Confession: I discovered one of my favorite songs through a Gap ad. The 1999 “Khaki Soul” spot, specifically, which featured attractive young people clad in Gapwear dancing to Bill Withers’s 1977 hit “Lovely Day.” That song and I are the same age, and there’s a good chance that it had wound its way into my aural periphery in the prior two decades, but this ad—more of a miniature music video, not unlike Volkswagen’s resurrection of “Pink Moon,” later that same year—was the first time I’d had a moment with it. “Lovely Day” didn’t trigger a desire for khakis, but it did prompt a trip to my local CD retailer, where a clerk located the phrase “lovely day” in the store’s proprietary database, and off I went with its lone copy of “Lean on Me: The Best of Bill Withers.”
From the launch of its first stand-alone store, in San Francisco, in 1969, the Gap has always been in some proximity to the record business. Initially, its founder, Don Fisher, wanted to call the store “Pants and Discs,” because the only things it offered were Levi’s and music. (His wife demurred and suggested a name that referenced the generation gap.) In the eighties and nineties, under Mickey Drexler’s leadership, the company’s store design was simplified to white walls, polished wood floors, and stacks of clothes, while ad campaigns like 1988’s “Individuals of Style” and 1993’s “Who Wore Khakis” invented a history of everyday fashion. By the late nineties, Gap had positioned itself in the mainstream of pop-music trends: Gap TV ads linked the modest, durable cotton pant to country, electronica, and swing.
Recently, when Googling to see if “Khaki Soul” was online, I discovered just how much the Gap’s music curation could mean to someone. The blog Gap In-Store Playlists 1992 to 2006 is the passion project of a Texan named Mike Bise, who worked at Gap for the fifteen-year span of his blog’s title, and who really loves the music that was piped into the store during that time. As an irrepressible music sorter and list maker myself, I was immediately drawn to the blog’s stated mission: to acquire a complete set of monthly in-store playlists, on paper, from June, 1992, to February, 2006—a hundred and sixty-five in all. The playlists accompanied the four-hour music programs that the Gap initially received 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 nineteen-twenties. Muzak entered the foreground-music arena in 1997, rebranding its employees as “audio architects” and securing Gap’s in-store music contract in 1999. You can see “Lovely Day” on Muzak’s April, 1999, playlist—which Bise found a CD of on eBay—slotted between Sugar Ray and the B-52’s.
So far, Bise has scanned and posted fifty-four paper lists, he told me in a recent phone conversation. He once had many more in his possession, but he lost them during a move, in 2006, a loss he characterized as “devastating.” (Hearing the story, I shivered thinking about losing my own collection of ticket stubs and concert T-shirts.) He started the blog in 2015, he told me, in order “to catch others out there in the sea, and scoop them up.” In January, 2017, Bise was contacted by another former Gap employee, named Justin, who had a stack of paper playlists stashed in a box. Justin was going to simply scan and e-mail the playlists en masse, Bise said, but decided that it would be more fun to send a couple at a time from the unsorted stack and chat about each list over e-mail. So far, Justin has sent Bise thirty-three scans.
Justin doesn’t have any lists from 1992, though, so while Bise waits for those to come in, he re-creates them, from memory, as iTunes playlists. Over the phone, Bise recited song titles from his first month on the job, October, 1992 (the blog starts in June because, early in his tenure, he found some tapes from a few months before), like someone else might recall a great d.j. set or a twenty-first-birthday mix: Sounds of Blackness’s gospel-R.-&-B. gem “Optimistic,” Opus III’s club classic “It’s a Fine Day,” Utah Saints’ Kate Bush-sampling “Something Good,” Soul II Soul’s “A Dream’s a Dream,” and Rozalla’s “Love Breakdown.” These tracks—a neat encapsulation of house music’s infiltration of dance-pop in the early nineties—share space with the Replacements, the Bangles, and XTC. At the time, radio playlists were becoming more constricted, thanks to the Telecommunication Act of 1996, which deregulated station ownership. The Gap’s taste in music, on the other hand, was impressively eclectic, though two wildly popular genres were underrepresented on the playlists through much of the nineties: country, which was, apparently, still too uncool for the Gap; and rap, which conservatives were loudly assailing as a destructive cultural force. (The Gap declined to comment for this article.)
A.E.I. and Muzak constructed their in-store programs as sonic packaging for the otherwise simple clothes on display, but they also often worked in cahoots with record labels, sometimes débuting singles—such as Lenny Kravitz’s “Fly Away” and Morcheeba’s “Part of the Process,” both from 1998—before they were heard on radio. In other cases, the specific versions of songs sent to Gap stores were obscure, leading Bise on crate-digging hunts. In January, 1995, after more than two years of searching, he found the European CD single containing the “Elevation Mix” of Des’ree’s “Feel So High” (from the June, 1992, in-store program). Even tougher was “Sense of Danger (Attaboy Remix),” by Presence, featuring Shara Nelson, from the March, 1999, playlist. “I bought two CD singles and three different twelve-inch combos in order to find the correct mix, which was on vinyl,” Bise confessed. In 2010, he noticed that several mixes of Joe T Vannelli Project’s “Sweetest Day of May” (from May, 1996) had appeared on iTunes. The Gap version, which he owns on vinyl, was not one of them. It is possible, it turns out, for in-store programmed music to create its own strain of music-nerd exclusivity.
Along with being an autobiographical, and gently monomaniacal, memory project, Bise’s blog acts as an autodidactic mini-history of retail soundscaping. During some months, the Gap’s music theme was straightforward: the release of the Gap Blue No. 655 scent, in October, 1997, led to a program in which each song had the word “Blue” in the title. April, 2000, nodded to Latin pop, which was having a crossover moment. A personal favorite is the January, 1997, playlist, which captures an instant in which mainstream pop was more heterogeneous than it had ever been: there’s the Beastie Boys, the Butthole Surfers, Beck, D’Angelo, the Roots, Maxwell, the Posies, Soul Coughing, Sublime. Programmed-music companies are generally held in low esteem by music nerds—even lower than a tight-playlisted, payola-taking corporate radio station. But stark anti-corporate stances have become somewhat passé among many music lovers, and the Gap of the nineties is now a source of nostalgia for thirty- and forty-somethings. When I tweeted out my discovery of the blog, in July, I saw no one critique the political economy of Gap music. Instead, many of my contemporaries fondly recalled their own nineties, and noticed, hey, a lot of these are pretty good.
For Bise, it’s not a matter of cherry-picking his favorites from the past and discarding the rest. The quest—like acquiring an artist’s discography, or a run of 45s released by a defunct regional label—is one of completion. He’s spent months looking for former A.E.I. and Muzak employees, and reaching out to Gap and Mood Media to see what might be lingering in their archives. In the meantime, he trades e-mails every few weeks with Justin. A few days ago, Justin sent him the lists from June and October, 1996, and they chatted about their memories of that time. Justin doesn’t have every list that Bise wants, but he has confirmed that, somewhere down in that box of old paper playlists, he has Bise’s all-time favorite: August, 1998, thirty-five songs of which Bise can recall on his own. Justin is waiting until it arises naturally in the stack to send it over.
