The Politics of Recorded Sound (Social Text)

SocialText 

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The Politics of Recorded Sound Special Issue Editor Gustavus Stadler

Introduction: Breaking Sound Barriers  •  Gustavus Stadler   1 Sound, Knowledge, and the “Immanence of Human Failure”: Rethinking Musical Mechanization through the Phonograph, the Player-Piano, and the Piano  •  David Suisman   13 Deaf Jam: From Inscription to Reproduction to Information

Mara Mills  

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Splicing the Sonic Color-Line: Tony Schwartz Remixes Postwar Nueva York  •  Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman   59 Never Heard Such a Thing: Lynching and Phonographic Modernity  •  Gustavus Stadler   87 Can You Feel the Beat? Freestyle’s Systems of Living, Loving, and Recording  •  Alexandra T. Vazquez   107 Buzz and Rumble: Global Pop Music and Utopian Impulse

Jayna Brown  

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Editorial Collective  Nadia Abu El-Haj, Herman Bennett, Ed Cohen, Gabriella Coleman, Ashley

Dawson, Patrick Deer, Ana María Dopico, Brent Edwards, David Eng, Allen Feldman, Licia FiolMatta, Heather Gautney, Stefano Harney, Phillip Brian Harper, Tariq Jazeel, David Kazanjian, Richard Kim, Jason King, Brian Larkin, Eng-Beng Lim, Julie Livingston, Randy Martin, Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel, Rick Maxwell, Anna McCarthy, Micki McGee, Susette Min, Timothy Mitchell, Roopali Mukherjee, José Esteban Muñoz, Alondra Nelson, Tavia Nyong’o, Shireen Patell, Ann Pellegrini, Jasbir Puar, Michael Ralph, María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo, David Sartorius, Ella Shohat, Nikhil Singh, Lok Siu, Gustavus Stadler, Neferti Tadiar, Livia Tenzer Editors for the Social Text Collective  Brent Edwards and Anna McCarthy Managing Editor  Livia Tenzer Arts Editor  Susette Min Web Editor  Tavia Nyong’o Editorial and Web Assistants  Cortland Rankin, Hiie Saumaa, Julia Steinmetz Sponsorship  The editorial operations of Social Text are sponsored and supported by the

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Introduction Breaking Sound Barriers Gustavus Stadler

I got more records than the K.G.B. — M.I.A. (Maya Arulpragasam), “Paper Planes”

This special issue of Social Text emerges from the current excitement, audible across a number of disciplines, about new ways of studying sound and sound reproduction from cultural and historical perspectives. It offers a range of such work — produced by scholars in history, African American studies, English, history of science, and performance studies — positioning the production and consumption of recordings as social and cultural practices; from this perspective, the essays herein illuminate both the political contexts surrounding such practices and the way these practices mediate understandings of such contexts. A number of the articles are also concerned with historiographic questions and seek to complicate simplified, apolitical narratives of the “evolution” of sound recording. The archive drawn upon by this issue is extraordinarily promiscuous. Sources include scientific experiments with the deaf; newspaper accounts of recordings of lynchings; CDs by Anglo – Sri Lankan dance music/hip-hop sensation M.I.A.; street sounds from a Puerto Rican neighborhood in 1950s Manhattan; a school bus ride in 1980s Broward County, Florida; histories of pianos and music boxes; and the writings of novelist William Gaddis. Still, one concern can be said to lie at the core of each piece and that is the idea that recording takes place within, and is ineluctably shaped by, the social and formal properties of networks of power. In the epigraph to this introduction, which I take from the hit song “Paper Planes” (discussed in this issue by Jayna Brown), Maya Arulpragasam juxtaposes two different meanings of the term record as well as two

Social Text 102 • Vol. 28, No. 1 • Spring 2010 DOI 10.1215/01642472-2009-057  © 2010 Duke University Press

