered by Muzak or any of its competitors. But Paul Simon, I saw, said he always knew he had a hit when he heard a Muzak version of it, like at the mall or something like that, which it's kind of like Weird Al covering Nirvana. Like Cobain said that he knew that Nirvana had made it when Weird Al covered Smells Like Teen Spirit. I think that's basically the same thing. Oh, I think most musicians, unless you're a Ted Nugent who, and we'll get to that, but very famously sort of offered to buy a Muzak when

they fill up on hard times so he could basically burn it to the ground. I think most musicians deep down think it's kind of an honor when one of their songs is Muzak-ified. It's got, yeah, you'd have to. Plus, I just want to find out what somebody's going to do with it. Because like I was saying at the beginning, it really takes some creativity to come up with, okay, what can I replace this with that's not just completely predictable or boring, but also isn't going to grab everybody's attention. Because that's, again, not the point of Muzak. I don't know if it was a slogan of the Muzak corporation or not, but they basically said that they fill in the awkward pauses in life to where, you know, yeah, you don't like it. It's

like you were saying at the party. If you're at a party that doesn't have any music on, you just probably just get smashed out of your skull because you're just trying to lubricate the social situation so much. Whereas if you put on music, it's like it takes a lot of that edge off. That was one of the points too with Muzak. And then also to kind of get you to linger a little longer when you were shopping in a store. That was part of it as well. Yeah. I mean, music, we almost always have music on in our house unless, you know, it's night and we're watching a movie or watching something on TV. But it almost all waking hours, we have music playing in our home and it just feels weird and quiet and not full of life

when there's no music happening. It's strange. It can be strange for sure. Should we take a break? Yeah. We have reached basically the early 70s when it's Muzak's first crisis point. And we'll come back to that for this. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh man.

And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that Michael and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Uh-huh. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye bye bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Articular and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life in India. It's like smoking. You might not smoke,

but you're going to get second hand astrology. And lately I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention because maybe there is magic in the stars if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you it got weird fast. Tantric curses, major league baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had a handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the I Heart Radio

app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. All right. So I'm born in 1971 and music starts to die a little bit. A little bit. Because a real rock and roller came into the world. That's right. Born with a jean jacket with the Van Halen logo on marker in the back. It did not go away completely though. It was just sort of, I guess the beginning of the end, but that didn't mean there wasn't still a business model for music because music was never about its popularity. No, but there was a time where it was popular, like JFK had it on Air Force One. I think Eisenhower had it piped into the White House. It was playing on board Apollo 11.

It was everywhere. It's really hard to get across how ubiquitous it was, but I found a quote from a guy named Professor Gary Gumpert of Queens College in New York. He said that at the time, music was just kind of amniotic fluid that surrounds us. It never startles us. It is never too loud. It's never too silent. It's always there. And that was what it was like. You were just kind of moving from one placid bucolic field to the next, going from mall to mall, store to store, elevator to elevator, bus ride to bus ride. It was just absolutely everywhere. So compared to that, the idea that it's absolutely everywhere unquestioned, yeah, it really kind of started to take a bit of a downturn in the 70s,

but it just didn't go anywhere yet. It took decades for it to really take a hit. Yeah. I mean, even in the 80s, that was syndicated in 19 countries, there were 80 million people listening, whether or not they wanted to or not, listening to music every day. And the company ended up being bought and sold a couple of times over the years. I think in 81 or in 72, a company called Teleprompter owned it. In 81, Westinghouse bought it. And I don't know if I believe this. The story goes that Westinghouse learned later on when they were buying Teleprompter that they owned music and apparently they didn't know that. That's what fundinguniverse.com says. I don't know. I mean, who does it?

Maybe back then they didn't do research into purchasing entire corporations, but... They were on a lot of scotch at the time, man. Although we've had companies that bought websites and then they learned that there was a podcast program attached. So I think I've heard of that, things you should do or something like that. Yeah, that was actually that could happen now that I think about it. That's right. Yeah, I kind of actually felt a deeper affinity from Muzak when I learned how many times they've been passed around corporation by corporation. And then I think in the... I think it was... When did Yesco come along? Was that the 90s?

