Nah’msayin?

Dear Workplace Music, You’re Tacky and I Hate You

Graphic Caity Hall

Let me just start off by saying that I’m one of those people who likes most, if not all, kinds of music.

On the right day, I’ll jam to anything, and my collection spans genres-a-plenty (yes, even country). I try to keep an open mind when it comes to my tunes, but there is one kind of music that I can’t stand: any song they play at my job, or pretty much in anyone’s workplace.

Top 40 radio is a rotting wasteland of pop covered in glitter and hammered on auto tune, playing music that belongs in clubs and as the ring tones of people who wake up in the morning feeling like P. Diddy (or Puff, or Daddy, or whatever his name is now).

Instead, it’s being played over and over and over. In one eight-hour shift at my job, I heard Katy Perry’s “Roar” eight times. Eight. Flipping. Times. Which is nothing compared to the number of times I thought about heading to the nearest zoo, so I could throw myself into the tiger cage and make it all stop.

I wake up from my nightmares with Miley Cyrus’s “Wrecking Ball” bouncing around my head like a pinball from hell. The only thing that teen twerking machine is wrecking is my happiness and sanity.

On the other hand, stores who create their own playlists, custom tailoring them to what they think their clientele will be into, are just as bad. These contrived collections, which consist of a totally awful remix of something from Adele, a weird Euro-pop song about shoes, and that one indie song that got big, are trying way too hard.

I used to judge people who walked around stores with headphones on, because I thought it was sort of rude to employees and fellow shoppers. Then I realized these people are masters of their own mental stability, pioneers of our times who are finally taking matters into their own hands, instead of being forced to face the (horrible, horrible) music.