Everything but the Coffee

by Simon, Bryant

  Perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising. In many ways, NPR and Starbucks sell similar products. Both package themselves as authentic: real news, real coffee. NPR, it likes to remind its listeners, doesn’t run crass commercials; and Starbucks, it likes to tell its customers, doesn’t rely on Budweiser-type advertisements. NPR reporters and anchors speak in muted voices that match the earth-tone shades of the walls and chairs at Starbucks stores. But both sell, actually, what Gladstone called a desire to “understand how the world works.”1 Indicating once again the expanded meanings of buying, they offered their customers an easy way to absorb and project a sense of learning and discovery. Both were kind of like National Geographic without the text. Beyond the hourly updates and drip coffee, the NPR and Starbucks experiences turn on the easy acquisition of adventure and knowledge. Both promise to take customers to new and different places, and the customers in turn get to use the knowledge they gain from these adventures as a kind of currency— as yet another way to make distinctions and show that they are, in the words of a Starbucks marketing representative, “everyday explorers.”2

  The best thing about these explorations, though, is that the adventurers don’t have to travel by themselves. NPR and Starbucks organize the tours for them. Everyday explorers don’t have to spend hours online researching flights or looking for clean hotels or encountering any of the unpredictability or griminess that comes from seeking out something truly new and foreign. Yet they can still get regular doses of discovery through their purchases.

  “I want to come in and be surprised,” Hazel Delgado, a thirty-three-year-old regular at a San Bernardino, California, Starbucks said about her favorite coffeehouse.3 Customers will pay for discovery—with pledge drive calls and return visits for high-priced coffee—because the idea and feeling of discovery has value. Listening to a radio report from Myanmar or drinking a cup of coffee made from Sumatra beans can be like traveling to a far-off land. Both Starbucks and NPR make this kind of “virtual touring” accessible and easy while still slightly foreign and exotic. Among creative class types, travel or discovery translates into cultural capital. Knowing something or going away can earn you the respect, admiration, and the dinner party envy of friends and associates. The farther you go, at least in higher education and higher earning circles, the more capital you get. Think about the esteem and admiration someone earns at a get-together in a New York City loft apartment for venturing to Laos or Chile. You get points, too, for discovering a newBurmese or Brazilian restaurant. Sensing this dynamic, Starbucks offers a watered-down version of this transaction, taking its less adventurous patrons away from the glass towers and enclosed malls of the developed world. The coffee company promises to escort customers on voyages to the most rural, underdeveloped, and authentic spots on earth, places with lots of vicarious cultural capital in bobo and creative class social networks. Starbucks and NPR, then, create package tours for those on breaks between their own overseas trips, and smooth sailing for the less adventurous, those who want discovery but want it close by, clean, and not too far outside the mainstream.

  Coffee anchors the Starbucks discovery experience. “Look at the world through the eyes of Starbucks coffee,” the company Web site suggests. “Geography is flavor,” according to another of the firm’s favorite taglines. With each cup (even if it is loaded with milk and sugar), Starbucks promises to take its customers on journeys to distant, exotic lands. For a time, Starbucks even issued coffee passports. With every bag of single-origin beans purchased, you got a stamp, certifying that you had been to Ethiopia, then to Colombia, and then to East Timor. Of course, you didn’t need a visa or vaccines or to take your shoes off at air-port security to go to these places, and that is a big part of the appeal.

  While the Starbucks discovery aesthetic begins with coffee, it gets sounded out with music. Any Starbucks regular during the height of the Starbucks moment—say, from 1998 to 2005 or so—was sure to have heard Cuba’s Buena Vista Social Club and Brazil’s Sergio Mendes while waiting in line for a tall Caffè Verona or grande Guatemala Antigua coffee. Starbucks’ musical project sold the foreign and unfamiliar, exploiting yuppie and upper-middle-class desires for discovery and knowledge. That’s been a constant with the company and its music. But that doesn’t mean that Starbucks’ musical project hasn’t changed. Over the years, Starbucks has packaged its music and its explorations of the larger world in different ways, moving from the quest for discovery to sell the unfamiliar to using the aura of discovery to sell the familiar.4

  SEARCHING FOR THE NEW

  I still remember him slumped over the record rack, the back of his checked thrift store jacket riding up and pinching him where his arms met his shoulders. He looked like an underwater diver. After staying bent down for a long stretch, he would pull up and call out across the crowded eight-by-twelve-foot store right off the pages of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity.

