{"id":98153,"date":"2016-05-13T15:31:03","date_gmt":"2016-05-13T19:31:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=98153"},"modified":"2016-05-13T15:51:54","modified_gmt":"2016-05-13T19:51:54","slug":"the-liberating-power-of-the-enforced-soundtrack","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/05\/13\/the-liberating-power-of-the-enforced-soundtrack\/","title":{"rendered":"The Songs We\u2019re Stuck With"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Real McCoy.<\/p><\/div>\n

At a coffee shop, standing on line (because I\u2019m a New Yorker, and for some reason that\u2019s where we stand with lines\u2014on<\/em> them, never in<\/em> them), I began to cry. This in itself was not so extraordinary\u2014the mascara has not yet been invented that\u2019s proof against my tears\u2014but this jag happened to be music related. The Jos\u00e9 Gonzalez cover of \u201cHeartbeats<\/a>\u201d had come on the sound system, and the time-machine jolt to 2006 was so sudden that my body didn\u2019t know how to respond except with tears, although it wasn\u2019t grief I felt.\u00a0<\/p>\n

There is a particular quality to music you were once forced to listen to for long periods\u2014the songs you remember from, say, jobs at which you had no control over the sound system. I don\u2019t mean to say I dislike that particular cover of \u201cHeartbeats\u201d; left to my own devices, I probably would have thought it was pretty enough. But I\u2019d listened to it for months on end, and my relationship with it, at this point, had moved beyond simple like or dislike into a special realm familiar to anyone who\u2019s worked retail or in the hospitality business. It\u2019s not like a song you cleave to of your own volition; it\u2019s the abdication of all such power.\u00a0<\/p>\n

There is the summer program I attended during high school where a girl down the hall blasted Real McCoy\u2019s \u201cAnother Night<\/a>\u201d on a loop for weeks\u2014she was learning a dance routine\u2014and my initial scorn and irritation gave way to acceptance, and then a grudging familiarity, and finally a sort of emptiness when it exited my life. There was the restaurant where I waitressed that forced a single Diana Krall standards album on us for four months straight, until we\u2019d been brainwashed into a kind of neutral submission and the music was so tied up with feuds and crushes and bad tippers and big spenders and being young that we\u2019d lost an ability to hear it objectively.<\/p>\n

In my experience, at least, you don\u2019t want to listen to these songs on your own time. Any song, even those you liked previously, becomes too tied up with the smells and people and feelings of a specific place\u2014and with the particular reluctant freedom of obedience. Diana Krall, Real McCoy, Cat Power\u2019s \u201cNew York, New York\u201d: they\u2019re all blessedly free of the pressure to form a judgment. You have your own songs, probably. And what you feel at the end of these experiences is like what one feels for a family member: at the end of the day, it simply is. In that way, at least, it\u2019s very much like love.<\/p>\n

Sadie Stein is contributing editor of <\/em>The Paris Review, and the <\/em>Daily\u2019s correspondent.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At a coffee shop, standing on line (because I\u2019m a New Yorker, and for some reason that\u2019s where we stand with lines\u2014on them, never in them), I began to cry. This in itself was not so extraordinary\u2014the mascara has not yet been invented that\u2019s proof against my tears\u2014but this jag happened to be music related. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":178,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13115],"tags":[22364,22367,8285,4901,22366,13158,46,22365,10359,13487,7754],"class_list":["post-98153","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-our-daily-correspondent","tag-associations","tag-diana-krall","tag-hospitality","tag-jobs","tag-jose-gonzalez","tag-memories","tag-music","tag-real-mccoy","tag-retail","tag-songs","tag-working"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Strange, Liberating Power of the Enforced Soundtrack<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Sadie Stein on the songs we\u2019re stuck with.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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