{"id":165290,"date":"2023-08-30T11:38:46","date_gmt":"2023-08-30T15:38:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=165290"},"modified":"2023-08-30T11:38:46","modified_gmt":"2023-08-30T15:38:46","slug":"passionate-kisses-the-soundtrack-at-cvs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2023\/08\/30\/passionate-kisses-the-soundtrack-at-cvs\/","title":{"rendered":"Passionate Kisses: The Soundtrack at CVS"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, Licensed under CCO 4.0.<\/p><\/div>\n

I seem to find a reason to go to CVS several times a week. Sometimes these reasons are medical, but much of the time, I am tracking down some household item or another\u2014especially when I need something faster than it can be delivered, or I don\u2019t want to be party to the low-level violence of same-day delivery, and I don\u2019t feel like subjecting myself to the psychic keelhauling of a Target run. There is a unique air of desperation to most CVS locations. This is probably because CVS, as a health-care company stapled to a convenience store chain, blends the special emotional terroirs of the hospital and the gas station snack aisle. It could also be because the stores are often seriously understaffed, presumably in part due to the corporation\u2019s recent move to slash pharmacy hours at thousands of locations. The decor is what you might call austerity-core. It is both corporate-loud (garish displays of next season\u2019s decorations) and minimalist-clinical (pilled gray carpeting, fluorescent lights). People in pain and in search of relief, people picking up the prescriptions they need to live, and people who really want a soda all stalk the aisles.<\/span><\/p>\n

The one unalloyed delight of CVS, though, is the soundtrack. One of the first things you notice once you start paying attention to the in-store music is how much whoever is in charge of programming loves Rod Stewart. \u201cIf you want my body and you think I\u2019m sexy, come on, sugar, tell me so,\u201d Rod demands as you ponder the locked cases of flu medicine. \u201cYoung hearts, be free tonight,\u201d Rod bellows while you compare the prices of soap. Sometimes he hides behind an additional layer of mediation, as in Sheryl Crow\u2019s version of \u201cThe First Cut Is the Deepest,\u201d a song also notably covered by Rod. These are not the sexiest Rod songs. In fact, they are the songs where he sings from a place of impotence or regret. His lover threatens to crush him; she is too impossible to talk to; love will tear them apart. Like the shoppers whose attention the in-store loudspeaker announcements periodically try to seize, she is to be guilted, cajoled.<\/span><\/p>\n

Big feelings reign on the CVS soundtrack. Sometimes they are overheated. Other times they are gushy, like the Sixpence None the Richer cover of \u201cThere She Goes,\u201d the heroin anthem by the La\u2019s, jacked up a treacly minor third from the original. (There are lots of covers on the playlist.) The emoting has a tendency to ambush you. Earlier this week I was picking up trash bags when, all of a sudden, I heard the distinctive <\/span>plunk-plink-plunk-plink-plunk-plink-plunk-plink<\/span><\/i> of<\/span> the sad-sack opening guitar riff to \u201cChasing Cars\u201d by Snow Patrol. The song depicts a couple, secure, or maybe trapped, in a bubble of self-sufficiency: \u201cWe don\u2019t need anything or anyone.\u201d While Rod sometimes sounds like he is delivering his come-ons with a campy wink, \u201cChasing Cars\u201d contains no prophylactic against its own sentimental excess. It is an almost unbearable song to hear in CVS, regardless of the circumstances that bring you into the store. \u201cIf I lay here, if I just lay here, would you lay with me and just forget the world?\u201d the chorus goes. <\/span>Here?<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

The basic experience of shopping at CVS is one of doing something desperate at worst and banally unpleasant at best while swimming in a warm bath of muted musical intensity. No other retail chain is so committed to the power ballad as a musical form. A Spotify playlist of \u201cCVS BANGERS,\u201d apparently sourced from hard-won knowledge, features a stacked lineup: Foreigner\u2019s \u201cI Want to Know What Love Is\u201d; Cutting Crew\u2019s \u201c(I Just) Died in Your Arms Tonight\u201d; the Cars\u2019 \u201cDrive\u201d; Toto\u2019s still-inescapable \u201cAfrica.\u201d One song on that playlist that I absolutely have heard in my local store is Paula Cole\u2019s \u201cWhere Have All the Cowboys Gone?\u201d\u2014the nineties adult-alternative equivalent of a power ballad, a spoken\/sung tale of a marriage crumbling under the weight of too much gender. Some philosophers claim that the emotions artworks evoke are really \u201cpseudo emotions\u201d; we feel them at one degree of remove. I can think of no better support for this thesis than the experience of listening to Paula Cole in CVS. The hopes of young love, the disappointments of middle age, the curdling resentment that ensues: I feel some inkling of it all. But mostly I\u2019m just tapping my foot as I wait to pick up my prescription.<\/span><\/p>\n

