I once said, “I may grow old, but never so old that the theme song for Morning Edition on NPR will suck any less.” I said this on the internet, at about six in the morning, after a fourteen-hour shift at work. I probably then slept for three hours, zombied my way through a day of caring for my then-one-year-old son, and then went and worked another fourteen-hour shift. What I’m saying is, I was probably not in a particularly generous mood when I issued this judgment on BJ Leiderman’s best-known work, and my youthful superiority to it, but I stand by it—that song sucks! But I may have underestimated how bad things could get on the Morning Edition theme song front, because things have gotten worse.
Here’s the original, the one NPR has been using for 40 years or so, until this week.
I can abide the first twelve seconds, but then the elevator doors slide open, and an assaultive, treacly adult contemporary guitar melody begins, like someone gently tying a cashmere sweater around my shoulders to keep me warm in the waiting room of a real estate attorney’s office, without my consent. It’s like if you turned that Classical Gas lick into a sweet vermouth breakfast martini in orange jello, and then ate the whole thing while sliding around the kitchen floor in your dressing robe and knee socks and making John Mayer guitar face, and also you are a 55-year-old tax accountant.
It’s eleven seconds of a distilled corn syrup IV smoothed into the bloodstream by spreading it onto the crook of your elbow with a butter knife, in music form. The old Morning Edition theme is the audiobook intro music to some aspirational 1970s self-help book that has 33 chapters on how self-love is a choice we make every second of every day, and not a feeling. It is the worst! Or it was, until this week.
The new Morning Edition theme song is somehow even worse than the original. When I said what I said about never getting so old that the original theme would suck any less, NPR obviously took it as a challenge to make me regret my take. They’ve introduced a new theme so awful that I look back on the old one with a perverse, abused fondness, a torture victim on day 143 of daily torment longing for the good ol’ times of the first few weeks, when I still had a few fingers on my hand to have the nails pulled off of one by one, at least.
The first thing I thought when I heard it was that it sounded like the theme song to an imaginary Aaron Sorkin period drama about the news set in the 2000s. Then I went and looked up the theme song to the Aaron Sorkin period drama about the news, and holy shit! This thing sounds just like the terrible theme song for The Newsroom, with all the self-seriousness, but with the nostalgic lament exchanged for optimistic hand claps.
They took the original and let late-90s Sting tantric-fuck it into a world-beat cell phone alert. It sounds like they’re playing the original through some hell-born Casio demo song filter, and also there are hand claps.
From the New York Times coverage of this momentous occasion of the world getting just that much worse:
The new theme is intended to attract a younger and more diverse audience, while also aligning with the evolution of “Morning Edition” into a newsier program, said Kenya Young, the executive producer.
“I wanted a sound and a mood and a tone and a feel and a vibe all mixed in one,” she said.
There’s no denying that there’s a sound and a mood and a tone and a feel and a vibe, here, all mixed in one sixty-second self-appreciating optimistic fart.
Once NPR decided to proceed, it enlisted Man Made Music, a music and sound studio that has worked on similar efforts for HBO, Imax and others.
The process began broadly, with a small group of employees from both organizations sitting in a room together to listen to a wide variety of music styles and to discuss what emotions the songs elicited.
(…)
Man Made Music also identified a set of qualities the new theme should embody, including the intimacy between “Morning Edition” and its listeners, who often tune in as they prepare for the day; the integrity of the program’s reporting; and the sense of discovery that characterizes its broadcasts.
The firm then presented NPR with a wide-ranging set of themes, each of which paid tribute in some way to the fanfare of the original. After a small group of NPR employees settled on the music that would become the current theme, they shared it with their colleagues.
The original Morning Edition theme was put together by a struggling college student who gave a demo to his friend who worked at NPR. That steamy, frosted saccharine shit endured for forty years. The new one, of course, represents not the efforts of one jingle writer, but the shining end-product of a whole firm, with a committee trying to manufacture feelings of integrity and discovery and intimacy in the hearts and minds of an imagined audience. If there’s one thing we’re good at two generations later, after all, it’s having a bunch of meetings and an endless e-mail chain to drill down on how to come out the other side with everything just that much worse. And hand claps.
