Musical interlude

I work out at the Nationwide gym. It’s a great deal, um, it’s free, you get personal trainer help on demand, fitness testing, and they have lots of great machines and free weights. (No pool.) Plus, everybody wears little name tags, so it’s easy to figure out who people are.

The only bad thing about the gym is the music. For the longest time, it was 100% oldies. Well, I remember all of the oldies because they were drilled into my head, driving around in the big conversion van in 1983. Unfortunately, these are only bad oldies… like, C-list oldies. “Hey there, Georgie girl,” the “down on South Street” song, “Everyone knows it’s Wendy,” and maybe they’ll play “Sign, sign, everywhere a sign.” Oddly, the Beatles and Elvis are entirely missing from the Nationwide Wellness Center Oldies Canon.

I strongly suspect cheapness. Are obscure oldies cheaper than mainstays?

However, the last couple of weeks I’ve noticed a totally new sound. A grating, bizarre sound. It is now some kind of tribal dance music. Or occasionally a deep moody bassy song with a drum machine gone berserk. At first, I was really happy it wasn’t The Shirelles. But then I realized, hey, I don’t recognize a damn one of these songs — what’s going on? It’s got to be some kind of corporate techno! The dead giveaway, really, was this strange “California wild” female vocalist who comes in on, like, every single song, singing weird lines like “Ready, steady, go, hold my hand now!” or “One I two want three it yeah!” Honestly, is there no justice in this world?