Corporate music is truly wonderful. When you hear that parade of uniform high notes from what is undoubtedly a piano or violin, maybe if they’re real hip they’ll use some synth chords, while the quirky companies insist on a catchy ukulele; and listening to it is like getting the best head of your life that is sucking any inspiration you could ever hope to have in the hopes that you will consume from them or produce for them. The main point of corporate music is to take classic ideas of music theory and then absolutely strip away any emotional authenticity from it.
Corporate music is the perfect medium for illustrating working in a corporate environment. Talented producers paid thousands to make a 30-second track that sounds inspiring, with no inspiration. A personal favorite comes from BP, a whopping 3 minor chords on a piano with panning scenes from the marshes of Florida, where I’m sure their off-shore oil rigs are just a few miles south of the camera. A production value north of six-figures so we can see just how truly sorry they are for the Gulf crisis. I think I shed a crude tear the first time those piano chords drilled my ears. You go, British Petroleum, truly moving.
It goes beyond displaying the ‘ethos’ that a company holds. The rhetoric of uninspired music seeps into the office workers of those companies. A score completely void of any emotion because God forbid signal that you are a human being from the hours of 9 AM to 5 PM. Frustration beyond the crinkle between your eyebrows might as well signal an active shooter in the office and happiness beyond that you might as well call HR if someone goes deeper than water cooler talk with you.
People argue that there is no need for complex emotion in the workplace, which is absurd considering a third of your adult life will be spent working. For a lot of people, work is the most important aspect of their lives, and it is demoralizing to expect people to shade themselves for 50+ years of their life in the name of corporate culture.
There is a book titled, Dialect of Enlightenment, which talks about work environments and rituals today in relation to human rituals centuries ago. A section of it talks about human sacrifices in the literal sense, killing other humans as a means to please whichever higher being so that the community can continue living; followed by what the authors called the, ‘introversion of sacrifice.’ The phrase is quite grim itself with equal meaning: that we are essentially sacrificing a part of our own lively hood at work. If you wish to live, anywhere, you have to work and there is rarely a way around that, the environment in which you work is most commonly in a corporate setting and whether it is as a line cook or a board member of the same enterprise, you are sacrificing any other expression that you could be doing at that moment.
The irony is that these corporate structures are structured by the people that work in them. However, some people (typically the most successful) make money a top priority in every facet of life and some genius discovered that expression doesn’t make money, so it became taboo to act as you feel in the workplace.
Now, I have only worked on and off in an office for 2 years now and this blog is a lot grimmer than it actually is, at least in my workplace. People build friendships, overreact to their work, and some even get married to their coworkers. But I still see an absolute fabrication of politeness and correctness in that building and I am sure it spreads to all neighboring buildings as well. And as I look at my coworkers I still see good people, but you can tell that there isn’t much there as the years add up. Perhaps they are still genuine outside of their cubicles, but that’s still 40 hours a week of wearing a mask.
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