THE AQUATIC and Fitness Center is great. It's big, spacious, and it has a wide range of exercise options throughout the complex that appeal to the gym's equally wide range of patrons. Despite these excellent attributes, however, the music selection at the AFC is awful. As it stands, talk radio is about as well-suited to the gym experience as most of the music that currently permeates the weight room. Utter silence would be preferable to the current array of pop horror that one is forced to listen to for the duration of his or her gym experience.
Before you get indignant, hear me out. I'm not saying music has no place in a gym. Music has significant motivational impact on physical exercise, just not the music you'll hear at the AFC. For those of you who frequent the gym and are not lucky enough to have an iPod to drown out "Big Girls Don't Cry" by Fergie as it washes over the workout area, this issue is poignant. It's not an issue of music in the gym, but rather the specific arsenal of songs that are played to the point of absurdity, with which I have a problem, and I can't be the only one.
Walk into the AFC and wander around for ten minutes. You will hear "Hey There Delilah" at least once during your stay. I have personally been subjected to that particular gem at least twice every time I'm there. Every time the song comes on I get closer and closer to just dropping a weight on my head in hopes of knocking myself out and escaping the duration of Plain White T's despair that is to follow.
Though it would be fun to throw blame around, the employees of the AFC are not as responsible as one might assume for the menagerie of TRL's latest that springs forth from the speakers. Actually, as it turns out, they probably suffer the most out of all of us at the hands of this horrible music. "The song I hear most is whatever is hot right now," AFC employee Jessica Wignall says, citing both "Delilah" and "Big Girls Don't Cry" as two of the most repeated songs in the lineup. Unfortunately for AFC employees and the rest of us, Wignall and the rest of the AFC employees are at a loss for options. Despite the obvious unpleasant effects of hearing any Nickleback song more than once a lifetime, the music comes from an XM radio subscription on which all stations with any obscene content are blocked, leaving a scarce selection of music to choose from. "We basically flip between a handful of channels - 90s on 9, XM Hitlist, The Blend, KISS FM - for example," Wignall explained. Due to these restrictions, one has the dubious privilege of hearing songs that are inevitably slated to join the canon of one-hit wonders that populate VH1's "101 Worst of All Time" list in just a short time spent at the gym.
I'm sure some of you like the music mentioned above, and for that, I'm sorry. That being said, even fans of this music would have a hard time maintaining that the theme song of The Hills has any place in a weight room. It's hard to distinguish why Pink's "U+Ur Hand" is deemed appropriate while the mainstream rap and rock popular amongst students is banned; obscenity is expressed in both cases, but because the latter has outright curse words it gets the axe. We're all adults, and we've all heard music with swear words in it; I don't think it would be all that earth-shattering to let some of that music slip into the rotation every now and again.
At some point, the music issue has to be addressed. The restrictions in place are such that only a handful of the worst and most benign of songs makes it to the speakers, so just cut the music. Most everybody has an iPod (or a CD player, or a cassette deck, or an AM/FM radio) and a set of headphones; let individuals choose what they care to listen to, and allow silence for the rest of us who don't want to bring music for ourselves. Imagine spending an hour in the gym without the threat of Maroon Five's latest atrocity looming on the XM horizon. That right there is an AFC I would support.
David Infante is a Cavalier Daily Viewpoint Writer.
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