How Music Works (20 page)

LP collections, they recorded radio programs and music that they played

or composed themselves. With two machines (or the soon not-uncommon

double-deck cassette machine), you could copy cassettes, one at a time, and

give the duplicates to friends.

Record companies tried to discourage “home taping,” as they called it.

They worried that people would record hit singles off the radio and never

have to buy their 45s again. They mounted a huge (and fairly ineffectual)

propaganda campaign that mainly served to alienate the consumer and

music fan from the companies that sold pre-recorded music. “Home Taping

Is Killing Music” was their slogan. I myself occasionally bought pre-recorded DAV I D BY R N E | 109

audiocassettes, but mostly I still bought LPs. Like many of my friends, I’d

make mixtapes that consisted of my favorite songs in various genres, for

myself and others. Rather than lending out precious, fragile, and bulky LPs, we’d exchange cassettes of our favorite songs, each tape focusing on a specific genre, theme, artist, or mood. There was a lot of nerdy musical categorizing going on. Pocket-sized audio wonder cabinets. I found out about a lot of artists and whole styles of music through the cassettes given to me by my friends, and I ended up buying more LPs as a result.

The mixtapes we made for ourselves were musical mirrors. The sadness,

anger, or frustration you might be feeling at a given time could be encapsu-

lated in the song selection. You made mixtapes that corresponded to emo-

tional states, and they’d be available to pop into the deck when each feeling needed reinforcing or soothing. The mixtape was your friend, your psychia-trist, and your solace.

Mixtapes were a form of potlatch—the Native American custom by

which a gift given requires that a reciprocal gift be received in the future.

I’d make you a mixtape of my favorite songs—presumably ones you would

like and might not already have or know about—and you’d be expected to

make a similar tape for me of songs you think I’d like. The reciprocal giving wasn’t super time-sensitive, but you couldn’t forget. The gift of a mixtape

was very personal. Often they were made for exactly one person, no one

else. A radio program with one listener. Each song, carefully chosen, with

love and humor, as if to say, “This is who I am, and by this tape you will

know me better.” The song choice and sequence allowed the giver to say

what one might be too shy to say outright. The songs contained on a mix-

tape from a lover were scrutinized carefully for clues and metaphors that

might reveal the nuances and deeper meanings secreted in the emotional

cargo. Other people’s music—ordered and collected in infinitely imaginative

ways—became a new form of expression.

Record companies wanted to take all that away from us. I taped songs off

the radio, just as the record companies feared I would. I carried a boombox on my first trip to Brazil, and every time something amazing came on the radio

I taped it. Later I’d ask who those singers or bands were, and then I’d begin a search and eventually buy their LPs. I even licensed some of them for release on a record label I had for a while. If I hadn’t been able to tape those radio programs, I would never found out who those artists were. I also recorded other 110 | HOW MUSIC WORKS

kinds of radio programs on cassettes: gospel music, preachers, exorcists, radio talk-show hosts, and radio dramas. The piles of cassettes got a little out of control, but they were a constant source of inspiration and they became tools in my own music-making process.

Boomboxes had built-in mics, and, maybe more significantly, they had

built-in compressors. A compressor is a bit of circuitry that squashes the

sound and effectively acts as an automatic volume control, so that louder

sounds are pushed down and quieter ones are brought up. For example, if

you recorded one big piano chord on your boombox, the attack—the loud

initial hit—would be smacked down, and, as the “tail” of the chord lingered, decayed, and got softer on playback, you would hear the circuitry trying to

make it louder. Almost as if someone were working a volume knob in a fran-

tic attempt to maintain a constant sound level. It’s a fairly unnatural effect when overused, but it’s also pretty cool, and can sometimes make amateur

recordings sound weirdly exciting. For a while I used boomboxes as compo-

sitional tools—recording band rehearsals and improvisations, which I would

later listen to and make note of the best parts, imagining how the good bits could be stitched together. The built-in compression had a huge influence on these decisions: by favoring some passages and making others sound terrible, it made invisible creative decisions.

Whole genres of music thrived as a result of cassettes. Punk bands that

couldn’t get a record deal resorted to churning out copies of homemade tapes and selling them at shows or by mail order. These second-and-third generation copies lost some quality—the high frequencies would inevitably be reduced,

and some dynamics would disappear as well, but no one seemed to care too

much. This technology favored music that has been described as either “ethe-

real, ambient or noisy.”16 I remember getting self-copied cassettes of Daniel Johnston’s songs that must have been copied multiple times. The audio quality sucked, and it seemed like he had “overdubbed” vocals or instrumental parts

on some songs while creating the recordings—all on cassette. It was an era of murky music. Quality was sliding down a slippery slope, but the freedom and

empowerment that was enabled by the technology made up for it.

Cassettes had different, though related effects in other parts of the world.

In India, the Gramophone Company virtually had a monopoly on the LP mar-

ket. It recorded only specific styles of music (mainly
ghazals
—love songs—

and some film songs), and they only worked with a handful or artists: Asha

DAV I D BY R N E | 111

Bhosle, Lata Mangeshkar, and a few others. Their stranglehold on recorded

music lasted until 1980, when the Indian government decided to allow cas-

settes to be imported. The effect was rapid and profound: smaller labels blossomed and other kinds of music and artists began to be heard. Soon 95 per-

cent of all commercial recordings in India were being released on cassettes.

This wholesale adoption of cassettes was the pattern in a lot of other coun-

tries as well. I have “commercial” cassettes that I treasure from Bali, Sudan, Ethiopia, and elsewhere. Sadly the quality is often atrocious; the copying

machines could have been misaligned, or the copies might have been made

hastily by the store or kiosk owner. But a lot of music got disseminated that never would have been heard without the cheap and reproducible cassette.

