Why Was A Famous Bossa Nova Song Linked To Passenger Lifts?

The ride in a passenger lift is fast, comfortable and smooth, as long as it is manufactured to exacting standards and installed by experts.

It is perhaps not entirely surprising that lifts would therefore be linked to a particularly smooth easy-listening Bossa Nova song. Still, the story of how The Girl from Ipanema became a lift music classic is particularly unusual.

Originally composed by Antonio Carlos Jobim, The Girl From Ipanema is believed to be the second-most recorded pop song ever made, with covers by countless artists such as Frank Sinatra.

It has a particularly gentle, smooth sound which does tie it somewhat to the actual genre of lift music that had been linked to the increased popularity of lifts since the 1930s, but even by the 1960s, its initial purpose of making people feel more comfortable in the safe but unfamiliar surroundings of a lift was nonexistent.

The connection between The Girl from Ipanema and lifts was not based on any commonly used lift music playlist, but instead emerged as the result of the 1980 comedy film The Blues Brothers, directed by John Landis.

In one of the film’s signature scenes, Jake and Elwood Blues rush into the Chicago City Hall building just before hundreds of law enforcement officers reach the building and try to break in.

As they attempt to apprehend the eponymous brothers, Jake and Elwood are in the lift, being serenaded by an elevator music cover of The Girl from Ipanema, produced by Norm Geller of FM100, a radio station based in Chicago, Illinois.

The contrast between the calm, silent stare behind the sunglasses of the Blues Brothers in the lift and the chaos outside made it an instant hit with audiences.

It also became an in-joke for Mr Landis, who would subsequently use it for every scene shot inside a lift, and much like other cinematic in-jokes such as the Wilhelm Scream, other directors adopted both the specific song and other similar easy-listening songs as part of the soundtrack for lifts in film, television and computer games.

Ironically, given that few lifts have piped-in music today, it is far more common to see a fictional lift play The Girl from Ipanema than a real one.