The Bipolar Logic of Gym Music, or: Young/Sexy/Rich/Virile/Cool vs. Not

So I’m exercising in my local gym on this “elliptical trainer” thing that is better for your knees than running but will kill you if you get off it too fast, and thinking about the music they’ve got playing in there. I’m not sure what to call it, exactly—it’s pretty much the same music all the time: a kind of hard-driving pop-techno which is basically a very fast beat with phrases like “Got to keep it movin’!” or “Do it to me, baby!” looped over and over and over again on top of it. Sometimes there is a keyboard/midi/synth playing a very frenetic lead that sounds like the noise a cat might make if you put it in a particle accelerator. The overall effect of this music is, I think, supposed to be motivational: it’s supposed to motivate you to dance, exercise, or fornicate very fast and for a very long time. It is the aural equivalent of that P.E. coach everybody had in Seventh grade whose motivational technique consisted of verbally abusing and insulting you until you either got motivated or gave up sports forever.

Some people like that, I guess. Some people need that, maybe. Disregarding for a moment the very relevant question of why I do not simply bring an iPod to the gym and shut up already, let me state for the record that I am not one of those people. To me, that music presents a very bossy dilemma: Either a) Submit entirely to its relentless rhythms, and become the badass exercising machine that it wants you to be or b) Be the loser who can’t keep up. Winner or Loser? What do you want to be? Pretty compelling logic, even if you’re paying attention, because it hits way, way below the belt. It preys on precisely the same kinds of profound insecurities I thought we all left gratefully behind us at middle school graduation: the desperate fear of not being cool enough, where ‘cool’ = fast, strong, hot, cute, interesting, smart (depending on where you went to middle school), wealthy, aware of really obscure shit (depending on what crowd you hung out with)…you get the picture. The music forces you to choose between fictional opposites, within a duality that it (the music) creates. After all, say I amp my workout up to the amphetamine-grade intensity that the song demands, and in so doing completely burn myself out in ten minutes, while the guy next to me who is listening to, say, the Cowboy Junkies on headphones, is exercising at a cardiovascularly healthy, but more leisurely pace. And say this guy keeps going for another 40 minutes after I collapse, beet-red, in a stupor in the corner? Do I win?

There is a very strong parallel here to the way a lot of advertising works. The most hit-you-over-the-head-obvious example of what I’m getting at would be the typical Viagra ad, which, in magazines, tends to show a robust-looking, toothy, middle-aged guy with a full head of steel-grey, “distinguished” hair being hugged from behind by an anachronistically youthful, middle-aged woman, who is visibly satisfied in every way with the guy, thanks in no small part to Viagra. Now I am not a middle-aged man, and I have not suffered the devastating effects of prostate-removal or any of the other potency-threatening ravages that can come to men in their middle years, but I can imagine that those ads haunt the psyches of a lot of otherwise reasonable guys 50 and older. The message is basically: “Are you SURE your woman is satisfied with your performance? Because if you are, hey man, more power to ya…but if there’s even the teensy weensiest little shred of doubt lurking somewhere in the deepest recesses of your imagination, don’t you think you OWE it to her to give us a call?”

Now I am not in any way impugning Viagra, which in spite of its reputedly prohibitive price tag has undoubtedly given a new lease on (sex) life to many, many (upper-middle class) men with legitimate medical issues. Nor am I questioning Pfizer’s right to make a buck (or ten bucks a pill, or whatever) and therefore their right to advertise. What I am very harshly criticizing is the ubiquity of messages coming at us all the time (from tv, radio, magazines, billboards…) that frame everything in these zero-sum terms, where either you do exactly as they say or you are a total loser. I think this can’t be good for us, hearing these kinds of messages all the time, everywhere, even if we were all (which we aren’t, all) so jaded and meta-aware that they couldn’t catch us in their little binary webs. Not that being jaded and meta-aware, which is pretty much the only form of self-defense against these constant threats and demands, is necessarily such a good thing, either.

“Work it, baby!”
“Work it! Work it!”

“Work it, baby!”
“Work it! Work it!”

No. I will not work it. Or maybe I will, but not because you tell me to. Maybe I’m just not good with authority. Or maybe it’s just those damn synthesizers. The guy next to me is singing along, in a robust falsetto: “Wooooork eeeeeet!” “Woooooork eeeeeet!” I glance over at him and he really is working it—he’s completely magenta and he’s punching at the air and sweating into his eyes and grinning. He is enthusiastically on board with whatever this music wants him to do. If the music told him to jump off a roof, this guy would be like: “how high?” I kind of envy him.

Meanwhile, I’m doing everything in my power to stay in my own invisible, tenuous rhythmic bubble, but the song is omnipresent, omnipotent, all-devouring—my only refuge is the television in front of me, which is showing a computer-generated graphic of a man’s newly revivified hair follicle: we see how “Super Boost” seeps into the shriveled pore, causing it to put forth a thick, black hair.

I close my eyes. I take deep breaths, counting backwards from ten. In this city, I think, you really need an iPod. Then I think: Shit! now the music’s making me buy an iPod! Then I think: don’t think like that. Then the song ends, and for like ten full seconds, I don’t think anything at all.