Music I Hate a Lot

I’m picky about music. And what a fucking surprise that is, right? Yeah, I know. I hate heavy metal and rap and hip-hop and easy listening and almost anything with vocals. I don’t like strings, usually. Or brass, for the most part. I’m not a big fan of rock, never mind that I grew up during the ‘60’s. I didn’t know what was wrong with me until I went off to college and discovered The Ohio Players. Yowza.
I’m not one of those people who likes to have music going constantly. Even music I love, I don’t need to hear all the time. Sure, I have Sirius radio for the porch and in Merlin, and I have Pandora on the computers. But I don’t listen to it all the time. There is a lot to be said for silence. Complete silence. Except for birds and purring cats and the regular passing of trains just four blocks from our house. I love those.
But constant music? Eh. I hadn’t thought about this in a while [since I interviewed artists about it for The Book = Teaser!], but today I had to. Today I spent an hour in the chiropractor’s office. I had stitching. I wasn’t cold. It didn’t smell bad. I didn’t need to pee. Ergo, I should have been perfectly content, right?
Almost. There was, however, a fly in the ointment. A big, noisy, hairy horse fly:
Muzak. Actually, I think it’s internet radio—I think it’s Sirius, actually—I asked one time, trying to figure out what this guy had programmed into his office system. Because, hello!  He’s only 40! He’s younger than I am = way, way too damn young to be listening to this crap. I’m guessing all of his patients are a bunch of old farts who like this stuff. That scares me to death.
I hadn’t ever really realized how truly terrible it was until today, when I had to spend so long listening to it. When he came in the room, he apologized sincerely for my having to wait so long, and I had to bite my tongue to keep from saying, “Sweetie, it wasn’t the wait; it was your fucking music.”
Only I didn’t. “Fucking” would probably cause him to short-circuit. (I believe he may be a cyborg.)
I heard, this afternoon, “Secondhand Rose,” and “I Write the Song,” among many other atrocities, all done in the most truly hideous way possible. Either one of these songs, no matter how tastefully they were performed, would be enough to make me want to stab myself in the ears with a knitting needle—and I don’t even knit! They’re that bad!—but the arrangements I heard today? Oh, honeys!  It’s a fucking miracle I’m still alive.
Imagine “I Write the Song,” (and be reallyreallyreally glad you can’t hear it in your head. Oh? You wish you could? Then go here, sweetie, bless your heart). Now imagine it as Muzak, and then, just for further inspiration, imagine it accompanied a full Muzak orchestra with lots of damn strings and with dancers:  it’s a troupe of dancers from, oh, maybe 1970, where all the young men and women are dressed exactly the same and, in fact, look pretty much interchangeable in their contrived sexlessness, all perky and upbeat in red shirts and bright red pants and white dancing shoes, and they all have hair that never, ever moves from its perfectness, and they all have smiles that are so blindingly white and even and brilliant that you can’t look directly at them, lest you be blinded. And they’re all leaping and pirouetting in a most spritely fashion, singing gleefully about being the music and writing the songs.
And you just want to grab them and rip out their throats with your teeth so they will shut the hell up.
It was like that. For an entire hour.