It's time to bring back 'elevator music'

Suggestion for improving all public spaces: Add boring music that no one particularly loves. Suggestion for really improving things: Allow no public music recorded after the arbitrary date when you got old and decided that all new music is just noise.

No, you say — upbeat modern music adds zest to life! But some situations ought to be zest-free.

Last week, I was boarding an airplane in the dreaded JFK airport, weary, wanting to go home. It's 10 p.m. Everyone was shuffling on the plane in a bleary, peevish state of mind because the flight had been delayed an hour and a half.

There was the usual boarding sequence: people who need assistance, military members, families with children, children who have served in the military, First Class, Platinum, Diamond, Tungsten, Uranium, Sky Priority, Troposphere Premium, Comfort Select, Discomfort Select (for the masochists), then Lady With Three Shopping Bags and a Pillow the Size of a Small Black Bear class — she holds up departure for 10 minutes, standing in the aisle while she fills three overhead compartments — and, finally, Peasant Classes one through six.

Now imagine going through all this while accompanied by the worst pop song from the past year, some tuneless thumping thing sung by someone whose voice has been fed through filters until they sound like a robot with a head cold, played loud while everyone morosely files on.

Did it make anyone happy? It did not. No one wanted to hear it except, perhaps, a smattering of younger people, and they were wearing headphones, listening to something else.

After you reach a certain age and the iron curtain of musical preferences has descended, pop music is the bane of public spaces, of bars and coffee shops and drugstores and supermarkets.

I don't want to hear Peak Boomer music from the '60s now, any more than my father needed to hear Al Jolson yelling "Toot-toot Tootsie, goodbye" at the SuperValu in 1967. Let it go.

What should replace it? Elevator music.

That's the derisive term for middle-of-the-road background music that sets a mood and a tone and does not require your full attention. It was a floating, universal, musical soundtrack to the world from the '50s to the '70s — cheerful, upbeat, banal and agreeable, like a warm bath. Movie themes, show tunes, old standards, all run through the Mantovani filter to remove anything that would demand your attention.

It has one message: Everything's just fine.

Perhaps we'd be a less jangly society if vapid mood music was the norm, like aerosol Xanax. But this won't happen. No one will complain to the airline that the boarding music was dumb and crude; they'll just put on their headphones and retreat to their private musical cocoon, because everyone has come to expect omnipresent pop music as the default for public spaces.