Elevator music
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Elevator music, also known as lift music (in the UK), piped music or muzak, refers to the gentle, bland instrumental arrangements of popular music designed for play in shopping malls, grocery stores, telephone systems (while the caller is on hold), cruise ships, airports, and of course, elevators.
One example of the music being played is in the film The Blues Brothers. In the film, the Brothers are riding an elevator where a soft music version of "The Girl from Ipanema" is being played to comically contrast to the noisy scene of a massive force of police and national guard troops pursuing them.
The Muzak corporation is perhaps the best-known supplier of such music. In fact, the term muzak has become a generic epithet for excessively bland music. However, the Muzak Corporation moved away from this type of image, for the most part, in 1997 [1], and now uses only "original artists" for its music source, except on the Environmental channel[2].
The term is also frequently applied as a generic term for any form of easy listening or MOR music, or to the type of recordings once commonly heard on "beautiful music" radio stations. [3]
The music video for the Foo Fighters song Monkey Wrench has an elevator music version of the song Big Me (which is another one of the Foo Fighters songs) playing when Dave Grohl is in the elevator. The song was chosen because Grohl thought it particularly uplifting.
"Elevator music" is also a term used disparagingly by jazz purists to describe smooth jazz.
- Elevator Music A Surreal History of Muzak, by Joseph Lanza
- Anti-muzak site in the UK
- The King has Just Left the Building: an art project related to elevator music.
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