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different social contexts in which the term has meaning: one is her identity as an individual musician making (and sampling) records; the other is a state institution of surveillance, keeping records on citizens. Bringing these two contexts together in the form of a boast, she suggests that they are somehow mutually implicated, and that breaking the conceptual barrier separating them is part of the revolutionary project she ascribes to her music. Placing her own recording work on a continuum of power with that of the intelligence agency of the modern state, she insists that a “record” is a flexible thing of far denser, potentially more ominous social and political meanings than we may generally assume it to be. In the spirit of this lyric, the essays in this issue seek to further expand our understandings of the range of contexts in which recording and recordings play important socially and politically formative roles. Also in that spirit, it asks questions about what actually constitutes a recording and what relationship sound recording has (and has had) to other forms of data collection, information storage, and music production. Indeed, that the boast is coming from a British woman of South Asian descent working in a genre (hip-hop) generally considered American- and male-dominated harmonizes nicely with the concern these essays show for exploring the many ways that modalities of social difference such as race, gender, class, nation, and ability structure practices of making and listening to recordings, as well as the manners in which we think about those practices. The most typical image of sound recording in the Euro-American cultural imaginary is probably that of the genius music producer, always male, mostly but not always white, sitting at an immense mixing board as a rock, hip-hop, or pop act runs through its paces in the studio. Canonical figures like Phil Spector and Lee “Scratch” Perry have further fortified this image with their spectacularly eccentric and, in Spector’s case, homicidal behavior.1 In this author-oriented understanding of recording history, a few masterful record producers have brought the process to which Thomas Alva Edison gave birth in 1876 in his Menlo Park, New Jersey, laboratory up to the level of an art form in itself. One reason this narrative remains strong is that its energy is periodically refueled by programs like VH-1 Classic’s Classic Albums series of one-hour documentaries about the making of landmark rock albums. A less visible and perhaps more influential reason is that, until recently, our histories of recording have been histories of recorded music, and music has been considered to be the sine qua non of recording, the content that lifts it from mere message carrier into the realm of aesthetics. 2 In histories of this sort, virtually every event in the development of recording has been designed to improve the “fidelity” with which music is reproduced, and these events have taken place in an idealized space isolated from any historical phenomena other than technological “advances.” 2

Stadler ∙ Introduction

Typically, such histories tell a story that goes something like this: Edison invented the phonograph in 1876 as an instrument capable of both recording and playing back sound. He introduced it to the public in 1877, believing that its marketability would hinge primarily on its potential to improve bureaucratic efficiency as a device for dictation. He also imagined that it would succeed as a tool of historic preservation, enabling the voices of loved ones, political leaders, and great poets to be heard beyond the point of bodily death. However, after a decade or so, it became increasingly clear that the greatest source of profit from the phonograph would lie in listening to recorded entertainment like songs and comedy sketches — first in public exhibits and parlors, and soon after, by the turn of the century, in the privacy of the middle-class home. Contemporaneously with these developments, Emile Berliner’s gramophone appeared, a device that could not record but which could play discs fashioned from a master recording —  thus allowing production of recordings on a previously impossible scale. As consumers’ relationship to sound recording came to involve playback exclusively, the content of the recordings they were buying was, increasingly, studio-recorded music. And things stayed this way, with a series of milestone innovations bringing improvements in sound fidelity and methods of studio production (e.g., the increasing number of tracks able to be made available for recording and mixing instruments), into the late twentieth century. The onset of the cassette, the boom box, and the Sony Walkman complicated to some degree what had been assumed to be the essentially domestic nature of listening to recorded music. But the most significant change of recent years has been the digital “revolution,” a seemingly unprecedented, unpredicted eruption of technical, material, and paradigmatic advances that, among other things, allow any budding musician or DJ with a laptop to perform and mix her own magnum opus in MP3 format and market it over the Internet. This story’s focus on inventions and inventors treats recording as, in Michael Warner’s phrase, “a medium itself unmediated” and feeds what Lisa Gitelman calls “a tendency to naturalize or essentialize media — in short, to cede them a history that is more powerfully theirs than ours.”3 Gitelman’s Always Already New constructs a broad critique of “technological determinism,” extending and deepening a countertradition that developed in response, originally, to Marshall McLuhan’s influential screeds on the history of media. Indeed, the early segment of the history of the mechanical reproduction of sound has already been drastically and productively complicated by the work of both Gitelman and Jonathan Sterne; in Sterne’s The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction, the book’s subtitle tersely rebuffs the techno-driven account from the get-go. Both Gitelman and Sterne have shown, in deeply textured theoretical frameworks, how Edison’s invention was itself shaped by a mass of social, Social Text 102

