Musical horrors beyond your comprehension

Just because you can do something with technology doesn’t mean you should.

The other day, being out and about rather early in the morning, I stopped for breakfast at a place I’d never been to before, with “Cafe and Brunch” in its name.

I soon became aware that the background music playing in the place was all about, uh, brunch. It was generic easy-listening “smooth jazz” type music with a guy singing about “dancing to the brunch-time beats” and stuff like that, with the verses calling out various breakfast foods in slightly odd ways, like “pancakes spinning in the morning light.” Then the next track, with another forgettable Muzak melody, had a refrain about “that cinnamon kick” and verses about waffles and cinnamon rolls and oatmeal. Another line: “It’s not just eggs and fruit on a plate, it’s love with you and feeling great.” I tried googling some of the lyrics, wondering what on earth I was listening to, but nothing came up. The longer the music went on, the more confident I became that I could detect in it the sulfuric stench of a large language model. Someone had asked a plagiarism engine to generate a dozen or so smooth jazz songs about brunch, and this was what it had come up with.

Then the next day, I visited a coffee shop I’ve been to many times, and which always has normal pop music playing. This time, though, it was playing a very familiar sort of smooth jazz, but all the lyrics were about coffee instead of breakfast foods. Not-quite-human lyrics like “There’s coffee in the air when I’ve got jazz in my cup” and “I feel so fresh, I feel so young, like I’ve got latte in my lungs.” I’ve never experienced having latte in my lungs (I’m a caffeine user but, like Bill Clinton, I never inhale). I can imagine how it might feel, though, and fresh  and young aren’t the first words that spring to mind. That wasn’t written by a human being.

Why would anyone want this? Advertising jingles I understand. Atmosphere-setting background music I understand. But what’s the point of making your background music a non-stop advertisement for the general concept of brunch? 

I found it intolerable and will most likely never patronize either of those establishments again. It’s well known that classical music can be used to keep “urban youths” away. If anyone wants to keep the likes of me away, they’ve found the right music to do it.