Love Songs at the Bank

Banking is antithetical to romance. The word that immediately pops up is "cold" — cold marble, cold steel vaults, cold columns of numbers, cold cash. The opposite of flesh and blood, of lips nibbling an earlobe.

You probably don't have a sexy relationship with your banking professionals. At best, it's cordial. Perhaps it's warmly businesslike, or perfunctory, or marked by mutual indifference and impatience. There aren't a lot of stories about people getting picked up at banks, because it doesn't happen.

Can't happen, maybe. May be impossible because of science.

So, imagine you're programming the music for your local branch. "Money," by the Beatles — too obvious. "Money," by Pink Floyd — too ironic. Ambient techno? A little too edgy, although appropriately numbing. How about a little Haydn? Or, God forbid, Coldplay?

That sounds about right. The one thing you wouldn't want to have playing over the intercom system as some guy sets up his free checking account is "Killing Me Softly With His Song":

Strumming my pain with his fingers / Singing my life with his words / Killing me softly with his song / Killing me softly with his song / Telling my whole life with his words / Killing me softly with his song

I felt all flushed with fever / Embarrassed by the crowd / I felt he found my letters / And read each one out loud / I prayed that he would finish / But he just kept right on

And so on. The problem with hearing this (and its ilk) in a bank isn't merely that it's a love song. There are some pretty awesomely banal "love songs" out there, the musical equivalent of soggy couscous or unsalted popcorn. It's actually a real love song, expressing real feelings with words that are poetic.

Roberta Flack's "Killing Me Softly" isn't a tune to do business by, unless we're talking about "gettin' down to business" in a musky New Orleans motel room.

Which we aren't. Unfortunately.

Society as a whole has difficulty with the whole "soundtrack plus business" concept. Slate recently ran a terrific feature where readers wrote in with the worst commercial/song pairings they'd stumbled upon.

The winnner was "Lust For Life," Iggy Pop's raucous heroin jingle (Here comes Johnny Yen again / With the liquor and drugs / And the flesh machine... Of course, I've had it in the ear before..."), which runs in ads for Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines. This triumphant ode to self-destruction is layered over wholesome shots of white people scuba diving and dining on Olive Gardenesque entrees.

Scores well on the irony meter, but you know that if its irony was ever considered, it was by someone pretty far down the creative totem pole, snickering quietly into her sleeve as the bigwigs got excited about how "Lust for Life" made their floating bourgie playground seem a little less dead inside.

Run with your strength, businesses. Don't pretend your bank is a nightclub. It's not, and you're not fooling anyone. For the record: You're also kind of creeping out your customers, who are there to get their ATM PINs, not to score with middle-aged Portuguese bank tellers.

Strumming my PIN with my fingers / Using my account with this machine / Checkin' my balance with this card / Checkin' my balance with this card / Seeing whether my paycheck cleared / Checkin' my balance with this card

Marginally better. But better nonetheless.

— James Norton (jrnorton@flakmag.com)