Another side effect of the cassette deluge was that many musical forms that

had been edited and shortened for disc recording could now return to something resembling their original form. Indian ragas last at least an hour, and though the side of a cassette tape is rarely that long, they can easily be quite a bit longer than the twenty-one minutes of the standard LP. Rai songs, the Algerian pop

format, can go as long as the performer and audience feel like (or can afford), so cutting them down to the three- to four-minute songs that were suitable for

disc and Western audiences killed the party before it could get started.

Wider and more ecumenical dissemination of cassettes wasn’t always

for the better. In Java, cassette recordings of local gamelan ensembles circulated widely. Before the advent of cassettes, every village had its own unique gamelan ensemble with its own instruments, each with their own idiosyncrasies. There were variations in the playing and arrangements as well. But

as cassettes of popular ensembles circulated, the styles became more homog-

enized. Similar patterns began to show up everywhere, and even the tuning of the gongs began to conform to those heard on the cassettes.17

There is always a tradeoff. As music gets disseminated, and distinct

regional voices find a way to be more widely heard, certain bands and singers (who might be more creative, or possibly have just been marketed by a bigger company) begin to dominate, and peculiar regional styles—what writer

Greil Marcus, echoing Harry Smith, called the “old weird America”—eventu-

ally end up getting squashed, neglected, abandoned, and often forgotten. This dissemination/homogenization process runs in all directions simultaneously;

it’s not just top-down repression of individuality and peculiarity. A recording by some previously obscure backwoods or southside singer can find its way

112 | HOW MUSIC WORKS

into the ear of a wide public, and an Elvis, Luiz Gonzaga, Woody Guthrie, or James Brown, can suddenly have a massive audience—what was once a local

style suddenly exerts a huge influence. Pop music can be thrown off its axis by some previously unknown and talented rapper from the projects. And then

the homogenization process begins again. There’s a natural ebb and flow to

these things, and it can be tricky to assign a value judgment based on a particular frozen moment in the never-ending cycle of change.

IN THE CLUB

Around 1976, 12” dance and DJ singles emerged. Because the grooves on

these oversized singles could be wider, and because they were spinning

as fast as a 45, they were louder than LPs that spun at 33RPM. I remember in the late seventies hearing how the low end (the sound of the kick drum and

bass) could be brought forward on this format and made louder. Discos had

speakers that could accommodate those frequencies, and they became a world

of throbbing, pulsing low end—an experience that had to wait for the CD and

digital recording to be experienced outside the club environment.

Low frequencies are felt as much as they are heard. We feel that bass in our chest and gut; the music physically moves our bodies. Beyond any audible and neurological apprehension of music, in the disco environment it was pum-meling and massaging us physically. These frequencies are sensuous, sexy,

and also a little dirty and dangerous.

At the same time that disco sound systems featured big bottoms, they also

featured arrays of tweeters—tiny speakers that could project over the heads of the dancers the extreme high frequencies present in a recording. While being massaged by the bass, these speakers were simultaneously filling the air with the sound of high hats flying around like a million needles. I suspect there was a drug connection as well; those high frequencies in particular sounded

sparkly fresh if you were on amyl nitrate or cocaine. Naturally enough, the

mixers in recording studios began to accommodate that drug-altered hearing

as well, and for a while in the eighties, a lot of records had piercing highend in their mixes. Ouch. Some artists worked exclusively in this style, and their music was made primarily to be heard over club-speaker systems. You’d

hear an amazing song in a club, but it just didn’t sound the same at home.

DAV I D BY R N E | 113

Jamaican sound systems did the same thing. The huge sound of the bass and

the high-frequency chucks of the guitars and hi-hats left a gaping sonic hole in the middle of the music—a hole perfectly suited for toasters and MCs to

sing and rap over.

DJs in discos gravitated to 12” discs not just for the increased volume and

louder low end that the format could accommodate, but also as a medium

that could combine those features with what were then called “extended

mixes.” A club mix of a song would not only be more earth shaking sonically, but it was generally lengthened, and would contain breaks—sections where

the vocal and often much of the “song” disappeared, leaving only the groove.

A DJ could “extend” these breaks even further by playing the same record on

two turntables. They could switch from one turntable to the other, making

an instrumental break in the song segue into the same section on the other

copy, and then do the same in reverse, repeating the process over and over,

creating a break that was as long as he, she, the dancers, or an MC wanted.

As with early jazz, people beyond the actual musicians, like the dancers, were influencing the music.

Jamaicans were among the first to exploit these possibilities. When the

technology moved to Manhattan and the Bronx and was supplemented by

some breakdancers and an MC, you had early hip-hop. The beats changed

when they got to New York, but the principle was the same: repurpose a

medium that was originally created for listening to music, or for DJs to play in clubs, and then use it as a medium to make new music. Music eats its young

and gives birth to a new hybrid creature. I doubt there is a single hip-hop artist whose beats still originate from a DJ manipulating vinyl by hand, but the organizing principal hasn’t changed much in thirty years.

Rock musicians and their fans didn’t initially appreciate these develop-

ments. The reasons largely have to do with race and homophobia—many of

the most popular dance clubs were black, gay, or both. Part of the disdain

might have also stemmed from the idea that this new kind of music wasn’t

being made by traditional musicians. Drummers and guitar players weren’t

seen playing in these clubs, even though they were often audibly present on

the original records being spun. That complaint could be accurate and jus-

tified, though I don’t really think most of these grumbling rock fans were

that interested in or emotionally sympathetic to the employment situation of drummers and guitarists.