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cultural, and historical forces: ideas about inscription, writing, presence, and stenography; understandings of deafness and how the ear works; shifting attitudes toward death and the embalming of dead bodies; even the history of medical instrumentation, as in Sterne’s examination of the early-nineteenth-century emergence of “mediate auscultation,” also known as stethoscopy.4 The alterity of the early history and prehistory of phonographic recording is perhaps not all that surprising. But, in fact, the history of recording has been an inchoate narrative in its entirety, as David Suisman’s article in this issue helps to show, with a diversity of recording practices and uses that belies music-, fidelity-, and even phonograph-centered accounts. (And even in those accounts, some notable complications immediately emerge, such as Spector’s hazy, stereo-resistant “wall of sound.”) To be sure, office dictation did not have the motive power to popularize the phonograph that Edison believed it would, and spoken-word commercial recordings are not as marketable now as they were during the 1890s. But the diversity of sound recordings’ content, contexts, and functionality has never disappeared. At the same time Folkways Records was releasing the Tony Schwartz Nueva York recordings that Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman discusses in her essay in this issue, they were also commissioning and marketing records like Understanding of Sex, Vol. I: Sex Principles for Adults/The Psychology of Love and Sex, Sounds of Medicine (sample track title: “Stethoscope Sounds: Sounds of the Bowels — a Normal Hungry Man Smoking a Cigarette before Dinner”), and numerous instructional recordings, including one that, at the height of the cold war, helped listeners learn Russian language and history.5 In the 1950s and 1960s, William S. Burroughs and Andy Warhol used tape recorders to “write” novels; in a particularly striking illustration of the diverse uses of sound-recording technology, Warhol referred to his portable cassette recorder as his “wife.”6 As the first decade of the twenty-first century comes to a close, it can sometimes seem as though the diversity of recording practices has been tamed under the sign of digitality. For instance, as I sit eating lunch in the food court of a large urban mall, my iPhone lies beside my plate. On this single small device, I can listen to or download music in MP3 or another digital format, which I can do legally at a retail site like the iTunes store or illegally via file sharing and BitTorrent. I can record memos to myself or, without too much effort, covertly record a conversation with someone else or between the people at the table next to me. Using one of at least five similar applications, I can listen to tiny samples of actual birdcalls so as to identify the birds I encounter as I walk home through the park. I can go home to compose and demo a new song using an application that turns the phone into a digital four-track recorder. I can listen to voice mail or rerecord my outgoing message. Then, I can get back on the Web and 4

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participate in a musicians’ discussion forum full of complaints that Apple has not yet produced an iPhone “app” allowing them to sequence the many thousands of loops, made by recording live instruments, that are currently available for purchase at multiple Web sites. As my own wide-eared wonder at the device (which I still, more often than not, refer to as my “cell phone”) begins to resemble the teeming technological determinism of advertising copy, it is important to ask, what’s “political” about all this? Primarily, paralleling all these cans is a series of can’ts. What seems at first like a collapse of the barriers separating all of these sound-recording-related practices into a single device is also a refinement of technologies, media, and multiple economic, cultural, and social institutions and practices, a process that has caused many of recording’s existing cultural modes to disappear altogether. Record stores and labels, recording studios, concert halls, bootleg concert tape dealers, notebooks, pens, books (or at least ornithological manuals), answering machines, microcassette recorders, and four-track cassette recorders are among the many things, commodities, businesses, and institutions whose existence, at least in the form in which they are familiar (and admittedly, this familiarity is becoming evermore generationally specific), is threatened by the emergence of this small handheld instrument, which in acting as hosting device produces a sense of universal commonality across all of these formerly separate and specific recording-related phenomena/practices/modes of production and consumption. At the same time, new opportunities emerge — for small software developers, for musicians, and so on. But the many different recording-related functionalities of the iPhone have to be seen as only one of the latest instances of the ways that understanding audio recording are always directly and structurally effected by broad sites of social, political, cultural, and economic struggle. What seems, on the one hand, like a liberating level of access and a conceptually stimulating dissolving of boundaries is, on the other, symptomatic of the ever-increasing control of the flow of capital by large corporations such as Apple, who now realize profits previously dispersed across many subfields of the music and telecommunications industries, among others.7 The wealth of such corporations enables their depiction of their products as constituting, extraneously to the market, the very frontier of modernity. This story is spread widely, even as, in a significant number of settings, other technologies and formats continue to be preferable and their uses continue to be diversified. 8 And this attempt to wed corporate capitalism and technological innovation in the public imaginary is continually undercut by controversies, such as the one surrounding Apple’s criteria for rejecting certain applications at its “App Store.”9 Another set of assumptions surrounds the “I” of the iPhone. The “I” that I have described as its user is an unmarked self, free to enjoy the Social Text 102

