Great piece, evocative, and got me to dig up some songs I hadn't heard in a while.
I was born in 1982 and played and listened to all the same stuff, but I spent almost no time in malls, so it's really interesting to hear they're a big part of your childhood. (Please don't take offense but) I'm reminded of Kevin the Food Court Gangsta from Penny Arcade: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/08/04/the-ecology-of-the-suburban-thug
Synthwave and its associated genres were the culmination of how people like *me* (city people, but *not* mall people or party people) treated music. Soundgarden, Orbital, My Bloody Valentine, Four Tet, Amon Tobin and Neutral Milk Hotel were things we found *afterwards*, wandering around the streets of Seattle, of London, of Austin, wandering alone in a light drizzle with some headphones tucked into a hoodie, and we barely noticed when those things became Washed Out and Glasser and Com Truise and Fennec Fox, except, if we noticed the makers at all in our wikipedia dives, we noticed they were a little more like us. But even then, it was always there. Chris Cornell was a solitary basement dweller before he was ever a stage screamer.
Edit: and now, as a married 41 year old with kids and a boring tech job, I mostly listen to Nintendo mix tapes (some original songs, some covers) on youtube, for the exact reasons you described. I work to "two hours of Nintendo autumn music with rain sounds animal crossing stardew valley tears of the kingdom" things.
I mean, city people had no reason to become mallrats. I guess it does depend on the city, but the people I knew who grew up in New York or Philadelphia had options when they were young. There were places they could walk, bike or take the bus or train to. I grew up in a town that didn't even have sidewalks and definitely wasn't bicycle friendly. The closest place that was anything like a hangout was a diner that would have been a 35–40 minute walk from my house—along very busy streets with very narrow shoulders. And if you were 14–16 years old and had to convince your parents to drop you off somewhere on a Friday night, the mall gave you more variety of experience than sitting in Starbucks, Barnes & Noble, or a diner for two or three hours, and offered more opportunity for random social encounters.
Even when one learned to drive (back then you could get your license at 17), the mall was still a decent place to fritter away an afternoon or evening with friends from around town from time to time. Around that point though my other goth & punker friends (the ones 18 & over anyway) starting going to clubs and shows and discovered the pleasure of chain smoking in the diner until 2 AM, while I got a nights & weekends job at the mall and was still there all the time. After two years I pretty much had my fill of the place (though it hadn't yet had its fill of me, as fate would have it), and by then it had already begun its slow decline.
> A listener punching out emails perhaps doesn’t want exogenous words being chanted into her ears; minimal lyrical content then becomes an advantage. Someone lounging in bed looking at Instagram on her smartphone or sitting at a desk with her laptop and methodically transferring her attention between Discord, six browser tabs, and Google Docs/Adobe Illustrator/Windows Notepad perhaps doesn’t want to listen to anything too tiringly energic, too variant in terms of tone and tempo, or too distracting
Do you think this is happening with film and shows as well? I've wondered if shows like "Emily in Paris" are written to be left on in the background where you don't really need to pay attention to know what's happening.
I think it was already a thing where TV is concerned. Soap operas were made to entertain stay-at-home wives while they did housework. Some of my favorite 1990s shows (Sifl & Olly, MST3K, and Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist come to mind) don't demand especially close attention and were easy to tune in and out of. I think this was accidental, though—no television network wanted to fill its airwaves (except maybe late at night) with content that didn't especially grip viewers. They had Nielsen ratings to think of, and the ratings determined the value of their ad space. "Good for background viewing" probably wasn't a strong argument for content when there were 100 channels and viewers had a simple clicker device at hand.
(I'm sure the answer is only a google search away, but I wonder if more women (especially married women) joining the workforce since the mid-twentieth century played a role in the demise of the daytime soap opera. I think only General Hospital might be left.)
I don't watch a lot of modern television, so I'm really not sure. Most of the newer stuff I make a point of catching (and it isn't much) doesn't seem like it's content to be background viewing. My sense is that not much has changed: there's the still the airtime-filling stuff in the mornings, afternoons, and after midnight that's there for channel surfers and background viewing, and the evening/prime time content that's designed to capture the viewer's attention for 30–60 minutes at a time.
My guess is that streaming shows that lend themselves especially well to background viewing still probably come about by accident. Like, if someone *really* want background noise, there's a billion YouTube videos of affable people gabbing about trivia for sixty minutes. Granted, I don't pay especially close attention to all of Hulu or Netflix's original offerings, but it seems like a show that's designed to be watched inattentively might be a tough pitch, given that the effect of streaming has been more deliberate selection on the part of the viewer.
I'm not sure I see this happening with film, even in the age of direct-to-streaming. I think people still comport themselves differently when putting on a 90-minute movie than a 20-minute episode of a TV show. A TV show doesn't become ambient comfort food unless the viewer has already familiarized himself with it by watching a bunch of episodes, and in my experience people don't put on movies in the background unless they've already seen them before. A movie that's incapable of grabbing somebody is less likely to be viewed in full, and therefore less likely to be viewed again.
