Stop! In The Name Of [Insert Song Here]

You’re at a traffic light and suddenly you hear Puccini. Is that the car next to you? If you’re in Nashville near Schermerhorn Center, home of the Nashville Symphony, it’s the stoplight, as Gail Kerr reports in today’s Tennesseean:

The newfangled traffic light boxes were already capable of broadcasting recorded information. So public works employees contacted Sony BMG Nashville and worked out a deal.

“They came up with the music and waived the royalties,” Lynch said. “The boxes are there. We already pay the utilities. This is Music City USA.”

[. . .] “The committee got bigger,” Lynch said. Everybody and their mother started offering suggestions about what to play next: Someone even suggested they play bump-and-grind music next to Déjà Vu.

Thankfully, that didn’t fly. Nor did Take Me Out to the Ballgame at the proposed riverfront ballpark site when the Sounds deal died.

But some efforts worked: They broadcast some Predators plays around the arena when the team went to the playoffs. During the Music City Bowl, they had the lights play the fight songs of each team.

There have been some interesting moments. Homeless guys have been spotted clogging. During National Library Week, poetry and books on tape were played, to the puzzlement of pedestrians.

This is a pretty unique initiative, though it’s not entirely unprecedented–what it reminds me of is the habit of city businesses (such as the downtown Seattle McDonald’s) or services (such as the bus stops in downtown Minneapolis) to start blasting country and classical music into the street to dissuade kids from hanging out. The difference is that the thrust of the Nashville project is to provide a kick, and maybe some civic pride, rather than a deterrent.

It also makes me wonder what other cities’ adoptions of this system might bring about–to stick with the cities in which I’ve lived, Minneapolis, Seattle, and New York are all rich with musical history and current stuff. Still, it’s easy to imagine native Seattleites being less than enamored of being reminded–yet fucking again–that they have the honor of having been born in a place where Jimi Hendrix and Kurt Cobain happened to be, too. (Actually, given the existence, locally, of a pretty well-regarded Mayor’s Film and Music office, we’d probably get a hefty share of less well-known stuff. Then again, we might just get Death Cab 24/7. You never know.) Minneapolis’s streets are so wide you might not even hear the music being played, which if you’re sick sick SICK of hearing about Prince and the Replacements and Husker Du already is probably fine. New York–where would you begin? Punk rock in the Bowery, jazz in Harlem, old-school hip-hop in the Bronx … but it’s hard to imagine there needing to be any music planted there by city officials, since you can hear plenty just walking the streets. Besides, no one in New York pays attention to traffic lights.

Stoplight music puts pep in steps [Tennessean, via Coolfer]