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NEW FROM STOP SMILING BOOKS
Tuesday, February 09, 2010
HOW TO WRECK A NICE BEACH
THE VOCODER FROM WORLD WAR II TO HIP-HOP
THE MACHINE SPEAKS
BY DAVE TOMPKINS
Selected by the Village Voice as one of the 10 Best Books of 2010
Chosen by Amazon as the ENTERTAINMENT BOOK OF THE YEAR
“It's unquestionably brilliant, not only one of the best music books of the year, but also one of the best music books ever written.”
— Los Angeles Times
“How to Wreck a Nice Beach is much more than a labor of love: It’s an intergalactic vision quest fueled by several thousand gallons of high-octane spiritual-intellectual lust. ... [Tompkin's] biggest and most perilous adventure in How to Wreck a Nice Beach is the plunge deep into the throbbing radioactive heart of his own prose—a hallucinatory stew of Rimbaud, Tom Wolfe, Lester Bangs, and Bootsy Collins.”
— New York Magazine
“We should be thankful that Tompkins sacrificed a decade to this unique and beautifully wrought book, in tribute to the brief cultural moment when a tool of militarism, secrets and destruction found itself transformed by music-makers into a zap-gun of heroic space-age liberation.”
— Mojo
“...work(s) the military-entertainment-complex angle with admirable energy, piling up flash-frozen anecdotes of pilots and DJs in voice-critical moments; showing, in its drooling over antique military-signaling equipment, a musician's gear-lust; and striving incessantly to invoke sound: ‘It could sound like an articulate bag of dead leaves.’ Despite its dense payload of raw fact-bombs, the book remains, like the sound of the vocoder itself, suggestively ghostly.”
— The Guardian
"...Achieves what the best music writing does—it opens doors, tears off tarps and digs in the dirt to reveal the stunning variety and potential in popular music.”
— The Nation
“Dave Tompkins is seven steps ahead of science and several leagues outside of time.”
— Sasha Frere-Jones, Pop Music Critic, The New Yorker
ABOUT THE BOOK
Stop Smiling Books, Chicago / Melville House Publishing, Brooklyn
Full Color, 352 pages. Available online for $17
The history of the vocoder: how the Pentagon’s speech scrambling weapon transformed into the robot voice of pop music
The vocoder, invented by Bell Labs in 1928, once guarded phones from codebreakers during World War II; by the Vietnam War, it had been repurposed as a voice-altering tool for musicians and soon became the ubiquitous voice of popular music.
In How to Wreck a Nice Beach—from a mis-hearing of the vocoder-rendered phrase “how to recognize speech”—music journalist Dave Tompkins traces the history of electronic voices from Nazi research labs to Stalin’s gulags, from the 1939 World’s Fair to Hiroshima, from artificial larynges to Auto-Tune.
We see the vocoder brush up against FDR, JFK, Stanley Kubrick, Stevie Wonder, Neil Young, Kraftwerk, the Cylons, Henry Kissinger, and Winston Churchill, who boomed, when vocoderized on the morning before V-E Day, “We must go off!” And now vocoder technology is a cell phone standard, allowing a digital replica of your voice to sound human.
Afrika Bambaataa, Ray Bradbury, Florian Schneider of Kraftwerk, Peter Frampton, Laurie Anderson, T-Pain, Teddy Riley, DJ Quik, ELO, Rammellzee, Arthur Baker, Michael Jonzun, Midnight Star, Lester Troutman of Zapp, Holger Czukay of Can, Donnie Wahlberg, Egyptian Lover, Fab Five Freddy, Forrest J. Ackerman, Man Parrish, Cybotron and Wendy Carlos, composer of A Clockwork Orange and The Shining.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dave Tompkins, a former columnist for The Wire, writes frequently about hip-hop and popular music. His work has appeared in Vibe, The Village Voice, The Believer and Wax Poetics. As a child growing up in North Carolina, he wrote stories about Mud Men, shot football cards with his dad’s .38, and was forced into speech therapy. His grandfather ate the microfilm, somewhere over Moscow.