The Cream: November 6, 2024

Music for Hotels

I’m fascinated by music heard in the wild, not chosen and curated by me. Music with a public life. For instance, when we landed recently at JFK in New York, our shuttle driver played Andrea Bocelli live in Las Vegas in the van at I-want-you-to-love-this-too volume. Someone on the subway loved “My Philosophy” by Boogie Down Productions enough to play it over and over. I know this because he didn’t bother with earbuds; he simply held his phone’s speaker up to his ear. I could only hear the ticking of the beat and the contour of the high notes from the sample of “Sister Sanctified” by Stanley Turrentine and Milt Jackson. With that little to go on, I only knew I knew the song, but it felt vaguely validating to share hip-hop affections with someone from New York old enough to have liked the song when it came out. But, since that was farther back than I’d like to think, I don’t feel that validated.

Later in Little Italy, a waitress hustled cannolis while singing along to Quiet Riot’s “Cum on Feel the Noize,” but that’s just New York showing off.

We stopped in New York en route to Cairo, and I hoped to be able to write about the music I heard in the wild in Egypt, but it didn’t quite work that way. Our excursion frequently steered us away from businesses that might pump contemporary Egyptian pop, and if car radios were bumping it, the near-constant honking made it impossible to hear.

Instead, I got to think about music for hotels, which is not quite as Eno as it sounds. On our first day, I loved hearing a cover of “What is Love” by LexMorris and Michelle Ray, that worked on so many levels. The chill-out vibe was the opposite of Haddaway’s when he made it famous in 1993, and the song exists in complete, straight-faced earnestness as if Will Farrell and Chris Kattan hadn’t made the song the punch line to a joke on SNL. But they did those sketches in the late 1990s so LexMorris and Michelle Ray might not know their late night comedy history. That chill-out vibe tends to be so humorless that they couldn’t have shown more awareness of the materials they were working with, even if they knew.