I'll have a tall latte, but go easy on the Louis Armstrong

When did listening to Ella Fitzgerald become a necessary adjunct to enjoying a coffee? I can't remember the last time I went into a cafe and they weren't blasting some 1950s easy listening through the speakers. This isn't just the big chains either; the so-called independent local places who think they're completely different from Starbucks because they buy their coffee direct from one-legged ethnic Kenyan farmers and bake their own bagels are just as bad. A word of advice to any local coffee shop owners who are desperate for brand differentiation - take Nina Simone out of the CD player and stop putting up self-important notices about how the care and attention you take is just to 'enhance my coffee-drinking experience'. How these people can claim to be completely different from the big corporations when they use language like that defeats me.

Mostly, I drink coffee because caffeine is a stimulant. I could get caffeine from another source, for example tea, but I to be honest I've never understood what the big hoopla about dried leaves and hot water is anyway. I could be really modern and drink Red Bull or Rockstar or Mindfuck or
whatever the latest buzz-in-a-can is called, but they all taste like shit. So, I drink coffee. Maybe, late at night when my work is done, when I have time to relax and reflect on the events of the day, I might consider the soothing tones of Louis Armstrong or Myles Davis before I
go to bed (or at last I would if I was a pretentious, new-media dickhead with a straggly goatee). During the middle of the day, however, I drink coffee purely because I don't want
to relax.

If you find somewhere that plays Zodiac Mindwarp and The Cult on the sound system, and describes it's fare in terms such as 'it's just fucking coffee, do you want one or not?', then please let me know. In the meantime, I'm going to boycott all locally-owned coffee shops for the cardinal sin of hypocritically aping the packaged ambiance of the big chains and then feeling all superior about it.