![]() ![]() "We all are terrorized by music nowadays," he wrote, ".the merciless stream of 1960s golden oldies drenching suburban malls, the disco-revival radio thumping out Donna Summer in the back of a taxi all the way to the airport, the tinny Muzak bleating from storefronts as you walk along the sidewalk, the tastefully muted Andrew Lloyd Webber seeping from recessed speakers above the urinals in the men's room. Bottum published an essay called "The Soundtracking of America" in Atlantic Monthly. ![]() Just as music needs a backdrop of silence to signify, we need music-free stretches to make music meaningful. "If God had meant for everything to happen at once, he would not have invented desk calendars." remind me why I need bells on my ankles and bells on my toes? "I am no more interested in hearing 'Mack the Knife' while waiting for the shuttle to Boston than someone sitting ringside at the Sands Hotel is interested in being forced to choose between 16 varieties of cottage cheese," wrote Fran Lebowitz back in 1978. Marketing synergy turned into sweet music! Ever more ariels hummed as they sent ever more music to ever more places. ![]() Then, thanks to a deal between Apple and Motorola, there was iTunes for my mobile phone, too. Suddenly my loft was "full of noises, sounds and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not." I could stream "a thousand twangling instruments" to a choice of speakers: the studio window, the bathroom, the kitchen or the south studio. My playlists, containing music I downloaded wirelessly through my iBook's built-in Wi-Fi ariel, could be as long as I wanted I had access to just about anything that had ever been recorded, and I could stream it anywhere in my building thanks to an invention called AirTunes. With the arrival of the MP3 format, music seemed to attain the incorporeal lightness and ubiquity of Ariel in Shakespeare's Tempest. ![]()
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