Different music listened to in different ways

I. RADIO
I've always used the term "wallpaper music" to describe music that is like, so nowhere that it might as well just be the wallpaper that you never notice in a room where you barely were once. (Maybe two hours last year at a dentist appointment?) It's appropriate that I bring up dentistry, because where I first came to know "wallpaper music" was at dentist offices with their smooth jazz and lite rock formats, which made me realize I'd been hearing it all along at shopping malls as well. AM/FM pop/rock like The Eagles on down to Christopher Cross and Michael Murphey and Bonnie Raitt is one of the more insidious forms of wallpaper music, because it is accepted by the public as not wallpaper music, but actual rock music. (???) It gets worse...even a heated epic howl like "Layla" -- possibly Clapton's single most acceptable moment ever -- is slowly and steadily turning into wallpaper music itself. But anything can be wallpaper music; perhaps surprisingly, house techno and hardcore punk work just as well for certain people.
        A new apartment is bound to have new wallpaper, so it only follows that it would have new wallpaper music. In fact, I'm listening to one of my preferred radio stations right now (WNUR 89.3 FM Evanston/Chicago) in my new Chicago apartment, and I'm starting to realize that there are indeed forms of wallpaper music I actually like. For example, this tune I just heard by Nik Turner ("from Hawkwind"). A merely pleasant psychedelic trance thing that I had forgot to notice the name of, but about halfway through the band broke into a downright beguiling keyboard-and-backbeat-driven trance section. I have no idea how the rest of the song went, and I'm definitely not gonna rush out and buy it, but at that moment I realized that the little burbling going on in the background sounded very nice indeed on a late Monday afternoon with a big tree softly swaying outside my window in the 75 degree weather.
         Okay, a few songs later, the DJ has come back on and back-announced everything, and the song is called "Bones of Elvis." He also just back-announced the last song he played, The Ruins' "Prog Medley", which was an amazing piece of NOT wallpaper music, and broke me out of my trance without a problem. Very nice job. Before that was a Troggs song that I don't remember hearing at all (somehow it became wallpaper...The Troggs wallpaper???), and before that was something else that I did remember hearing...when he announced it...but now 5 minutes later have already forgotten what that was...and then, before that was the "Bones of Elvis" song by Nik Turner From Hawkwind (that's exactly how the DJ announced him both times). Now he's playing "Stone In" by Guru Guru, which I've played on the radio in Lincoln a couple times, as well as at my apartment in Lincoln and in my car several times, and it has always sounded great, but now in Chicago, and being played for me by someone else (finally!), it seems positively elemental.
          THE MORAL OF THE STORY IS: Radio is inherently wallpaper music, whether it's a lite rock station piped into dentist offices across the entire country or a cutting edge big-city avant-rock station with a broadcast range of about fifty blocks. Some of it is good and some is terrible, some of it is important and some innocuous, but it is all heard as wallpaper because the invention of the radio more or less turned all music into wallpaper. (Literally: because radio doubles as a home furnishing, we now hear music coming more or less out of our wallpaper, especially with certain in-wall speaker setups.) For example, even though I was listening to a great radio station, and enjoying most everything they were playing, I still completely forget entire tracks mere minutes after hearing them. This is partly because of my subjective personal memory, sure, but also because we have been trained to hear the radio as something we can basically ignore. Any music, speech, anything, is capable of being forgotten/ignored/ turned into wallpaper. That's why talk radio personalities are so bombastic, and why radio commercials are mixed so loud.
           Oh shit, I interrupt this half-ass manifesto to tell you what's on WNUR right now. While I was writing the, ahem, moral of the story, the DJ played this live, fairly vintage-sounding, and heavily British punk song, probably from 1978 or so. The song part was good, though maybe just okay, but an amazing thing happened halfway through when the band broke down into a vamp and the singer started rapping to, and then with, the crowd. He's still going right now. His accent is so thick I can't understand everything he's saying, but he just asked 'em what their favorite TV show is. That got 'em rowdy -- people shouting all kinds of different shows in a big garble -- and now, approx. thirty seconds later, there's some antagonism building, something about fighting, with some other voice -- I presume from the crowd -- saying something like "if a bunch of skins were standing here you'd be beaten up by now" and the crowd is jeering and cheering and shouting slogans. Oh shit! The singer just said this weird line: "I love all you people, but I hate you when you act like stupid idiots." Who the fun is this? Okay, songs over, and they went right into another track, some squalling current-sounding noise/jazz blur, so I'll just call up the DJ....okay, just got off the phone, and it was, and now I remember the DJ pre-announcing this, Alternative TV, with a song called "Alternatives." I'm assuming the guy talking to the crowd was Mark Perry, who was in the band and wrote/published the zine Sniffin' Glue. The squalling noise/jazz blur that followed is by Total, and I like the way they're augmenting drone standard with pounding post-"In C" piano and squalling sax. Sounding rather over the edge, especially when heard on the radio, coming out of the wallpaper.

P.S. Heard a couple days later, some really great wallpaper music: an 18-minute or so synthesizer solo by Sun Ra. I've been hearing a lot of Sun Ra on WNUR lately, both on the jazz shows and the rock shows, and it always sounds great. There's this one DJ that brings in his own copies of never-reissued vinyl from the original Saturn label, and he says right there on the air, "you're never gonna find it" or "I haven't even seen this one e-bay it's so rare." The synthesizer solo in question is the title track from just such a totally lost album, called Nidhamu (1971), which I've never even heard of. It's an incredibly great piece of music. On the radio, driving around Chicago, it sounds glorious, this non-stop space-age quest-jam music, played by one guy on one instrument.

Next 'way' to listen: mp3's!