Airline Music: “Inherited Concepts of How Heaven Sounds,” or Just Crap?
Travel Blog • Michael Yessis • 02.02.04 | 9:30 PM ET
It’s a no brainer, of course. Music on airplanes is almost universally awful. But why? Slate’s August Kleinzahler recently explored the subject, even questioning the two major companies responsible for bringing you endless loops of Cher tunes. (The response when he asks who programs the classical stations: “We farm that out to some woman in Germany.”) Kleinzahler only wants what many of us want from our airline music: a little surprise now and then. Alas, it probably won’t happen on the big airlines anytime soon. “[S]urprise is Public Enemy No. 1 so far as market research analysis goes,” he writes. “Which is why airline audio is the aesthetic equivalent to the prose in TV Guide or supermarket paperbacks.”
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Michael Yessis is the cofounder and coeditor-in-chief of World Hum.