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device’s many sound-related functions during leisurely and hassle-free time spent in a number of different types of space: public, private, and virtual. Like so many new technologies of the past 150 or so years, not least the phonograph, the device seems to offer a form of disembodiment that promises individuals expanded social fluidity, transcending the particulars of their bodies — the sites at which politics and history literally touch them. The portability and sleekness of the iPhone accelerate such fantasies, and in many ways it does make sound eminently more manageable. But as a number of essays in this volume show, these fantasies of fluidity arise out of historically and politically loaded circumstances. As Mara Mills’s piece demonstrates, the development of the spectrogram, the most common visual form for representing sound, depended centrally on experiments with deaf people, and its developers continually promoted its progress as a philanthropic boon for the deaf, even as they continually invested more energy in other arenas. Or, to cite Stoever-Ackerman’s work again: Tony Schwartz’s ability to construct what he saw as a fair urban ethnography of an “ethnic” neighborhood depended on the access to technology and space that his whiteness and masculinity provided him (and those traits may also have constrained him in certain ways). Such politics underlie even my leisurely day with my iPhone. As a white person not bearing obvious signs of homelessness, I am not asked to leave the mall by security, even as I sit at a table for over an hour after I have finished consuming my food from the food court. I do not appear mentally ill, even though I may sound as though I am talking to myself while recording a memo about groceries or the Grundrisse. As a man, I feel relatively safe slipping headphones on and off and looking up at trees, rather than my surroundings, as I walk through a wooded area in a city park. My ability to take part in the musicians’ Web forum may depend on my willingness to ignore, or take part in, a discursive context often rife with sexism and homophobia. And, of course, my access to the device itself depends upon my having at least two hundred dollars to spend on it, as well as ninety dollars per month for the mandated phone and data service contract with AT&T. What these essays are all striving for are diverse ways of thinking recording as a “system of living,” to use the phrase Alexandra T. Vazquez, channeling Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas, makes central to her essay on freestyle. In this regard, ethnomusicologists like Louise Meintjes and Norman Stolzoff, in their respective studies of South African mbaqanga and Jamaican dub reggae, have proven adept at breaking down the walls of the recording studio, showing the embeddedness of that seemingly vacuum-sealed space in a larger world where people live race, gender, class, language group, and so on.10 But other approaches can bring more attention to the various practices that surround recording and the uses of recordings, employing the archival and methodological resources of their fields. It may be satisfying 6

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to argue that, say, Missy Elliott is one of the most important two or three producers of the past thirty years, as I would. But it is a more vital and politically engaged project to depict the ways that gender and ethnicity help to shape musicians’ relationship to recording and the recording studio, as both Vazquez and Jayna Brown do in this collection. At times this call for more and more inclusivity, more and more modes of study, more and more breaking of conceptual and disciplinary barriers may seem to drift toward simply asserting the banal truism that “everything is political.” It is worth reminding ourselves, especially having embraced a constructionist view of technology and sound itself, that the various phenomena that construct them do nevertheless bear specific traits, patterns of use, and symbolic resonances, even as they are never fully defined by them. One of these traits may well be a tendency to associate sound and its reproduction with various forms of liberation. Particularly prominent among these forms is emancipation from the body, as is evident in the phonograph’s longtime association with the possibility of preserving the voices of the living after death, or in the poesis and timbre of the African American “sorrow songs,” written into notation and anthologized — recorded — contemporaneously with the early years of the phonograph, which place longing for the afterlife front and center. To many, sound seems to escape the seemingly innate structure of subject-object that anchors so much thinking on the nature of vision. It is relatively uncontainable and irresistible, though this quality can also be quite oppressive; during the George W. Bush administration blasting loud music became a “standard” CIA interrogation technique, despite the fact that the United Nations and European Court of Human Rights consider it a form of torture.11 But our aim should not be to wish away these liberatory associations as mere false consciousness, as is evident in Jayna Brown’s treatment of the utopian strains in contemporary global pop. We need to be sure that the critique of technological determinism, with its distrust of the wonder inspired by technology, does not become a way of wiping affect off the analytical map; to do so would be to affirm a retrograde, ahistorical, apolitical view of affect, as well as to reduce the meanings of affect in relation to this technology to the simplest and most naive forms of significance.12 Sound and recording deserve more attention from the new work in the politics of affect, and vice versa; this is particularly true in the case of recorded sound artifacts and practices that are not commercial music (my own article in this issue, on 1890s lynching reenactments, is relevant here). And indeed, to argue implicitly or explicitly that any “wonder” at the technology is always already ideological mystification would seem to rehash the most hackneyed nineteenth- and twentieth-century projections of technological naïveté vis-à-vis phonography onto women and people of color.13 Social Text 102