  “Bry, do you know this band?”

  I learned long before then not to say yes to Bing, unless I really did know the band, and I usually didn’t.

  “No,” I called back softly, trying to hide my musical illiteracy from the store’s other well-informed record divers.

  Then Bing—his parents named him Justin—would turn to me and tell me about the band and its lineup changes, its history and back-ground, and who they sounded like. A mix between the Smiths and Big Star, or maybe the singer reminder him of a younger Eartha Kitt— another Bing favorite. After a few rounds of this, he would pick out an album or an EP, and we would head home.

  Later, in the living room of our second-floor walk-up apartment, we would make a pot of coffee and listen to the new music on our portable flip-top turntable with the sounds coming out of three-inch-high red plastic speakers.

  “So what do you think?”

  It went like this every week. Bing would read papers and magazines, listen to the radio, and talk to his friends, and then on Saturdays, we would go record shopping. Usually Bing came home with something I had never heard of or hadn’t heard in a long time. He loved turning me, or anyone else who stopped by the apartment, on to new stuff. I got to know some of my favorite music this way—Chris Bell, Curtis Mayfield, the Modern Lovers, the June Brides, the Replacements, the Stars of Heaven, the Shangri-Las, and Solomon Burke.

  Bing became, in a sense, my music editor. He picked through the record racks and chose the tunes. I handed him this role because I trusted him. I trusted his taste and judgment, I trusted that he wanted to extend my musical reach, and I trusted that he believed that music, just on its own, could make our lives better—more fun, more soulful, more meaningful, and more melodious. From there, I trusted him about other things. I read books that he suggested, went to movies that he recommended, and saw plays that he had heard about or seen. Bing served as a culture broker for me in those days.

  Through Bing, I discovered new music and the vocabulary to talk about it. I could then take that knowledge and share it (or show it off) to others. As I did, I gained cultural capital myself. I appeared like someone who had valuable insider information on music, and I gained, in some people’s eyes, a bit of esteem because of this knowledge. I knew something that they didn’t know; I could help them make a discovery. Knowledge and information have currency in the postneed economy—people who know stuff have value, and we gravitate toward them to get their tips and insights, and then we absorb what they teach us and make it our own (sometimes with, sometimes without, attribution). This informal transfer of new knowledge goes on all the time, and it’s exactly what Starbucks sought to commodify through selling music, and later books, packaged as discovery.

  PACKAGING THE NEW

  To his friends, Don MacKinnon played the same role as Bing did in my life. As a Williams College undergraduate, he spent hours making mixed tapes for his dorm mates. From there, he went to Harvard Business School. When he graduated with an MBA in 1990, he joined with two other classmates to start Hear Music, a kind of commercialization of his college role as the guy
who turned others on to new music. What Hear Music really sold was cultural capital through discovery—the value of the chance to learn something new and then show it to others.

  At the outset, MacKinnon and his associates ran the company as a mail-order catalog. They introduced people to largely unknown regional acts like Texas legends Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt. Along with these releases, Hear Music put out compilations of a number of talented singer-songwriters—symbols of authenticity in the age of hair bands—like Nanci Griffith, Ricki Lee Jones, and Bonnie Raitt. From there, Hear Music opened record stores in Berkeley, Chicago, and a few places in between. Bing explained to me, “These were tastemaker shops,” forerunners to Amazon and hundreds of Internet retailers, “that used the ‘if you like . . . Cowboy Junkies or Lyle Lovett . . . , you will love [fill in the blank]”—something, he added, “you can see in today’s Starbucks marketing.” Hear Music offered a limited stock of products (say, one thousand records), and the staff—usually people who knew music—felt a certain ownership over these artists. They embraced the idea that it was their right, their duty, to turn people on to their artists and their songs. “Nothing came cheap at Hear Music,” Bing added. Most CDs sold for the full manufacturer’s suggested retail price. Like the value proposition Starbucks offered in its earliest days—pay them and you get a little of their coffee knowledge—people paid a premium to Hear Music to gain access to the staff’s musical expertise and a chance at discovering something new.5

