Slater Bradley
by Justin Yockel

Slater Bradley’s video "Inside a Times Square Burger King Where the Soundtrack is Being Played Backward" (2000) is an arena for us to ponder the relationship of Muzak and fast food. Both are the chewed up, reconstituted offerings of culture from corporatized America. Both are to be consumed rather than digested. We all know Burger King relies heavily on the entertainment value of pop food and pop music to sell their products. We’ve become desensitized to their methods. Bradley’s video refreshes our awareness that the fast food "dining experience" is in fact constructed and manipulative.

Bradley records on video the most mundane of American meals: a burger and soda. The video at first seems unstructured and accidental, as if an amateur videographer forgot to turn off the "record" on the camcorder. We watch like wide-eyed toddlers as big hands dunk onion rings between bites of a Whopper. The video is not a self-portrait in food, however. We never even see a full shot of Bradley’s face. Nor can it be considered an act of surveillance. The camera is too loosely handled to draw our attention to customers milling around in the background. Rather, Bradley repeatedly points his lens to the overhead speaker, which spews a garbled unidentifiable soundtrack.

The patient viewer is rewarded with the realization that the video is actually a simply structured and coherent loop. It plays forward and then reverses. The key moment occurs as a yellow-shirted customer in the background is about to exit, pushing on the door, but then reverses and retraces his steps. With the images now set in backward motion, the soundtrack now plays forward. We suddenly realize the garbled soundtrack we previously heard was Heatwave’s 1976 hit "Always and Forever" played in reverse. It’s a song that has been adopted as "our song" by millions of couples, prompting fan websites and repeated requests at high school dances and wedding receptions.

If only playing it backwards had revealed something more cryptic. Isn’t that what happens when you stumble across a reversed recording? At least that’s what pop mythology and fretting ministers would have us believe. Perhaps having just seen the re-release of "The Exorcist" is prompting me to expect "masking" in every song? Rather, "Always and Forever" was probably chosen for the play list because it was clinically proven to increase customer appetite and sales.

Bradley is probably the only person in the restaurant who is cognizant of the glitch. Fellow customers are not aware of being recorded by Bradley’s camera, let alone the construction of Burger King’s euphemistic "dining experience". Somehow Burger King, whose jingle is to let you "have it your way," has decided to shower you with a predetermined play list. It’s not enough to just eat their food in peace; you have to listen to their songs too. Piped music play-lists consist of easily swallowed, familiar songs. It’s filler, much like the food listed on the illuminated menu. The instrumentals of a cover song of a cover song are rehashed, replayed and reheated. Just how many combinations can they invent to dress up a song (or hamburger patty) as actually something new? Please remix my triple honey-dipped, bacon and guacasalsa cheesemelt in a rye wrap/warp slathered in BBQ nachodilla sauce one more time.

The value in pop culture, though, is its immense unifying strength. We all recognize the food, the songs, and the logos and yet none are specific. They are stand-ins for the real: symbols. Even the restaurant itself is a stand-in for a real place. It’s anyplace and no place but not a specific place. The molded chairs, reflective mirrors, dropped ceilings, fluorescent fixtures in Bradley’s video are all a manufactured environment. It’s an environment geared for efficient processing of consumers.