Hey, Jason Toon here. I like to think of myself as somebody who follows my esoteric interests wherever they take me. But in this Shoddy Goods, the newsletter from Meh about consumer culture, I meet a superfan who makes me look like a dabbler. “I didn’t know anything about the company,” says Michael Bise, about when he started working at a Dallas-area Gap store in October 1992. He didn’t shop there and wasn’t even particularly interested in clothes. It was just a way to make some money as temporary Christmas help. He’d wind up staying for 14 years. And eventually Bise would become, without question, the best-known Gap fan in the world thanks to his tireless search to collect every in-store Gap music playlist from his long stint working there. Look out: he’s getting close.
“All this music I didn’t know”“I listened to gay bar dance music, basically, and Stevie Nicks and Kate Bush,” Bise says, in a soft-spoken, thoughtful voice with just a hint of Texas in it. “Then, working at Gap, I started hearing all this music I didn’t know, music I’d never heard before, and I liked it. I wanted to know what it was so I could go out and buy it for myself.” Bise also did some turntable DJing, so he had a sense of how one song could flow into another to build momentum and create a mood. At the time, instore music at Gap (like many other retail chains) was provided once a month on four-hour cassettes by a company called AEI Music. The tapes themselves had to be sent back to AEI, but the included paper playlists - supplied so staff could answer customer questions about the music - usually just got thrown away. When Bise asked his manager if he could keep them, a collection was born.
Through the switchover to CDs in 1998, and a new provider, Muzak, in 1999, Bise kept using the playlists to guide his own music collecting, then squirrelling them away in a box. By the time his career took him elsewhere in 2006, he’d have over 150 paper playlists in that box. Then he lost it. “It was awful,” Bise says. “I just put it out of my mind.” Fourteen years of memories, a musical diary of his life, gone to who knows where. But the forces of entropy weren’t counting on Bise’s incredible memory - and tenacity. About a year later, he says, “I was at Whataburger, I had one of those big drinks, and this song came on. I said ‘May 1997’. “I wanted it all”Bise jumped onto iTunes and started recreating the monthly playlists from memory, one folder at a time. He’d follow recommended artists and songs to spur his recollections. When he heard a “Gap song” out in the wild, he’d whip out his notebook, capture what details he could, and track down the title and artist back home. But he could almost always pinpoint what month’s playlist it had been part of. When I mention how eclectic the playlists were, how they could go from Madonna to the Monkees, Bise immediately said “Oh, Monkees, Madonna, I have that. July 1999. ‘Beautiful Stranger’ into ‘Last Train to Clarksville.” He laughed at his own feat of recall and promised “I don’t have my iTunes open.”
Still, there was only so far even Bise’s memory could go, and it wasn’t good enough. “I didn’t want just some of the songs. I wanted it all.” Then a chance discovery reignited the possibility that Bise and his memories could be whole again. “One day I was looking through this folder I had, full of CDs of unreleased Stevie Nicks songs, and there, in the back: 24 playlists,” he says. “I don’t know why I put them in there, but there they were.” Those 24 playlists would form the core of his Gap In-Store Playlists blog. Bise knew that across the whole wide Gap-o-sphere, there had to be others like him, employees who had held on to these little mementoes of their time working there. Maybe if he put his playlists on the Internet, he could attract those fellow superfans and rebuild the collection. “It was pretty wild”An entire community has gathered around Bise’s quest. Most of his 64,000 Instagram followers are civilian spectators, just there for the ‘90s and Y2K vibes. Same with those who follow his Gap playlists on Spotify and listen to the original tapes on the Internet Archive. But a significant cohort have been able to help fill the gaps (sorry, but the pun was inevitable) in his collection. Bise now counts, among his online community, ex-staffers at AEI, Muzak, and Gap corporate who were involved in creating the original lists, and he’s made friends with at least one of the featured artists, R&B legend Jody Watley. He’s now found most of the holy grails on his list. After years of searching for the playlist from his very first month at the store, October 1992, Bise found it completely by accident when he bought a box of old AEI instore tapes on eBay. “There was a Pottery Barn and Lane Bryant and all these other brands. There was one Gap on the list, August 1993 was in there. Well, in that box was (also) October 1992. It was like magic. It wasn’t on his list. I’d done nothing to get it specifically. It’s uncanny.” What’s uncanny is that when Bise checked it against the version he’d rebuilt from memory, he had remembered 3/4ths of the songs. “Yeah, it was that close. Now, the order wasn’t perfect. But you can hear in your head what comes next. So the order was really, really close. Yeah, it was pretty wild.”
By his count, Bise has now collected all but 22 of the 168 months from his years there. If anybody out there has old Gap playlists, especially from 2002, 2004, or 2005, hit him up at michaelbise@msn.com. Bise has also expanded his coverage a bit to feature Gap print ads and commercials, and other stores from the same era, like Banana Republic and Abercrombie & Fitch. When I ask if that’s because he’s into nostalgia of that period, or he’s interested in the ways stores use music to create an atmosphere, he says “a little bit.. But the real reason, the main reason, is I want to complete my collection. All these other brands, more eyes, more people, somebody is gonna get somebody else that’s caught in my net.” His second great love is Gap itself. “I still only wear Gap clothing to this day,” he writes on the blog. “My blood is Gap Blue.” The enthusiasm has been noted by the company, which has collaborated with Bise, and noted by media outlets like Vogue. But all that attention hasn’t turned him into an aspiring influencer. Bise just keeps steadily doing his thing. “I think about an exit strategy,” he says, “and then I think oh, maybe next month that one person would be there who has those playlists.” When he finally gets those last 22, he says, “I’ll leave the website up”, but probably won’t keep posting to Instagram. The Internet is packed with obsessive fans sharing nostalgic artifacts of bygone pop culture. But Michael Bise is in a league of his own. He’s not only dug into his own very specific rabbit hole for decades now, but he’s invited the rest of the world in. I’m not sure he realizes how much fun his fans are having there.
A couple days a week I work in a co-working space just to get out of the house. One key difference from my normal set-up is muzak-like versions of pop songs, which provide a nice momentary break to stare into space trying to figure out if this truly is a quiet instrumental version of We’re Not Gonna Take It. How good are you at identifying songs you hear in stores and bars? And do you work with music playing, or prefer total silence? Let’s…hear all about it in this week’s Shoddy Goods chat. Music and commerce make interesting dance partners in these past Shoddy Goods stories:
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