If you spend enough time shopping at CVS and listening to CVS-inspired playlists, you may begin to wonder if some rogue programmer is introducing subversive material into the mix. One Kinks song in the rotation tells of local cultural institutions being turned into supermarkets, and then parking lots. Domestic frustrations figure prominently. On the subreddit dedicated to the store, where overworked employees compare notes, one of the most discussed and most reviled songs is Mary Chapin Carpenter\u2019s very nineties cover of Lucinda Williams\u2019s \u201cPassionate Kisses.\u201d It\u2019s a song about wanting more than the basic necessities\u2014in other words, more than convenience store stuff. The chorus is a question: \u201cShouldn\u2019t I have all of this, and passionate kisses from you?\u201d Desperation creeps in as the song lopes along. The last verse finds the singer shouting, \u201cGive me what I deserve, \u2018cause it\u2019s my right.\u201d The consensus among CVS veterans seems to be that all this is \u201cvapid and irritating,\u201d if unintentionally funny at times. One employee reports that a coworker with an unrequited crush on her manager stares wistfully at the object of her affection for the duration of the song whenever it comes on. Another shares a vignette: \u201cI vividly remember being violently hungover on a cold winter morning in New England, passionate kisses playing loudly in the background as someone\u2019s grandma slowly searched her purse for coupons, fluorescent lights inescapable as I prayed for a swift end to my existence. Hell is real and I\u2019ve lived it.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Hell is other people\u2019s music. But whose music <\/span>is<\/span><\/i> the CVS soundtrack? The store\u2019s music vendor is Mood Media, formerly Muzak. While that company made its name with what we\u2019d today call <\/span>original content\u2014<\/span><\/i>light instrumentals composed for background listening\u2014it eventually pivoted into the playlist business, curating \u201cchannels\u201d of already-existing vocal pop music for their clients. It\u2019s easy to imagine each major chain laying claim to its own channel to create its distinct emotional climate, whether they use Mood or one of its few competitors. Trader Joe\u2019s is peppy and lightly eclectic: Motown, tasteful eighties hits. H&M is corporate hipster: late-period Jens Lekman. Ditto Urban Outfitters, which used to put out a yearly mixtape: \u201cHalloween Head\u201d by Ryan Adams, \u201cSlow Me Down\u201d by Emmy Rossum. Breezy yacht rock diffuses through the faux-Egyptian catacombs of the Cheesecake Factory. Whole Foods is largely silent.<\/span><\/p>\n

CVS\u2019s musical identity is harder to pin down. It is not subcultural-aspirational like Hot Topic or Starbucks back when it sold CDs. Functionally, it comes closer to the genre-agnostic mishmash of feel-good tunes that play in most supermarkets. And yet the feel-good tunes resonate differently in CVS. The anonymous employee on the subreddit is surely right that the store\u2019s music produces its effects by way of contrast: earnest voices singing about tenderness lost or gained over sparkly guitars, piped into an impersonal, overlit, understocked place where absolutely nobody wants to be. The whole situation is a perverse joke.<\/span><\/p>\n

CVS is the negative image of the club or the theater. There is no coordinated pulse of the crowd, just individual people shuffling around. The music is inflicted on you against your will rather than offered up as a kind of gift or \u201cexperience.\u201d But the existential emptiness of this setting allows the music to sound with a special liveliness. In the wasteland, you can better hear what the pop song wants from you. The pop song demands your investment\u2014positive, negative, ambivalent, it doesn\u2019t care. It refuses to be ignored, and it won\u2019t settle for a minor role as a manipulator of moods. In the harsh fluorescent light, we can hear the pop song say, \u201cGive me what I deserve, cause it\u2019s my right.\u201d Who are we to refuse?<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Mitch Therieau is a writer in California.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cBig feelings reign on the CVS soundtrack.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2403,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1187],"tags":[14257,68709,67827,68710],"class_list":["post-165290","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-music","tag-ambient-music","tag-cvs","tag-featured","tag-pharmacy"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nPassionate Kisses: The Soundtrack at CVS by Mitch Therieau<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"August 30, 2023 \u2013 \u201cBig feelings reign on the CVS soundtrack.\u201d\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2023\/08\/30\/passionate-kisses-the-soundtrack-at-cvs\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" 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