The Girl from Ipanema (The Day the Muzak died?)

So, I’m standing in the elevator this morning at the hotel. On board with me is one of the cleaning ladies with her vacuum. After the polite good mornings were exchanged, there we stood, seemingly absorbed in the colored lights indicating our slow descent to the lobby. It seems to me this would be a good time for some Muzak, which is conspicuously absent. Not that I always need music playing, Muzak or otherwise. I generally have some sort of internal life soundtrack going on in my head anyway. Do you ever notice that sometimes a song will pop into your head and it seems to coincide beautifully with whatever you happen to be doing or feeling at the time? I love that. Happens all the time.

So, I’m standing in the elevator this morning at work. On board with me is no one. Again, I appear to be absorbed in the lights making their way up to my stop on 4. And, there is no music playing in this elevator either. Since I listen to so much music all the time, the silence is very obvious. So, my internal soundtrack steps up and I end up with some fragment of a song that seems to appear in a lot of elevator scenes in movies. I decide to do some research on the Internet about elevator Muzak, which leads me to the song I was thinking of and today’s title, The Girl from Ipanema.

Apparently, this song claims to be the second most recorded popular song of all time, behind “Yesterday” by the Beatles. Interesting. And yet, I had no real clue what the lyrics were. So I looked them up. It’s basically about a girl walking past a shop everyday on her way to the beach and driving the local boys crazy because she never seems to notice them. This song is the Poster Child for elevator muzak. The movies that I saw mentioned for it were The Blues Brothers (thanks, Dad), Catch Me if You Can, and Simply Irresistible. Those were just a few. It’s a catchy bossa nova, so now I am going to have to download it to the iPod. (Now, if I could just convince my friend Katie to sing it.)