So Yesco was around from the 60s. Well, when they finally came together though, right? Yeah, but they were early competitor, I guess kind of a midlife competitor to Muzak. But by the 80s, Yesco had established a name for itself by doing basically the opposite of what Muzak did rather than making covers of canned music without lyrics. They would just go get the licenses of like the hot new song of the moment and play those. And so rather than background music, which is what Muzak's whole jam was, these guys were pioneering foreground music and they were just a small little outfit from Seattle

that it was kind of like the little engine that could. And they changed the entire landscape, the audio landscape of the United States just by being persistent, by getting that word out that, hey now, foreground's the way to go, not background, that's old stuff. And I think that's why today when you go into Publix to do your grocery shopping, you'll hear Christopher Cross singing sailing instead of the Muzak version of sailing. Yeah, can't we just get both though? Do we have to choose?

I mean, I'm a big Christopher Cross fan. You're not going to find a bigger fan than me. For real, you like him that much? Oh, he's great. I got two of his two big albums I still have on my shelf. Oh, yeah. Well, he's sitting in the other room at my house right now. Well, I guess you're the bigger fan. Yeah. You're like, no, no, no, he's just tied up. Well, I was going to say, he's not here on his will, under his own will.

In fact, you could make a pretty strong case. He's here against his will, but... So in 1984, those when Yesco got officially involved with Muzak, I think Muzak was... Did they actually file for bankruptcy or were they just at that sort of mump precipice? Not yet. They were teetering right there on the edge and it was actually, they were bought by the Fields Company, the company that owns Marshall Fields. So Chicago makes another appearance. And the Fields Company said, we like where this Yesco group is going. We're going to merge with them. So Muzak actually merged with Yesco,

the smaller company, but then ended up moving to Seattle right before the Grunge movement hit. So Seattle's big musical contribution before Grunge was Muzak, basically. I remember seeing that logo. I mean, you've probably seen the vans around before and really not known. It's that M with the circle around it. I remember when I first saw that, I was like, wait a minute, is that the Muzak? Yeah. And that was a big update. They apparently went with some design group. I can't remember the name of it that just completely reinvented the brand because they went from being in the background to manipulating your mood, using stimulus progression to this other thing, this new made up sounding thing called...

What's it called? Quantum... Physics, mechanics, suicide. No, keep guessing. What else? Realm, Leap. Those are all the Quantum's I know. There's got to be another one, Chuck, because I'm still looking. I'm so sorry. What the heck is that thing called? It's Quantum Leap. What does it call a Quantum Leap? Sure. Okay. So with this Quantum Leap thing that they had going on. The Bacula Effect. Quantum Modulation. The Bacula Effect. Quantum Modulation. Okay. Oh, okay. I like Bacula Effect. That's a great one. With Quantum Modulation, it was... We are evoking an emotion that is now tied forever to this,

the brand that you're shopping, you store your shopping in. Yeah, yeah. Sure. So they hire people who make playlists, who curate these playlists that start to finish. They all share this one theme. They all have this one cool, not scary, super hip, beachy, spring break 2008 kind of thing, whatever. The best. So a company will say, this is what our brand is all about. Give us playlists that fit this. And so now you're kind of like, you feel cool because of the music of where you're shopping. And so that makes you want to shop and associate yourself with that place even more. That's what Muzak, that's what's called Neo Muzak is all about. That's the

current state of affairs in the industry. Yeah. Like take, if you want to use Armani Exchange as an example, what they'll do is they will literally try and make like a DJ mix that has beat matches and it doesn't break the momentum and it's all crossfaded. Whereas if Ann Taylor calls them up, they don't want to crossfade. They want Celine Dion songs and then a little bit of a small break and then a sting song coming on. And these gentle fades in and fades out. And you know, it's the same sort of stuff. It's just curated foreground music. What I love about Muzak is in the end, when they were finally acquired, they had 1.5 million commercially recorded songs in their catalog. And they call that the well. That's amazing. Almost 800 Beatles songs.

