I experienced my own personal hell while working retail in the early 2000s wherein I was subjected to a loop of Britney Spears, Justin Bieber, and Amy Grant for the entirety of my work day five days a week.
I ended up channeling that suffering into an experimental film I created and authored a thesis on the piece. It premiered in my city at an avant-garde multimedia show where I presented the film and delivered a short speech with excerpts from my abstract. Here is a segment of that summary:
Quote:
Music is generally classifiable into one of two autonomous categories: art or entertainment. To transcend this autonomy, I have created 5’50” of Pop. 5’50” of Pop transforms simple, formulaic, predictable, homogeneous pop music into something more challenging, arresting, and dauntingly complex.
Thousands of retail stores nationwide utilize commercially engineered playlists of background music provided by the Muzak Corporation. 5’50” of Pop makes use of the 100 songs that I heard on the Muzak loop each week at my place of employment. These songs were so similar that for months I thought I was being exposed to perhaps only a dozen or so songs. But there were, in fact, 100, and these tracks were more than just background music to me: they were a virtual sonic cage in which I was trapped for eight hours every day.
5’50” of Pop is a sound collage of those 100 pop songs. By playing the music videos for all 100 tracks over each other simultaneously, I attempt to arrest the senses, both visually and aurally, to recreate the suffocating effect this music had on me.
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When I presented the work to the head of the music department at my city's prestigious university's experimental music center, the president told me he would give me a Master's degree for the work, provided I pay for my undergrad. Sadly I couldn't afford that so the project was retired.
It was an indulgent act of catharsis, but effectively got me through the horrific experience.