"Easy-Listening" Music

Why is some easy-listening music so hard for me to listen to? My wife and I were sitting in a movie theater waiting for the movie to begin. The music playing over the sound system was a style I've heard referred to as easy-listening. It was a bit painful for me to hear and I was doing my best not to feel tortured by it. Some might find it hard to understand how someone can be so tormented by what might seem like the most non-offensive style of music a theater can pick for their "general" audience. Okay, maybe tormented is a bit too strong a word. How about pained? Hearing is one of our five senses; the others being sight, touch, taste and smell.

So I'll equate it to this: Imagine sitting in a theater and there's a smell throughout the room...a pretty bad smell, but not bad enough for your date or anyone else around you to mind. It might be as a result of the guy in front of you having had a big hangin' bag of chicharonés (fried pig skins) with hot sauce, two hard-boiled eggs and a six-pack of Heineken before arriving to the theater. Maybe it's a rotting, dead animal inside the air-conditioning vent. Who knows? At any rate, you know the smell will magically disappear once the movie starts, so you stick it out knowing that when the movie starts, you'll hear the soundscapes of a film score from usually a brilliant film composer like Thomas Newman, George Fenton, James Newton Howard and Mark Isham to name a few.