Great piece, evocative, and got me to dig up some songs I hadn't heard in a while.
I was born in 1982 and played and listened to all the same stuff, but I spent almost no time in malls, so it's really interesting to hear they're a big part of your childhood. (Please don't take offense but) I'm reminded of Kevin the Food Court Gangsta from Penny Arcade: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/08/04/the-ecology-of-the-suburban-thug
Synthwave and its associated genres were the culmination of how people like *me* (city people, but *not* mall people or party people) treated music. Soundgarden, Orbital, My Bloody Valentine, Four Tet, Amon Tobin and Neutral Milk Hotel were things we found *afterwards*, wandering around the streets of Seattle, of London, of Austin, wandering alone in a light drizzle with some headphones tucked into a hoodie, and we barely noticed when those things became Washed Out and Glasser and Com Truise and Fennec Fox, except, if we noticed the makers at all in our wikipedia dives, we noticed they were a little more like us. But even then, it was always there. Chris Cornell was a solitary basement dweller before he was ever a stage screamer.
Edit: and now, as a married 41 year old with kids and a boring tech job, I mostly listen to Nintendo mix tapes (some original songs, some covers) on youtube, for the exact reasons you described. I work to "two hours of Nintendo autumn music with rain sounds animal crossing stardew valley tears of the kingdom" things.
I mean, city people had no reason to become mallrats. I guess it does depend on the city, but the people I knew who grew up in New York or Philadelphia had options when they were young. There were places they could walk, bike or take the bus or train to. I grew up in a town that didn't even have sidewalks and definitely wasn't bicycle friendly. The closest place that was anything like a hangout was a diner that would have been a 35–40 minute walk from my house—along very busy streets with very narrow shoulders. And if you were 14–16 years old and had to convince your parents to drop you off somewhere on a Friday night, the mall gave you more variety of experience than sitting in Starbucks, Barnes & Noble, or a diner for two or three hours, and offered more opportunity for random social encounters.
Even when one learned to drive (back then you could get your license at 17), the mall was still a decent place to fritter away an afternoon or evening with friends from around town from time to time. Around that point though my other goth & punker friends (the ones 18 & over anyway) starting going to clubs and shows and discovered the pleasure of chain smoking in the diner until 2 AM, while I got a nights & weekends job at the mall and was still there all the time. After two years I pretty much had my fill of the place (though it hadn't yet had its fill of me, as fate would have it), and by then it had already begun its slow decline.
> A listener punching out emails perhaps doesn’t want exogenous words being chanted into her ears; minimal lyrical content then becomes an advantage. Someone lounging in bed looking at Instagram on her smartphone or sitting at a desk with her laptop and methodically transferring her attention between Discord, six browser tabs, and Google Docs/Adobe Illustrator/Windows Notepad perhaps doesn’t want to listen to anything too tiringly energic, too variant in terms of tone and tempo, or too distracting
Do you think this is happening with film and shows as well? I've wondered if shows like "Emily in Paris" are written to be left on in the background where you don't really need to pay attention to know what's happening.
I think it was already a thing where TV is concerned. Soap operas were made to entertain stay-at-home wives while they did housework. Some of my favorite 1990s shows (Sifl & Olly, MST3K, and Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist come to mind) don't demand especially close attention and were easy to tune in and out of. I think this was accidental, though—no television network wanted to fill its airwaves (except maybe late at night) with content that didn't especially grip viewers. They had Nielsen ratings to think of, and the ratings determined the value of their ad space. "Good for background viewing" probably wasn't a strong argument for content when there were 100 channels and viewers had a simple clicker device at hand.
(I'm sure the answer is only a google search away, but I wonder if more women (especially married women) joining the workforce since the mid-twentieth century played a role in the demise of the daytime soap opera. I think only General Hospital might be left.)
I don't watch a lot of modern television, so I'm really not sure. Most of the newer stuff I make a point of catching (and it isn't much) doesn't seem like it's content to be background viewing. My sense is that not much has changed: there's the still the airtime-filling stuff in the mornings, afternoons, and after midnight that's there for channel surfers and background viewing, and the evening/prime time content that's designed to capture the viewer's attention for 30–60 minutes at a time.
My guess is that streaming shows that lend themselves especially well to background viewing still probably come about by accident. Like, if someone *really* want background noise, there's a billion YouTube videos of affable people gabbing about trivia for sixty minutes. Granted, I don't pay especially close attention to all of Hulu or Netflix's original offerings, but it seems like a show that's designed to be watched inattentively might be a tough pitch, given that the effect of streaming has been more deliberate selection on the part of the viewer.
I'm not sure I see this happening with film, even in the age of direct-to-streaming. I think people still comport themselves differently when putting on a 90-minute movie than a 20-minute episode of a TV show. A TV show doesn't become ambient comfort food unless the viewer has already familiarized himself with it by watching a bunch of episodes, and in my experience people don't put on movies in the background unless they've already seen them before. A movie that's incapable of grabbing somebody is less likely to be viewed in full, and therefore less likely to be viewed again.
Just spitballing here.