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In inviting readers to use these essays to think more deeply, and in new ways, about the sound recording, I have divided the six articles into three pairs. Although the two articles grouped together are often very different in methodology or historical period of concern, each pair embodies one or more of the concerns I have been discussing. The first pair examines the deeply unstable, historically flexible understanding of the ontological status of sound and its reproduction. The second looks at the way race, specifically, has motivated and shaped some relatively unknown experiments in commercial recording. The third is concerned with refashioning approaches to gender, race, and postcoloniality in the role of recording in pop music made in the last twenty years. The opening essays by David Suisman and Mara Mills are foundational as theoretical and historiographical interventions; they raise questions about the ontological status of recordings and demonstrate how perceptions of such an essence are deeply embedded in historical contexts and the narratives to which they give rise. Working with very different, but equally intricate, historical archives, they each situate sound recording and reproduction as conceptual fields within broad understandings of inscription and information, thus bringing the supposedly predigital history of sound’s mediation into conversation with digital media studies. Intervening in a history that reflexively places the phonograph at the center of the study of modern sound technology, Suisman demonstrates that the player-piano was equally, and at times surpassingly, a dynamic force shaping concepts of the relationship between sound and modernity. Because player-piano rolls, anticipating computer punch cards, were an informational medium, their centrality to this early history demands a rethinking of the widely accepted, evolutionary narrative of the emergence of analog and digital forms of media. More broadly, the player-piano exemplifies the pull between alienation and “political optimism about the relationship between art and mechanical reproduction,” echoes of which Suisman discovers by pairing the very different depictions of the playerpiano evident in the work of the novelist William Gaddis and the composer (and political exile) Conlon Nancarrow. A piece that draws from work in sound studies, disabilities studies, and a deep archive in the history of sound technology, Mara Mills’s “Deaf Jam” traces a detailed history of the spectrography, the most well-known and widely used visual representation of sound, focusing on the central role played by deafness and deaf people in both theoretical and practical development of the technology. Mills depicts deafness being used as what she calls an “assistive pretext” in “the resourcing of disability within technoscience.” With this phrase, she refers to the repeated instances in which deaf people served as conceptual models or experimentees for spec-

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trographic methods, only to see the technology devoted to other forms of communication engineering. She traces this history’s persistence through the sequence of dominant theoretical paradigms of sound-guiding spectrography: inscription, reproduction, and information. That race has been a dynamic, contested presence in the history of recorded music is well known. The next two essays in this issue examine ways that racial politics have shaped nonmusical instances in the history of commercial recording in the United States. In Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman’s essay “Splicing the Sonic Color-Line: Tony Schwartz Remixes Postwar Nueva York,” the author adapts W. E. B. Du Bois’s famous dictum that “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line” to “provide a framework for understanding the crucial and undertheorized relationship between listening and oppression.” Her object of study is the 1955 LP made for Folkways Records by folklorist-activist Schwartz, who addressed the crisis in postwar white identity, widely known as “white flight,” by documenting the aural life of Puerto Rican immigrants in his own Manhattan neighborhood, the West Side. Stoever-Ackerman shows Schwartz responding to the oppositions being drawn in the mainstream press between “noisy” urban neighborhoods such as the West Side (now the site of Lincoln Center) and “peaceful” suburbs, as well as between “loud” nonwhite immigrants and “quiet” Euro-Americans. As Stoever-Ackerman also demonstrates, such accounts summarily elided the clamorous sounds of urban renewal taking place in neighborhoods like the West Side at the height of developer Robert Moses’s ascendancy. My own essay, “Never Heard Such a Thing: Lynching and Phonographic Modernity,” shares Stoever-Ackerman’s concerns with the ways race has mediated some of the less well-known corners of the recordmaking business. Examining reports of recordings of the lynching of African American men in the 1890s, I offer a historical and theoretical account of how such items would have come into existence in the studiobased commercial market of the time, despite the many claims that the recordings were made on the site of actual lynchings. Although none of the recordings are now known to exist, by examining memoirs and newspaper articles mentioning them, I place them as both a nonaberrant instance in the range of recordings sold in the 1890s and as outliers marking the racialized boundaries of civility and moral propriety. But in examining the varying responses of African American and Euro-American listeners, they also point to the need for a more historicized and particularized approach to the phonographic listener, as well as for approaches to the early history of phonography that problematize what has become an overly dominant paradigm of generalized “disembodiment.” Stoever-Ackerman’s and my essays share an interest in instances

