In August 2002, I was probably back-to-school shopping with my mom at our local mall, bouncing from store to store for backpacks, socks, and a first-day-of-school outfit. Gap was no doubt one of our stops — and thanks to Michael Bise, I now know what music was playing as we browsed.
When Bise first started working at a Gap store in Dallas in 1992, the first thing that struck him was the store’s music.
“Just right away, it was so different from what I was expecting,” Bise says. It wasn’t the classic soft instrumentals of a chain department store, nor was it pop radio hits. There was house, dance, David Bowie deep cuts, The Bangles — four hours of music on tapes produced for the retailer that looped throughout the workday. One song in particular, Rozalla’s “Love Breakdown,” so enamored Bise that after his first shift he went out and bought a CD of the album. Listening to Opus III’s “It’s a Fine Day,” another track on the October 1992 playlist, is transporting.
“I’m in there, I’m in the entire store,” Bise says. “I can tell you where everything is in that month.”
The monthly playlist tapes (and later CDs) came with a paper print-out that Gap employees could reference if a customer asked about a song, Bise says. The tapes were mailed back, but with his manager’s blessing, Bise started taking home the paper playlists for his archive. By 2005, he had amassed around 200 playlists, each with around 50 songs.
“I wanted the intact version, so that’s why the playlists were important to me,” Bise says. “I wanted every song on there. I wanted to get every obscure remix, every R&B, disco, whatever the mix was.”
Then, while Bise was moving to a different city in 2006, all the paper playlists disappeared.
Once the devastation of the loss subdued, Bise began re-creating playlists by memory, browsing on iTunes until a track shook loose a recollection of a playlist. (As I speak with him it becomes clear that Bise has an incredible memory.) Miraculously, in 2010, Bise discovered a stash of 25 physical playlists, some of which were from Gap proper and others from spinoff stores like Gap Kids and Gap Body. But Bise couldn’t forget all the music he had lost, all the moments in time crystallized by the songs flowing through Gap; in 2015 he started a blog with the hope of finding other Gap employees who had stashed away playlists. An Instagram account — that happened to pop up in my feed a few months ago — followed several years later.
Slowly but surely, Bise has been rebuilding his collection of Gap in-store playlists, and has even expanded to sister stores like Banana Republic and Old Navy. The playlists trickle in as more people discover Bise’s project: There was the man who read Bise’s blog and reached out with a trove of playlists from the years spanning 1996 to 2000. A profile in The New Yorker in 2017 led to an explosion of attention on Bise’s project — including from Gap, which Bise says didn’t have the trove of playlists he was hunting but did want him to curate some new playlists for the company’s Spotify account. Bise is laser-focused on filling the holes in his collection. Any kind of publicity he seeks — whether through press interviews, Gap collaborations, or his own social media content — is with the hope that someone will reach out with an old playlist that they, too, had saved. This most recently happened in July, after Bise uploaded a 2004 Gap commercial featuring Sarah Jessica Parker and Lenny Kravitz that racked up 340,000 views. The ads from that era have become a way to solicit what he is actually looking for.
Playlists are both ephemeral and enduring
Playlists are both ephemeral and enduring. They capture a time in your past, encapsulated by what songs you chose and what order you put them in. They also serve as a backdrop to your life, the real-life soundtrack of driving home from school or working in a Gap store. A playlist exists suspended in a moment in time, and if you have a copy of it, it is also a time machine. In an era of endless data, it’s funny to think that Gap apparently didn’t archive its own sounds, or if it did, nobody knows where they are.
“This is what happens in every company,” Bise says. “You’re thinking about now and tomorrow. So once you pay for that playlist, do you really need to worry about it again?” (Bise says Gap has been supportive of his project and has treated him like “part of the family.”)
What made the Gap playlists special for Bise was the unexpectedness: songs and remixes he had never heard but was instantly drawn to, the full experience of listening to a playlist from beginning to end without skipping around. Soundtracks created for a retail giant obviously come from a corporate point of view, but still it feels pure in some way, especially compared to the big data-driven tracks muscling their way into our recommendation algorithms. People will sometimes send Bise their own playlists for him to listen to, and he will begin to notice the same tracks appear over and over. It reminds him of when he went out and bought the CDs of his favorite songs from the Gap playlists: He loved the music, of course, but something was missing from the experience. He didn’t want to just listen to his favorite songs over and over. He wanted to hear music that wasn’t his favorite, music he wasn’t familiar with, too.
Bise has amassed the bulk of the playlists from the time he spent working in a Gap store, but his collection remains incomplete. Without missing a beat, he rattles off the lost playlists: June through November 1994, June to December 1992, October 2002, December 2002, July 2004 to October 2004, and on and on. The hope, of course, is that someone reading this story might have been just as obsessed as he was. Maybe, somewhere in the back room of your local Gap, paper playlists from 20 years ago are just sitting there, waiting to be rediscovered. If you have any information about Gap playlists — as well as Banana Republic or Old Navy or any of the Gap diffusion lines — Michael Bise would love to hear from you: [email protected].