  When a store plays music, though not Muzak or mainstream pop, it signals that it is a place for discovery. Less commercial music went hand in glove with the idea of the twentieth-century coffeehouse experience. At those smoky, basement beatific places, scratchy jazz and blues records played during the day, and folk musicians strummed their guitars and blew into harmonicas at night. When Howard Schultz opened Il Giornale, he played opera. At one of the very first Starbucks, located across from the University of Washington campus in Seattle, Timothy Jones made cappuccinos and spun records like a DJ. So did other baristas.6

  As the company grew, though, Starbucks didn’t want to leave any-thing to chance. It wanted predictability in the sounds as much as the drinks. It didn’t want customers greeted by the roar of metal at 6 A.M. or bubbly synthetic dance music in the middle of the afternoon. To ensure sameness and keep every store on the same musical page, the company at some point installed special CD players that would only play company-issued CDs. No worker could drop his or her own tunes into these machines.7 But as Starbucks grew, it needed music; moreover, it needed someone to pick the music. Flush with cash and confidence from its initial public stock offering in 1992, Starbucks started to assert itself more on the music front, in many ways modeling itself after Hear Music, which it eventually purchased in 1999 and made its official sound source.

  “When I saw Hear Music the first time,” Howard Schultz told a reporter as he looked back on why he purchased the company, “it was clear that they had cracked the code on the sense of discovery that music should have.” A couple of years earlier, he commented on the deal by saying, “The fact that Hear Music had elevated its status from a record store to an editor was compelling.”8 Hear Music’s Don MacKinnon explained the relationship a little differently. He saw the acquisition as a way to expand the role he started playing at Williams College onto a bigger stage. With Starbucks’ commercial reach, he imagined Hear Music as “that friend in college down the hall who played great music and made great mixes, and turned you on to something. A lot of us feel we don’t have that friend anymore.”9

  Bing first met David Brewster, later a Starbucks sound architect, in the mid-1990s when they both lived in Boston. At the time, Brewster worked in the marketing department at Houghton Mifflin, and Bing did the same at Rounder Records. “We would run into each other at trade shows,” Bing told me, “and since he was a big music fan, and I liked books, we would introduce each other to stuff.” As the decade came to a close, Brewster had had kids and wanted to move closer to his family in the Pacific Northwest. One day, he called Bing and asked him if he knew anyone out there. “I gave him Tim Jones’s information,” Bing remembers. By then, Jones had moved from behind the coffee counter to the Hear Music offices, managing compilations and in-store programming. Eventually, Brewster got a job with Starbucks and helped to run its first, short-lived foray into the book business. When that folded, he went to work on the music side of Hear Music and stayed there until 2004.

  “All the music decisions,” Brewster outlined for me over the phone, “were pretty deliberate.” Just like at the Hear Music stores and in its catalogs, the idea was to have limited selections. By not carrying too many titles, Starbucks suggested that each CD really earned its place at the table because it offered something special and unique.10 At first, this was pretty much how it was. Brewster and his colleagues looked for music laced with an “air of sophistication, as well as an aspect of discovery, often rooted in jazz.”11

  “Why jazz? What does it say?” I asked.

  “Jazz,” he answered, “is viewed as the archetypical sound of the coffeehouse—an urban coffeehouse, as opposed to a college coffeehouse with peanuts on the floor.”

  But Starbucks didn’t play just any kind of jazz. In the mid-to late 1990s, Brewster recalled, customers heard postbop and cool jazz, music positioned squarely between the riotous postwar sounds of Charlie Parker and the frenzied fusion of Miles Davis’s 1969 album Bitches Brew. As Brewster explained, the tunes could “not [be] too challenging, but not too vanilla, either, [and] not too old sounding like Benny Goodman.”