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in the history of commercial recording that embody experimentation and fantasy vis-à-vis the space of production. Although the articles by Alexandra T. Vazquez and Jayna Brown are both focused on commercial music recordings made in the past twenty-five years, they also, in different ways, offer critiques that radicalize the space of recording. Vazquez’s essay examines the freestyle genre of the 1980s through the lens of the female vocalist whose labor is too often erased into anonymity in favor of attention to the male producers whose sampling and sequencing often dominate what many consider a studio-based form of music. As part of an overall project of imagining freestyle as, in the words of Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas, a “system of living,” Vazquez depicts fans’ creation of an “ex post facto authorship that places the vocalists center stage.” This feminist tactic of reimagining the relationship of recording and authorship is part of an overall politics that embraces both the details of the music and a kind of kinesthetic recording of those details legible in gestures, walks, and facial expressions of its largely female fan base. Jayna Brown hears in the “Buzz and Rumble” of music by Congo­ tronics-associated musicians and M.I.A. new sounds rising out of the ruins of the genre/marketing category known as “world music” — a category set up primarily for Western interlocutors. She argues that “these forms are increasingly mediated by technology at the same time as they are less defined by Western curatorial mediation.” Brown places this music in the context of notions of utopia — theories with a specifically vital charge in a historical moment rife with war, state violence, and displacement of people. A key example in Brown’s analysis is the democratic, deinstitutionalized, locally focused recording practice of Vincent Kenis, the producer of Congotronics albums, which takes place in hotel rooms in Kinshasa. Meanwhile, in the turbulent, frenetically sample-based sounds of M.I.A., DJ Riot, and others, Brown sees an emergent model of an “alter-human,” for which the relationship between body and technology is integral rather than oppositional. Sound recording is a huge topic with an inexhaustible number of subtopics; six essays are, of course, in no way meant to encapsulate the subject or even to approximate a representative sampling of its subsets. The multiple geographical, historical, and theoretical concerns in these pieces are meant, rather, to showcase the variety of work being done on the topic in and across disciplines. They are offered with faith that readers who approach them as a group will trace out useful dialogues and arguments taking place over questions of content and method. Finally, what is productive about this issue depends not just on what the essays do for the study of sound and its mediation, but on what they do to reassess and replenish political critique. What matters here is learning how to hear what

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power, history, culture, and difference sound like. Those categories are, ultimately, the “technology” of sound recording. Audio files and images connected with the essays in this issue are available at www.socialtextjournal.org. Notes 1. Phil Spector was convicted of the murder of actress Lana Clarkson in Los Angeles Superior Court on 13 April 2009. 2. The exception to this might be film sound tracks. But much work on film sound tracks is itself focused on music, and is only recently beginning to reach out to realms beyond film studies. See, for example, James Lastra, Sound Technology and the American Cinema: Perception, Representation, Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000). 3. Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 5, and Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 3. 4. Lisa Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), and Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). 5. The liner notes for these recordings and the entire Folkways catalog are available free of charge at www.folkways.si.edu/index.aspx (accessed 22 August 2009). 6. Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), 26. 7. Also pertinent here is the agreement between Apple and AT&T giving the latter exclusive rights to contract phone and data services with purchasers of the iPhone. 8. See, for example, Charles Hirschkind, The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), and Peter Manuel, Cassette Culture: Popular Music and Technology in North India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). See also a number of the essays in “Media and the Political Forms of Religion,” ed. Charles Hirschkind and Brian Larkin, special issue, Social Text, no. 96 (2008). 9. See, for example, Rob Pegararo, “The iPhone Gets Easier to Dislike,” Washington Post, 4 August 2009, www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/ 2009/08/04/AR2009080401576.html (accessed 22 August 2009). 10. Louise Meintjes, Sound of Africa! Making Music Zulu in a South African Studio (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), and Norman C. Stolzoff, Wake the Town and Tell the People: Dancehall Culture in Jamaica (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000). 11. The 2004 CIA Inspector General Report citing loud music as a “standard” (i.e., not “enhanced”) interrogation tool is available at aclu.org/oigreport/ (accessed 24 August 2009). On 24 August 2009, Barack Obama announced the formation of the High Value Detainee Interrogation Group, overseen by the National Security Agency (NSA); this group’s methods follow the guidelines of the Army Field Manual, which bans the use of loud music. 12. And I would argue that we also need to be careful not to only take affec-

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tive experience seriously when it is experienced by fans, etc. The affective dimensions of an intellectual’s encounter with sound or music — Theodor Adorno, for example — are just as well suited to productive study. 13. See Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity (New York: Routledge, 1993), for a powerful recasting of this dynamic.

