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.