Fall Into The Music

It’s July 1999 and I’m on my lunch break in Washington, DC. Just up the road, about a 10 minute walk is a mall. Not THE National Mall, I’m talking about an actual mall. Since it’s in the city, it isn’t huge, but it’s got a nice selection of stores including Tower Records. I’d spend a lot of lunch hours there, discovering new music and spending way more than I should have on my paycheck.

However, nearby was a store where I also discovered a ton of new music. The Gap. Yes, while browsing through relaxed fit khakis (remember the “Khakis Swing ad campaign?) and basic pocket tees, I was digging the tunes that were blasting from the in-store speakers.

According to a 2017 New Yorker article, The Gap initially received four-hour music programs from a company called Audio Environments, Inc. Launched in 1971, A.E.I. provided retailers with “foreground music,” intended as a hipper form of programming than Muzak’s “background music,” which had been piping light re-creations of popular tunes into elevators, shopping malls, and workplaces since the 1920s. What a genius move!

After discovering the Instagram account “gapplaylists” I searched through the many playlist posts and found one from July of 1999 and created my own Gap store playlist.

It’s a fascinating and fun mix of adult-alternative pop with artists like Beth Orton and Paul Weller, and retro-soul and disco with The Spinners and War. You’ve even got the very trendy (at the time) cocktail-era cool (acid jazz/downtempo electronica) with Fatboy Slim and The Wiseguys.

So dig in and dig it! Here’s a link to my past, the playlist Gap - July 1999. Enjoy!