It's Good to be Alive

Thoughts on positive pop music, misery and working retail

In early December, 2021,  I walked into a very empty Gap store to scope out their EVERYTHING MUST GO closing sale. Holiday music played in the background and between forgettable updates of Yuletide classics my attention landed on an unfamiliar pop song which claimed that great things were coming, that life was not only good, but it was getting better. I looked at the masked employees selling their jobs away, out-of-season-piece by out-of-season piece. The juxtaposition felt both comical and violent. If the people working felt the dissonance they didn’t show it. Working retail makes you good at tuning things out. 

In a recent-ish piece for GQ, Gabriella Paiella wrote about the persistent popularity of the Life is Good clothing brand, as well as the more recent crop of micro-brands peddling similarly positive slogans and general “good vibes.” Life is Good came close to bankruptcy in March 2020, but – thanks to a public that was hungry for comfortable lounge-wear and even the thinnest shadow of hope – they’ve since turned record profits. “The world isn't that easy,” company co-founder and “Chief Executive Optimist” Bert Jacobs told Paiella. “All we're trying to do is get people to choose a strategy that's effective. And for us, rational optimism is really effective.” 

 There is, of course, great power in the messages that we send to ourselves and to others. But the rationality of the phrase “Life Is Good” is, perhaps, in the eye of the beholder, and the line between fake-it-till-you-make-it and toxic positivity is arguably a thin one. When I see someone in a shirt that says “No Bad Days,” I’m more likely to react with confusion than with a thumbs up of agreement. When a pop song offers similar optimism, my reaction is the same.

Most chain stores and public establishments pipe in music meant to impact customers in a certain way, mostly to make them feel good enough to spend some money. Nordstrom Rack, for one, seems to favor early 2000s indie rock, and I’ll admit that the BPM of  Spoon’s “I Turn My Camera On” does make me want to buy shoes. Your local CVS might interrupt the drudgery of picking up a prescription by bumping “My Sharona” or “The Boy is Mine” or “Dreams.” No doubt some employees hate the CVS soundtrack, but these playlists feel somewhat more humane, or at least more human, like listening to BOB-FM in the car. It mostly sucks, but at least they’re playing the hits. 

Back in June of 2017, the Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal reported that Target would start playing music in select stores. 

It's difficult to remember a time when the store was a mostly quiet experience, and in fact it took me years to realize that something had changed, and when I did start to pay attention it was only because I remembered that, in high school, the mother of a kid I babysat mentioned it to me. 

“I love shopping at Target because they don’t play music, have you ever noticed that?” she asked me, her voice soft and tense as she refolded the laundry I’d folded incorrectly. “I wrote them an email to tell them how much I appreciate it.”

In those days, Target followed the conventional wisdom of the time, allegedly¹ passed down from indoor mall culture, that customers don’t need or want to be distracted from shopping.

But as online competition began to close in, brick and mortar stores started to think about how to sell an “experience.” Supposedly Target customers found the silence “oppressive” and “boring” and “like a library,” and a Target spokesperson promised that the new playlists would be “upbeat, positive” with a “playful personality.”

Target has, in cooperation with Shazam, introduced me to some of the worst songs I’ve ever heard, including Idina Menzel’s 2016 “Queen of Swords,” which sounds like it was written, produced and performed by AI; and Scottish DJ Calvin Harris’ repulsive 2011 single “Feel So Close.”  But Andy Grammer is the artist I most closely associated with this Big Box aesthetic. He is a true icon of Upbeat, Positive, Playful Personality music. 

Leaving Menzel aside, Harris and Grammar are similar in terms of being Netflix-style handsome white guys who make middling pop music. Harris, however, radiates some amount of UK sleaze, which lends him artistic credibility, even if his music is the last thing you want to hear while shopping. My sister, who works at Trader Joe’s – another stronghold of corporate playlists – told me “At 6 a.m. if the music is too upbeat, it depresses me because it's like being in a club at a sad, tiring time. It feels wrong.” “Feel So Close” sounds horrific in the cold light of the toothpaste aisle because it’s meant to be heard while rolling on molly at 3 a.m. with a couple of people you know from work.

For all I know Grammer could have been engineered for Target, since that was, for a long time, the only place I ever heard him. His video for “Good to Be Alive (Hallelujah)” is reminiscent of some of Target’s most stylish commercials, and the song itself is wholesome, catchy, and free of innuendo, eroticism or meaningful historical context. The song I heard at the Gap closing sale wasn’t Grammer (unfortunately I didn’t get a chance to Shazam it) but it could have been. 

Perhaps if you were having a very good day, “It’s good to be alive right about now,” might hit just right. But most of the time, even pre-pandemic, it seemed out of step with reality on both a micro and macro level. Sociopolitical context aside, Target employees, milling around in red shirts, rarely seem to be having the time of their lives, nor do the customers, who just need someone to unlock the deodorant case. 

Most of Grammer’s songs are equally upbeat and chaste, including the early hit “Keep Your Head Up,” which perhaps you, like me, have mistaken for Bruno Mars when you heard it out and about, and “Forever,” in which he utilizes the famous Millennial Whoop and somewhat charmingly calls his beloved ladyfriend – who takes forever to get ready – “bro,”

Grammer has the artistic depth of a Ken doll. And yet the more time I spend with his music (ruining my YouTube and Spotify algorithms, in the process), the more I like him. By now I’ve watched the “Good to Be Alive” video some 30 times: The context is usually that I’ve cornered a friend or family member with the question, “Do you know this horrible song?” and as so often happens with these things I’ve come to love it, in a way. There is an underlying believability about Grammer in this video: His billion-watt smile; his ability to slam-dunk the song’s admittedly very tricky vocal melody; his claim that he’s been “sending up prayers and something’s changed.” 