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Sound, Knowledge, and the “Immanence of Human Failure” Rethinking Musical Mechanization through the Phonograph, the Player-Piano, and the Piano David Suisman

At the dawn of the twentieth century, the emergence of a new technology for the mechanical reproduction of music struck many people in the United States as a harbinger of dramatic cultural change. To its champions, this technology would usher in a more democratic musical age, bringing “good” music to more people, more easily, untethered from the painstaking and time-consuming labor of learning to play the piano. For some, this held the promise of fighting back what they saw as the degenerative, corrupting effects of the rising tide of popular music. A few contemporaries championed this new technology of mechanical reproduction for its creative potential in and of itself, capable perhaps of opening new realms of musical expression. Others, meanwhile, found the technology a menace, debasing the time-honored value of traditional musical training and robbing copyright holders of their rightful compensation for their creative labors. This technology was called the player-piano. The player-piano has not aged well. Today, it seems like a curious mechanical stopover on the route from manual music making to digital storage and playback. To the extent that it is remembered at all, it is usually cast as a historical also-ran, a postscript to the age of the piano, a foil to the more dramatic advent of the phonograph. Yet the culture of the mechanical reproduction of music does not belong to the phonograph alone. To wit, in 1900, by which time both the phonograph and the player-piano were widely known, many more people saw the player-piano as a revolutionary cultural Social Text 102 • Vol. 28, No. 1 • Spring 2010 DOI 10.1215/01642472-2009-058  © 2010 Duke University Press

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force and the phonograph as a mere trifle than the other way around. It is a myopic view of history that sees only the triumph of the phonograph and the fading of the player-piano. In the formative years of what Douglas Kahn has called the “century of sound,” the two technologies emerged in tandem, both resting on a deeper history of musical mechanization.1 The cultural and commercial development of the phonograph was to a significant extent inseparable from that of the player-piano, and the myriad questions — legal, cultural, phenomenological — raised by recording and mechanical reproduction were generally associated with not one but both technologies. For example, in the congressional hearings that led to the landmark Copyright Act of 1909, which formed the basis of U.S. copyright law for most of the twentieth century, player-pianos and phonographs factored into the discussions on relatively equal terms, and the final law, which established the doctrine of “mechanical rights” for the payment of royalties on recordings of copyrighted musical material, was crafted to take both technologies into account. If the legacy of the Victrola has been more historically conspicuous, we would do well to remember that its name was a deliberate play on Pianola, the trademarked design of the leading player-piano company. None of this is to belittle or deny the importance of the phonograph, but rather to suggest a thicker, more multifarious account of the historical development of sound recording and the modern soundscape of capitalism. Music lies at the center of this reinterpretation, because music has had an especially large effect on the form and meanings of the mechanical reproduction of sound generally. 2 In the era of mechanically reproduced sound, the political economy of music rested on the player-piano and the piano, as well as on the phonograph. Scrutinizing the latter, theorists such as Theodor Adorno, Jacques Attali, and Friedrich Kittler have done much to draw out the deep interconnectedness of music, sound, technology, and power.3 They, along with a growing number of historians and other scholars, have shown that listening is a culturally constituted practice, with both a politics and an ethics.4 Too strict a focus on the phonograph has serious consequences, however. It obscures a broader, deeper, more complex set of changes of which the mechanical reproduction of sound was a part. Indeed, the political economy of sound recording looks different if we include the player-piano in our purview. Rather than a linear path of development, it suggests a dialectical progression, based in equal measures on the objectification of time and the rationalization of knowledge, the former based in the phonograph, the latter in the player-piano. Through the player-piano, moreover, we may recognize not just the epochal rupture wrought by the advent of sound recording but also its connection to a longer, more evolutionary history of music and capitalism. If today we swim in a sea of recorded music, the modern culture of recorded sound 14

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must not be understood merely as the inexorable effect of the invention and development of the phonograph, however important that technology has been. Historicizing the player-piano also has something important to teach us, demonstrating the interwovenness of the two technologies and the complementary ways that they have informed the construction of and reactions to modernity. Records and Rolls: Historicity, Data, and Aura

