Muzak — the catch-all name for bland soothing, elevator music — gets a bad wrap. Comedian Chad Briggs recently gave it another shot and it shook up his listening-view a little bit. Read an excerpt below or listen above:

Summer of course, is the time of the outdoor music festival and any number of overblown and overpriced touring shows.

Last week, a blog post by a 22-year-old NPR intern kicked yet off another round in the debate on the ethics of paying for versus pirating music.

I had become mired in ambivalence about illegally downloading music and attending festivals, both of which I’ve done with trepidation in the past.

I wasn’t sure how to feel. I needed something to deliver me from my musical morass. And it was coming. I was soon to discover two acts that would shatter everything I thought I knew about music.

It all started a few weeks ago with the return of warm temperatures.

That’s when I discovered Ice Cream Truck, an avant garde DJ who parks his canary yellow rig right under my open window. Committed to his outsider art ethos, he played a private show just for me. That night I was treated to over a full hour of the same five seconds of “The Entertainer” diabolically looped until it bore a crater in my brain and filled it with the pale orange not quite sherbet substance in those pushup bars he pimps along with his relentless beats.

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