House Is A Feeling

So since coming over here I’ve been in and out of Uniqlo a bit, which is basically a Japanese version of H&M. The reason I mention this is that the music there is really strange for a high street shop.

It’s like the 00s never happened, like the hiphop and R&B and electrohouse and “new rock” played in every other shop never happened. Instead Uniqlo plays this airy house music that doesn’t really seem to fit with anything current. But it isn’t simply house muzak either: I heard Swayzak’s “Another Way” the last time I was in there, in amongst lots of stuff that sounded a bit like those old Digital Disco compilations on Force Tracks.

Some of the other times I’ve been in they were playing a sort of Classic/Music For Freaks style, but I didn’t recognise any of it. It’s the weirdest but perhaps least annoying music in any high street store. It’s a sort of culture shock to hear music that isn’t brand new in a shop like this.

That idea of incongruous sounds in global chain stores reminds me a bit of working in Carbon Records inside Urban Outfitters in Dublin, when occasionally you’d play something completely insane just to see the effect it had on a large department store.

I’m grateful to Optimo who included the theme tune from Twin Peaks on a mix CD, allowing me to play it one Sunday afternoon. If it didn’t quite halt the gears of consumerism with a screech, at least it completely weirded people out for 3 or 4 minutes. Another high point was finding some ancient promo vinyl of Mark Morrison’s “Return Of The Mack” behind the counter and playing it in all its erm…glory. I like to think we damaged the Urban Outfitters brand that day.

But beyond dumb workers messing around, I can’t understand a big clothes store playing music that isn’t the usual blend of the fashionable and the populist. There’s nothing fashionable whatsoever about the stuff being played in Uniqlo, not that I can see. Maybe that’s the point.

That said, there is plenty of talk of (a slightly different) funky house making a comeback in the London urban scene. There’s even a “Pure Funky House” CD which was recently released by the people who made the “Pure Garage” series. What a weird rebrand of a genre that is!Could Uniqlo’s strange selections be somehow part of that trend? I’m not so sure.

If I had to guess I’d say they’re just hedging their bets. This is a shop that refuses to be locked into any one particular aesthetic clothes wise, and has picked this brand of pleasant house as a musical unifier. It certainly seems likely that a worldwide shop like decides these things with clinical attention to detail, and you’d even imagine there are studies done to see what music is more conducive to sales or catering to a target audience, with the answers changing all the time.

I guess I’d still like to know how or why faintly 1990s sounding house is seen as the 2008 answer?