Supermarket Songs

I don't always listen to them fully. I could be wrong about the context, that happens when you can't hear well to start with. But I guess if this is what I hear then this is what other people hear, and it's going to shape them, consciously or not. It will make them adopt negative ideals, or perhaps worse, bad taste in music. They're not going to look up the lyrics later to get the full story, and so, replicating that viewpoint, neither will I. Maybe they can zone it out and I'm just weird, I don't know. But I tried to remember the highlights.

A male voice goes:

Why don't you listen to the man

who's lovin' you?

Wuh-oh, oh

This is the only line I hear usually. Brings up old paranoia about being called an “SJW,” because this could be romantic to some women (and men). Someone to take care of you when you can't be a good judge of yourself. Someone to tell you what to do in a world fraught with the anxiety of choice. But choice is also freedom and to hear this line again and again seems to build up this idea that dudes choose, women wait.

I'm presuming heterosexuality in all these songs unless I know better from prior sources—heteronormativity being a thing after all.

Along those lines, Madonna's “La Isla Bonita” would be absolutely great if it wasn't for that “girl loves a boy and a boy loves a girl” bit. Metaphorically weak from a lyrical standpoint even outside of making this yet another love song for the Straights.

(I should name some strong songs right off the bat. The Golden Hippie's “Drums Make Me Happy” and Natasha Bedingfield's “Unwritten” are actually pretty good. There are surely at least a couple others.)

She needs a wild heart

She needs a wild heart

I've got a wild heart

When I first heard this I seriously thought he was saying, “She needs a water park,” and this was about the son of a water park tycoon who gets lucky with one of his parents' customers. I had a strange nostalgia for when I was a young boy flirting with other boys at the Place To Be in those days, the [Water Park.] (Name censored to protect the guilty.) There's something about budding homosexuality (or bisexuality) that I think, speaking without experience, is a more invigorating and fascinating way to spend one's puberty than being straight. You have to make your own rules, and learn to keep secrets. You make friendships that are about life and death, and not just convenience or boredom—though we do of course have other friends as well.

But no, these are the true lines, heard properly in the quiet of the breakroom. (Never quiet, thanks to these songs.) Dude, I doubt your heart is as wild as you think it is. Anyone who thinks of themselves as “wild” is decidedly not, I can assure you. That is something I say speaking from experience.

NAY-HEY-HEY-HEY-HEY

This anomalously disembodied line is specifically from “Big Yellow Taxi” by Counting Crows. Filler lyrics, or filler syllables, are a must in a lot of songs—my favorite music would be incomplete without the spontaneous “Oh”s, “Ah”s, and other interrelated shouts. But this song has annoying rhythm and vocals and it may well be my current least favorite. This line is my least favorite out of the whole thing. Some musicians can make this sound convincing. Whoever sings for Counting Crows (I didn't bother checking) does not.

(Oh, we do play “Shiny Happy People” by REM. If we're busy enough, I can use the edges of the vocals and the particular instrumental style to pretend it's any other REM song.)

'Cause it's you

Who

Takes care of everyone else

You

need to allow me to help you

Whoa-ohhhhhhhhhhh-OH

Appreciated

Heard it originally as “asphyxiated,” “obliterated,” “under-equated,” etc. It's another song that takes a patriarchal attitude, albeit one which is relatively non-violent (though the word “need” is a little uncomfortable). These songs seem to presume that women are messes that need a strong man to save them. There are also a lot of songs which presume the reverse, that bad men must be “saved” by good women. Notably and amusingly it matches up to Demons and Wizards' “Beneath These Waves”; around “You / need to” you can start going into “A walk through the shaaaaaaadows / We'll soon cross the line,” with the long a in “shadows” matching up to the long o in “whoa.”

Shadows of life

cast by the rain

Shadows of pleasure

and shadows of pain

Shadows of you

Kissed by our love

Shadows we two

became shadows of

No comment. This is the song from the end of the killer worm movie Squirm (1976). What?

Tonight, nothing will bring us down

Tonight, we're at the Lost and Found

How romantic! You can look for your keys together.

You're my homie, no one knows me like you know me
Like the sun and the moon, all the best things comes in two
What would I do without a friend like you?

You gotta hear this one to appreciate how irritating it is. I was kidding, we don't actually play the song from Squirm, but this is from the Captain Underpants movie. How it worked its way into our Sisyphean ensemble I have no idea. Manager favorite of some kind, perhaps?

One of my friends who worked at another Store reported that “Roar” by Katy Perry being played every day was why she became known as “Blind Patty.” That same song convinced a man down in Idaho to stuff and mount a cashier he didn't like as a trophy.

“Shake It Off” by T-Swift is one of her worst, even if it's got a pretty good message.

Now time will rise and time will fall

Time stands still around us all

Time is not our enemy

Time is the universe's sea

What the hell was Jagged Skull smoking when they wrote “Ode to Time”? I appreciate that it's poppy enough to put in a grocery store, despite technically being power metal, but I can't believe that their writing got this bad. Everything after the Sailing the Multiverse album was utter horsehit, so it's no surprise that that's what they play here.

That's all I have for now. I may add more later.

Yours with love,

-Johnny Whistler