  After several successful collaborations with the famed postbop, cool jazz label Blue Note in the 1990s, which included the introduction of Blue Blend Coffee, Starbucks “exhibited a growing confidence about how [it] should represent itself to customers,” Brewster said. From jazz, the company moved to Delta and urban blues, putting out, in the words of one reviewer, several compilations that “dusted off some ancient jewels and mined new diamonds.”12 After that, Brewster and his colleagues gently steered the company toward world music. Playing Buena Vista Social Club in its stores, Starbucks helped to drive sales of the group’s 1997 break-through collaboration with Ry Cooder to unseen heights for Cuban music in the United States. It followed up this success by releasing Café Cubana—a “flavorful blend” of artists from Havana and Miami that promised patrons “a musical adventure.” Between 1999 and 2001, Starbucks joined forces with Peter Gabriel and Real World Records to bring to the coffee shops and the mainstream the synthetic sounds of Afro Celt Sound System, a U.K. band that blended Irish tin whistles with techno and traditional drumming, and the deeply spiritual singing of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, a celebrated Pakistani performer who would go on to record with Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder. Overlapping with these moves, Brewster and his crew got in touch with Yo-Yo Ma, Elvis Costello, Lucinda Williams, Sheryl Crow, and the Rolling Stones. Following that early Hear Music model, each star assembled an “Artist’s Choice” collection, usually a wildly eclectic one, of his or her favorite songs. “As we went along,” Brewster told me about this period, “we deliberately began to get more diverse.”

  As Brewster and his fellow sound architects played new sounds, Starbucks customers got the sense of discovery many wanted. Every once in a while, they came away from the stores feeling like they had uncovered something new, just like I had on those afternoons in the record store with Bing. Brewster knew that the sense of discovery enhanced the brand. For him, it was like filling two roles at once: he got to turn people on to cool music (and get paid for it) and create latte loyalty all at the same time. At this point, however, Starbucks executives saw CDs sales as a bonus, not as the music project’s main focus.

  By no means would Brewster and his Hear Music colleagues play just anything. Trying to create the feeling of discovery, they chose some music and tossed aside other tunes. “What [was] out,” he explained in 2003, was “Top 40 and country. Most classical, too, though we have done some opera
.”13 In the mid-1990s, Starbucks offered an album by Kenny G.14 Not long after, the saxophonist apparently lost his place in the stores. This was a hard call for Brewster. Howard Schultz palled around with Kenny G, who in turn bought a pile of the company’s stock. On one occasion the chairman pressed—gently—the Hear Music folks to carry his friend’s CDs. Brewster and his crew refused. “He’s not authentic,” Brewster explained to me. “We wanted this authentic tradition, and he is not from the tradition.” Brewster preferred artists who needed a leg up. That wasn’t Kenny G, either. He didn’t need any help, nor did he “do much for the larger culture,” Brewster said.

  Brewster won’t play any coffee songs, either. “We got pitched all the time by artists,” he chuckled, “who wrote songs about coffee . . .. That was too clichéd.” Instead, he looked for music that went with the brand’s vision of itself as a purveyor of hard-to-find, handmade, artisanal, authentic products.15

  Again and again, Brewster sent jazz, blues, and world beat tracks from corporate headquarters to play over Starbucks’ in-store sound systems. “African American music,” he said to me, was “a sound and a feel of what a coffeehouse should represent.” Here, I’m guessing, Brewster was talking about the freedom and experimentation displayed at beatnik coffee joints. At these places and at Starbucks, the soundtrack reached back to a long, complex tradition in American culture perhaps best expressed (meaning with all the contradictions left in) by Norman Mailer in his classic, revealing, and disturbing essay, “The White Negro.” In this insightful window into postwar thinking and neurosis, the one-time bad boy of American letters portrayed African Americans as the freest Americans. In their poverty and rural ways, they became to him the most authentic and liberated of the nation’s people. As the quintessential outsiders, African Americans, in Mailer’s cloudy vision, lived the freest lives. Blues, jazz, and R&B—black music—allowed whites to experience the liberating world of blackness as some of them—and Mailer—imagined it.16 Listening to Muddy Waters sing the blues, wailing, moaning, and preening, let the audience believe it could feel this romanticized (and projected) world of blackness—this world of honest struggle, sex, freedom, and the true promise of America.