Muzak Quotes

“In a way, what Tarantino has done with the French New Wave and with David Lynch is what Pat Boone did with rhythm and blues: He's found (ingeniously) a way to take what is ragged and distinctive and menacing about their work and homogenize it, churn it until it's smooth and cool and hygienic enough for mass consumption. Reservoir Dogs, for example, with its comically banal lunch chatter, creepily otiose code names, and intrusive soundtrack of campy pop from decades past, is a Lynch movie made commercial, i.e., fast, linear, and with what was idiosyncratically surreal now made fashionably (i.e., "hiply") surreal [...] D. Lynch is an exponentially better filmmaker than Q. Tarantino. For, unlike Tarantino, D. Lynch knows that an act of violence in an American film has, through repetition and desensitization, lost the ability to refer to anything but itself. A better way to put what I just tried to say: Quentin Tarantino is interested in watching somebody's ear getting cut off; David Lynch is interested in the ear.”
― David Foster Wallace

“As compensation for the lack of an AM-FM radio in his patrol car, Spencer had developed an automatic Muzak in his mind. Without his conscious thought, his mind would provide a continuous background hum of popular songs to entertain him while he drove. Sometimes, he'd noticed, he could tell how he felt about something by analyzing the songs going through his head: "Good Day, Sunshine" meant a good mood; "I'm Looking Through You" told him that he was pissed off....He supposed that all his moods were set to music while he was young, and neither songs nor emotions had troubled him much since then.”
― Sharyn McCrumb, If Ever I Return, Pretty Peggy-O