It is. I think that's why they never fully went under is that catalog kept them commercially viable for sale at least. Super valuable. It's got to be. Yeah. So they were bought in I think 2009 maybe by a group called Mood Music in Austin, 2011. And then two years later, they retired the Muzak name forever. Just couldn't do anything with it. So now it's Mood Music is the company that owns the well. Mood Media. But they're doing that whole foreground music, quantum modulation type thing where you just associate a brand with a certain kind of music. Like you wouldn't walk into that Armani exchange and hear Paul Simon or Christopher Cross. You'd be like, something's off here. Mood Media, their job is to make sure that there's nothing off while

you're in that store, that it all just kind of fits together and you feel good about where you're shopping. I don't know though, man. You want to move some Armani gear? Put on, you can call me out. Just watch it fly off the shelves. Man, those kids would freak out. Their frosted tips would stand up on end. They're like, what is this? This is amazing. I've never felt more alive. Why is Chevy Jason here? A really cool thing though is what you were talking about with Muzak being on the tech forefront. It's really cool that over the years, they were always early adopters of tech and it's funny to think about them that way, but they were always on the leading edge in the forefront of what technology was doing. Yeah. So I don't know if they invented them,

but they certainly were early adopters, if not pioneers in vinyl records. People were not using vinyl at the time. Then they eventually ditched the vinyl records in favor of an electronic brain called Mater M, the number eight and the letter R, which basically was a big deck of reel-to-reel tapes. They had a bunch of different songs on it, but they had different inaudible pulses that would trigger a different one to come on next. So you could curate lists on these huge reel-to-reels. It was just amazing. They were using this thing starting in the 50s. So the whole thing became automated. They launched their own satellite in the 70s. They had a computer database in the 70s. They were very much pioneers and early adopters of a lot of

different technology that we take for granted today. Yeah. I mean, you could make an argument that they were doing the Pandora Spotify thing decades before they were doing it. Absolutely. Yeah. And I mean, the whole point of it too was virtually unchanged. I mean, it's not necessarily to make you a docile shopper anymore, but it's like they're trying to make you feel like that brand is part of your identity by evoking memories in you using songs to unlock them. Totally. Pretty interesting stuff, man. I'm going to go. What were those two records again? I want to write this down. Okay. One is more than music period and environment. 1981 Musac record that has not just sailing on it, has Olivia Newton-John's magic, has take your time,

do it right, which I don't care if the lyrics are there or not. If you're sitting next to your mom in a doctor's office and baby, you can do it, take your time, do it right, comes on, you both know what that song's about. It may even be more uncomfortable in that situation. And then it ends with Funky Town. Nice. It's a good one. The other one is called the Blue Album. It's a complete stimulus progression album, and it has a bunch of good songs on it, including Orlean's Dance With Me, which is, if you ask me, the Musac covers way better than the original. So not to be confused with Weezer's Blue Album. No, it's a little different. Okay. And then if you're like, oh, this music is floating my boat, go start looking up Ronnie

Aldrich, Frank Chexfield, Montavani, and just start there. Yeah. And if eventually you're like, I'm feeling really goosey, how about some actual vocalists going on? And then you'll just go right into Josh's other favorite, which is Yacht Rock, easy listening. I like Yacht Rock a lot too. I'm super right now into West Coast Cool Jazz, Stan Getz, Chet Baker. Oh, I can't remember his name, but I just got into him. He's a great jazz pianist from that era. Bill Evans, the Bill Evans trio. Oh, I love Bill Evans. You're just getting into Bill Evans? Yeah, I just started getting into. I started with Chet Baker and just started working my way out. Vince Garaldi is another great one. I know he's known for the Charlie Brown stuff, but all of Vince Garaldi

is great. Yeah, you can tell just by the Charlie Brown album that he's an amazing jazz guy. Good stuff. So, Chuck, I have one more thing. People hate Musac a lot. So there's some artists who have tried to, a lot of artists have tried to make hay out of the whole thing. But one guy, David Schaefer, had something from back in 2000 or 2002, something. He had X10R.1 and X10R.2. These two CDs that he released, they were basically his weird, unnerving remixes of Musac that just turns the whole thing on its head so much so that you may laugh out loud when you first hear them. And I believe they're on his website, but it's like Musac, but what you would hear in your nightmares. Okay. It's really good. And I believe he's got it on his website to go

listen to. And I think you can buy the CDs too. So check that out. I'll check it out. Okay. Well, if you want to know more about Musac, just start listening and loving. Just don't prejudge. How about that? Great. And since I said don't prejudge everybody, that means it's time for Listener Mail. You know, before we do Listener Mail, we want to issue a formal apology to people that suffer from misophonia. In the Titanic part two episode Listener Mail, someone wrote in about our ad that we had where someone was whispering and it was my fault, frankly. I started off by sort of teasing and whispering. I joined in. You joined in, but I think I led you down the Primrose path. You did, but you know, if Chuck jumped off a bridge, would I jump off a bridge?

