So…

I went to do some lunch-time shopping at Fred Meyers three straight days at what I believe was the … exact… same… time to the dot.

Day #1, the overhead background music was… Hootie and the Blowfish’s “Hold My Hand”.  I have the most negligibly positive opinion of that band, and I recognize that fact as the secret to their success in putting out the Best Selling Album of All Time with an album where all but a couple of tracks were cross-over radio singles — on virtually every format.  It was innocuous and agreeable, and not anything more.  (I… don’t particularly want to hear them, really, but I don’t hate them.  My dad was a big fan of them, oddly enough.) But this was also the downfall of the group and why their next album went nowhere: the burn rate killed them.  Except, of course, it didn’t:  The band is now huge on the Corporate Gig circuit, which makes perfect sense them being the epitome of “Corporate Rock”.  They’re… successfully making loads of money; you’re just not paying attention to that fact.

The next day I noticed, at the exact same time, the overhead playing… Hootie and the Blowfish’s  “Only Want to Be With You”.  I remember this had a video I found amusing, which everyone else seemed to think was “Goddamned Stupid!”  The inspiration for the video seemed to have come up solely with the line “Dolphins make me cry”.  I can’t say this is a terribly relevant memory, but there are worse memory sensory items.

This seemed a trend.  Which is why on the next day, exiting the Fred Meyers the reason for the niggling feeling I had that I wanted to pay attention to something but didn’t hit me:  I should have turned down my head-phones and seen if this programming was trended.

I will note that in this day and age, most commercial music radio stations are basically going to have the same effect of same artist or same song at the exact same time, and can think of a particularly notable example of flipping past one station every day at a particular time in the afternoon and catching… the exact same song.

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