Pizza Jams: Soundtracking the Fantasy of the Everyday

MUSICIANS ON MUSIC
Musicians On Music is a weekly column in which we feature exactly that: musicians, both local and national, writing about music, the industry, other people’s music, or whatever they feel like writing. This week we feature Mike, Nick, and Frank from In, one of the most exciting – though least internet-searchable – new bands cropping up in Brooklyn. Our writer Drew Citron sat down with In last week, where they talked about trying to understand the ’80s. This week In continues their quest by examining one particular ’80s phenomenon: the Pizza Jam.

For a brief period between the early ’80s and the early ’90s – our childhoods – pizza was the flagship token of the tyke zeitgeist. This was when the mechanics of massive-scale corporate food production and commercial television were in full swing, mostly unchecked and uncriticized. The possibility of a certain kind of instantaneous common experience, minted in movies and proliferated in broadcast TV, had become mundane, elementary. We were getting reamed by the capitalist machine, but we were kids: there’s an honest intimacy to any crucial developmental experience, and a huge portion of ours was spent under the influence of the advertising aesthetics of the day. And so often, we were served pizza, with bright colors, a way-cool demeanor, and a subtly slamming soundtrack. These last – the pizza jams – became a part of our first language, as instrumental as “Uh-oh,” and “Mommy.”

We don’t want to revere pizza in particular – the Ninja Turtles turned it into a godhead, and we’ll leave that kowtowing in the sewer – it’s a useful locus; it’s got its greasy imprint all over late-20th century issues of post-Spockian child-rearing, technology and literacy, gender, violence in the media, the apex of the fast food nation, the rancid dream of free-market economics, and, in retrospect, authorship and the epistemology of art-making. For lots of attentive people of a certain age and demographic, the term “Pizza Jam” barely needs explication. We know it’s that pizza sound that gets kids moving as fast as their legs’ll get them to the nearest Hut. It’s that carefree vibe cut through with visions of gooey cheese and extra pepperoni. No anchovies, no worries. You eat this stuff with your fingers. You put your elbows on the table. You do some armpit farts. Whatever.

You know it when you hear it: a pizza jam is a jaunty number with a sonic or structural affinity to both the 8-bit compositions of video games and the kind of electronic funk that came from the sudden wide availability of synthesizers in the early 80s. It’s got a loping pace, a briefly phrased melodic hook and/or hooks, and, probably most definitively, a prominently mixed bass with an at least somewhat farty timbre.

The thing is, we were TV kids whether we like it or not. When we watch TV every day while our brain is as malleable as it will ever be, we learn what it sounds like when – ooh boy – the pizza comes steaming out of the oven. We learn what it sounds like when a sour apple Blow-Pop is sucked. We learn what it sounds like for a cartoon or video game character to jump up really high or slam into a mushroom and get really big. We learn a very specific way to soundtrack experience. We associate certain sounds with certain events we’ve all experienced in televisual representation. These associations become quotidian types, immediately identifiable ways to describe familiar and totally ordinary events.

And yet for all its recognizable identity, a pizza jam is authorless. Like all soundtrack music and library music, it’s defined by an association of particular sounds with particular displaced experiences – like the distinct soundtrack tropes that car chases or dark and stormy nights took in earlier film media – rather than the artistic imprint of a distinguishable creative agent.

Because of the essential authorlessness of these types, it’s easy to appropriate and reconfigure them in an ironic mode. These days, as we’re trying to digest the ’80s not just from memory but from revisiting events through videotapes and cassettes, people don’t have to identify themselves with Mega Man images or 8-bit melodies, or with what those items’ initial presentations meant to the community who created and received them. Instead, people can identify with the self-referentiality required to re-present those images. But we don’t think this is satisfying.

When we broach the subject of pizza jams, we want to ask: how can we value the essentially unauthored items of our childhoods and still engage our deeply felt experiences? How can we digest the ’80s and find what’s sincere and intimate there?

We’re trying to figure this out. Perhaps we can approach this musically by reclaiming ’80s sounds for something that acknowledges the “pizza” but makes feeling possible. Let’s remember: a truly affective soundtrack is not a dispensable background; it’s the air our ears breathe. (The pizza jam’s relationship to video games is not to be diminished: there’s something unique engrained in kids who played video games and watched a lot of commercials, hearing brief musical phrases over and over and over until they became an inadvertent raga of semi-passive play.) To find inspiration in the pizza jam is to grant our memories the meaning we might have thought standardized mass-media culture chewed up and shit out. It’s to reclaim the soundtrack of the fantasy of the everyday.

by Mike, Nick, and Frank of In

PS - More Pizza Jams:

More Domino’s (1986)

Pillsbury Microwave Pizza (1987)

Pizza Hut - Remix (1986)