In a Today Show interview he explains the title of his 2019 record Naive: “I’ve always been a positive person, since I was like, born, I think,” he says, flashing a disarming smile. “When you are this way, you’re happy and you see the good in everything, sometimes the world will question that about you.” To his fellow optimists he says, “If cynicism comes at you, don’t ever turn down your shine.”

Later in the interview he explains the meaning behind the uncharacteristically dark “Wish You Pain,” in which he hopes for all kinds of bad things to happen to his daughter.

I hope you cry and tears come streaming down your face
I hope this life traps you in more than you thought you could ever take
I hope the help you want never comes and you do it on your own

'Cause I love you more than you could know
And your heart, it grows every time it breaks
I know that it might sound strange

But I wish you pain
Wish you pain
It's hard to say
But I wish you pain

Of course, he says, he doesn’t want his daughters to suffer. But he grew up learning that personal growth comes from hard times. True as this may be, it comes off in this case as almost shockingly Protestant, and chips just a bit of plastic off of the Ken façade, reveling something more complicated and slightly unsettling. One imagines Grammer smiling, Ned Flanders-like, in the face of all manner of tragedy and disappointment. Getting knocked down and getting up, over and over, invincible in his positive attitude and belief in building character.

A Google search for “is andy grammer actually nice in real life” didn’t fetch much aside from an interview he did about mental health, but I guess it doesn’t matter. I like the guy, I wish him well, I bet he’s a great husband and father but his music still doesn’t reflect an emotional state that I find at all familiar. 

I asked my sister if hearing a positive song at work puts her in a good mood. “If it's a song I like and it’s upbeat, it probably does,” she said. Could it be that I’m over-thinking this? The other day a friend mentioned that she’d recently been trying to take the advice of a bookmark she’d seen: “Just for today, I will be happy.” She’d been skeptical, but it actually seemed to be working. Maybe that’s all that Grammer is doing.

 In my twenties I worked the opening shift at a Starbucks in downtown Pittsburgh. I’d wake up at 4:30 a.m., and eat a piece of toast while watching VH1, which invariably played the video for Christina Aguilera’s “Beautiful.” Setting aside the dread of my shift, humming along to the lyrics, “I am beautiful no matter what they say/ Words won’t bring me down,” this acted as the sort of daily affirmation routine I’d have never otherwise allowed myself, and still wouldn’t. 

At work we’d listened to some sort of proto-Spotify radio station intended to create a non-threatening, upbeat coffee shop atmosphere. During my short tenure behind the bar I suffered through the same horrible shit over and over on repeat: Joss Stone, Norah Jones, “Imagine” (Starbucks Music, the chain’s personal record label, had recently put out a John Lennon comp) and lots of toothless covers of jazz standards. I quit before Starbucks Music released their Sonic Youth comp Hits Are for Squares, but – though I find the celebrity-curated best-of conceptually irritating – “Kool Thing” (selected by Radiohead) might have been a nice change of pace. Or maybe not.

According to my sister, “The problem with corporate playlists is that they’re so repetitive, so most of the time I tune out the music. It’s often hard to hear the music because it’s so loud in the store.” Against the already overstimulating grocery store backdrop, the endless loop of Taylor Swift, Panic! at the Disco, Lorde, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Ellie Goulding, Elton John, Owl City, etc., is simply another annoying thing to ignore. 

When I worked at Starbucks I also worked a few blocks away at a used CD store. Those aforementioned Starbucks Music comps were easy to steal – they sat up front with the bags of coffee and chocolate covered espresso beans – so some of our less upstanding customers would trade them in by the shopping-bag full. At the CD store we tried to keep some variety in the mix, and we no doubt tossed those Noras and Josses and Paris Cafe collections into the store’s 5-CD changer, and in that context they sounded a little better to me than they did at Starbucks, because at least we got to choose them. There was little thought for setting the mood, unless the mood was “keep the customers from hanging around too long.”

Since Starbucks I’ve had very few corporate jobs and have nearly always had control over the music I hear at work. But we do, I understand, live in a society, and these freedoms have their limits.

A few years ago, while working as a barista in a South Philadelphia coffee shop, a woman got up from her laptop and politely asked me to change the music. “I don’t know if this is rude to ask,” she said, smiling, “but it’s like, drilling directly into my brain.”

I wasn’t particularly attached to what I was playing – a then-new, medium annoying release from Julia Holter – but I decided to draw a line in the sand. 

“Yeah, that is a little rude, to ask,” I said, “but sure, what do you want to listen to?”

The woman flushed and backpedaled. “Oh. No, it’s fine,” she said, and sat back down. 

My heartrate had picked up from the rush of conflict and I watched her furiously texting, now unable to concentrate on her work.

Then she returned to the counter and said, “I have to ask, why did you find that rude?”

I set my jaw, determined but scared at the conflict that everyone could see. “Well, I’m working, and music is one of the only things I can control,” I said. “And,” I said, “I’m a human!”

Long story short, the two of us worked it out, we both apologized, and I respected her for standing up to my rebellion against customer service. There was no Yelp review, but I never saw her again. 

Now I play the most palatable music I can. Life is hard enough as it is. 

1. I say allegedly because when I think of what a mall sounds like, all I can remember is water fountains and the rainforest CD playing at Natural Wonders and maybe on special occasions a guy in a suit plinking away at a grand piano. What malls sound like now I have no idea because I am not good at paying attention to my surroundings.