The Null Device

That's irritainment: Some months ago, the marketing department of the company that now runs the City Loop (that's the part of the Melbourne commuter railway that goes under the city centre) had the bright idea of piping canned music into the station PA systems, undoubtedly to give customers an illusion of better value for their (overpriced by other cities' standards) fares. So now they have canned music of the most bland sort (late-80s love ballads, boy-band R&B, and various easy-listening banalities which exist solely for this purpose) playing in the background, just loud enough to be annoying. Did I mention that the PA systems of the City Loop stations (which were built in the 1970s and 80s) cover every part of the stations uniformly?

Anyway, tonight at Museum Station (I refuse to call it after the shopping centre that bought naming rights), they had something playing which I would not have imagined would exist; namely an elevator-music cover of Lenny Kravitz' It Ain't Over Till It's Over. That's right, that chunk of manufactured 1960s hippie peace-and-love, circa 1990, made even more banal and kitschy, as if on some nutter's exquisitely ironic whim.

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