The state of culture

[Monte Davis]

JMK> I'm not paranoid enough to think the song was somehow intended for
_me_,
but ...

Why on earth not?

In 1981, when I worked in the Time-Life building just across Sixth Avenue
from Rockefeller Center, a colleague and I would go out at midday for a
fast-food lunch and a few rounds of Missile Command at a video game arcade.
One day we were getting our drumsticks and fruit drinks at Popeye's
Chicken, and I noticed Steely Dan's "Bad Sneakers" on the Muzak:

Bad sneakers and a pina colada, my friend,
Stompin' down the avenue by Radio City...

The track was then six years old and IIRC had never made top 40, so I said
to my friend: "Call me paranoid, but it seems I've been hearing that a
*lot* since coming to work here."

He replied with obvious relief: "You too, eh?"

On Wed, Sep 9, 2015 at 8:10 AM, Krafft, John M. <krafftjm at miamioh.edu>
wrote:

> It's a sign (or symptom) of something, but of what? The other day in
> Walgreen's I heard the store's version of Muzak playing, much to my
> surprise, the original Knopfler-Taylor version of "Sailing to
> Philadelphia." While one of the points about Muzak used to be that it
> shouldn't be noticed, this was too loud not to register, and I
> couldn't help wondering how many other customers were likely to
> actually recognize the song and then to connect it with Pynchon. I'm
> not paranoid enough to think the song was somehow intended for _me_,
> but ...
>
> John
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>
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