Apparently the answer is yes, but I'm still responsible for that. Well, we heard from plenty of people. I had a really nice back and forth over email with the original emailer. I misinterpreted their sort of joking tone of the email and she said, yeah, I was trying to be lighthearted about it. So I get where you were coming from. She was fine. She's going to get tickets to a future stuff you should know show, which she's very excited about. That's fair. Yeah, that's fair. But we worked it out and she's good. And we just, I didn't know it was a real, I had heard of misophonia. I didn't know it could be such a debilitating condition or we never would have made fun of it, certainly. I just sort of thought it was people that are like, and I just don't

like people when they eat food and listening to that. So now we know. Yes. Now we know. So thanks to everybody who wrote in and sorry for being jerks about that. Yeah. And I think we should probably do an episode on misophonia too, probably. Yes, for sure. I've started to do it before, Chuck. And there's not that much info out there. So it's going to, we will for sure. I agree with you, but it might take a little longer. All right. So all apologies, everyone. And I hope this helps make it right. Yeah. And now on to listener mail, right? All right. I'm going to call this from Lauren. Hey guys, a man walks down the street and says, why am I soft in the middle? The rest of my life is so hard. Oh, wait a minute. Sorry. What a perfect email for this one. I was

reading my forearm tattoo by accident. Hey guys, been listening to stuff you should know for a few years off and turn up the volume and play an episode while I cooked dinner. My seven-year-old daughter Lila used to complain, oh, you're listening to this again. But I recently caught her singing the beat to the intro music and she'll casually mention things she's heard from time to time. I suspect she's fond of the animal episodes. Anyway, you'll jokingly sometimes say, Jerry, will you have to edit that? You're going to have to edit that part out. And it has me curious how often things are cut from an episode and why. Bad jokes too long. Have you ever had to completely redo one? I think it'd be really interesting to know and I bet Lila would find

it encouraging. Since she likes to make videos of herself singing and dancing for the record, you'll make it effortless and seem effortless and it's always a joy to listen to. That is Lauren from Montevallo, Alabama. I'll bet this is how you say that. Montevallo? Yeah, you're probably right. You put a little too much mustard on there. She says, P.S., how cool of a mom would I be if my daughter heard her names on the podcast? Yeah, cool mom. So there you go, Lauren and Lila. The answer is very little gets edited out. Just the singing and dancing. Like that siren in the background? We'll probably just leave that in to prove your point. No, we don't edit a lot out. Occasionally, like we found out when we said this before early on, we left in the word stumbles and the ums and

the uhs and just because it's a conversation and we didn't want to make it seem too scripted because it's not or canned because it's not. And so we just left that stuff in there and the only time like I could think today you had to look something up real quick but that didn't happen much. Yeah, I had to poke my head out of the studio and look at my record collection and come up with Bill Evans' name. So, I mean, that's gone now but very little is edited out. It's especially after this many years. It's, we're not one take wonders but it's, Jerry doesn't have the hardest job in the world, you know? We've taken it easy on her for years. Yeah, that's about it. Chuck, I can't think of anything else we really added out. But that's not to say that shows that are

heavily edited and very kind of scripty and slick. Like there's room for those too. Oh, yeah. We're not the only way to do it. No, we're like the Muzak of podcasts. There's other people who are all like the Ted Nugent of podcasts and there's room for both. Yeah, like Roman Marsh, the Ted Nugent of podcasting. That's right, man. That guy's always wearing like a studded leather wristband and stuff. I keep waiting on Roman to text me and being like, you guys are consistently talking smack about me. He doesn't listen and no one he knows listens. That's impossible. So who is that? Lila and Lauren. Correct. Nice. Well, thank you very much for writing in. Hope we answered your question. And if you want to get in touch with us like Lila and Lauren did, you can send us an

email. Send it off to stuffpodcast.iheartradio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts, My Heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help and a different hot sexy teen crush boy band or each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the

iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular, and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find in Major League Baseball, international banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.