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Music to Snatch Toys By.


When I heard Jean Michel Jarre's Oxygène Part IV on BBC 6 Music the other day, it made me feel like trying to pick up a cuddly toy using a claw crane with insufficient grasp; either that, or performing the illusion Zig Zag Lady.



I don’t know what it is about the song, or Jarre’s music in general, that makes it synonymous with seaside arcades. It could be that it’s tacky and crap. While it certainly adds tension to proceedings (such as attempting, and failing, to extricate a stuffed animal from its Perspexed-off fortress), it’s hard to take seriously. I can’t imagine anyone listening to it non-ironically. It wouldn’t be out of place on the soundtrack to a secondary school science video in the 1980s.

Another instrumental with amusement arcade overtones is Popcorn by Hot Butter. A friend used to complain that his wife was prone to talking non-stop; so much so, that he would often zone out. We used to joke that when this happened, he'd visualise a troupe of Scotch Video-style skeletons dancing to the song. It was an unfair, yet amusing mental image.
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