Art & Creativity Quote by Alistair Cooke

“Canned music is like audible wallpaper” lands because it’s not really about music. It’s about what happens when sound is stripped of risk and intention and repackaged as ambience. Cooke’s metaphor is cutting in its calmness: wallpaper isn’t offensive, it’s domestication. It turns a room into “somewhere” without asking you to notice how. By calling background music “audible wallpaper,” he’s accusing it of the same trick: sensory decoration that smooths over silence, erases edges, and preemptively manages mood.

The phrase “canned” does a lot of work. It’s industrial, shelf-stable, uniform; it implies something once living has been processed for convenience. Cooke, a broadcaster with an ear trained on live performance and spoken nuance, understood how reproduction can flatten experience into product. The subtext is a warning about consent: you don’t choose wallpaper; it’s imposed by whoever owns the space. Likewise, piped-in music in shops, elevators, and restaurants is less a gift than a form of soft control, shaping tempo and emotion while pretending to be nothing at all.

The context is mid-century modernity, when Muzak and “functional music” were sold as productivity tools and retail accelerants. Cooke’s line punctures that optimism with a journalist’s skepticism: when culture becomes an interior design choice, it stops being culture and starts being management. His wit is that the insult is almost polite, which makes it sting longer.