But what is a sound recording — and what is it that the mechanical reproduction of music reproduces? These questions lie at the heart of a provocative and thoughtful article by Eric Rothenbuhler and John Durham Peters, “Defining Phonography: An Experiment in Theory,” analyzing what they see as an important historical break between the age of older sound-recording technologies and the advent of digital sound media. In their argument, “phonography” encompasses all “analog” formats of sound recording, from cylinders and discs to magnetic tape, united by a common indexical quality. That is, despite their apparent differences, each is a kind of inscription that serves “as one link in a chain of direct connections across time and space.” In addition, they are specifically sonic technologies, designed and developed to record and transmit sound. In these respects and others, Rothenbuhler and Peters maintain, phonographic media stand in marked contrast to digital technologies, designed and developed not as sound media but as technologies to store and transmit binary data — ones and zeros — that could just as easily refer to text, images, mathematical formulas, or other forms of data. As such, Rothenbuhler and Peters argue, digital media function (merely) as sign systems, no longer as actual traces of the past, and are thereby denuded of a connection to physical and social human experience.5 Their argument, as I read it, is strongest on the issue of historicity: the audibility not just of the past but of the passage of time. “Analog recording retains the otherness of past time,” they write. The physical objects that store and convey such recordings embody the sounds’ historical course. A vinyl LP record that has been played a hundred times sounds different —  with its pop, clicks, and surface noise — than one whose historical journey has been shorter or less momentous. The stylus is like a plow in the furrows of the past, churning up sounds long since buried. Each time the needle is set into the groove, the auditor bears witness to a physical connection between the past and the present. Analog recording weds the ephemerality of bodies and sounds to enduring objects, and through such objects historical contiguity becomes an “axis of cognition.” This bridge to the past is possible because phonographic media make audible not one history but two: that of the recording and that of the record. Digital media, by Social Text 102

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contrast, share none of the traits of physical embodiment. The aural character of such media is limited to a single dimension (i.e., binary data) and refuses to yield traces of its own passage through time. When the surface of a CD is marred by dirt or scratches, either it works or it does not; “the data encoded on the CD do not mix with the history of the disk.”6 (Rothenbuhler and Peters’s article predated the everyday use of computer files as a music medium, but their arguments generally apply to these, too.) Although the work of Walter Benjamin does not enter Rothenbuhler and Peters’s discussion, their ideas about phonographic historicity offer a helpful explanation for Benjamin’s near silence about the phonograph in his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” one of the major theoretical reference points for a discussion such as theirs. Benjamin mentions the phonograph only twice and has little to say about sound generally in his essay. The reason for this may have less to do with his particular tastes and intellectual proclivities than with the uncomfortable fit that the phonograph has with his argument about “aura.” Focusing on photography and cinema, Benjamin argued that works of art lost their unique “aura” when they were created by and conveyed through technologies of mechanical reproduction.7 It would seem, however, that phonograph records are incompatible with this claim, because they, if we accept Rothenbuhler and Peters’s argument, retain something that closely resembles Benjamin’s idea of aura (albeit without the hierarchical social relations that Benjamin maintained attended to painting and theater). More problematic, however, is Rothenbuhler and Peters’s historical schema, which posits that the regime of digital sound media, based on the storage and conveyance of data, breaks sharply with the past. On the contrary, the “new” technology of computers builds directly on the binary principle of player-pianos, whose perforated paper rolls anticipated many of the basic elements of digitization. This claim applies to both the common form of the instrument, often referred to generically as a pianola (just as victrola became a synonym for phonograph), and to the more complex form, which was called a reproducing player-piano. With pianolas, each hole in the piano roll indicated simply where a piano key was to be played and where it was not. With reproducing player-pianos, the perforated roll encoded not merely the notes to be struck but also all aspects of how to play them — including tempo, phrasing, dynamics, pedaling, and so on. Some limitations notwithstanding, then, reproducing piano rolls were recordings par excellence. Indeed, until the late 1920s, this technology could record and reproduce a piano performance far better than the phonograph, and even today, under most conditions and even with high-end audio equipment, recordings sound like recordings, not like reanimations of some original acoustic event. That is, one is unlikely to mistake a sound recording, whether analog or digital, for the performance 16

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of a live human musician; a recording of a piano, for example, will simply not reverberate in a room the same as the playing of an actual piano. By contrast, a reproducing piano roll generated sounds far closer to those made by the original pianist, whether it was Ignacy Jan Paderewski or a moderately skilled hack working for one of the player-piano companies. 8 (Opportunities to hear reproducing player-pianos are rare today, but the effect is similar to hearing MIDI-controlled musical instruments: one is hard-pressed to differentiate such a performance from a live rendering.) Reproducing player-pianos carried a much higher price tag than pianolas and phonographs and never made up more than 12 percent of the playerpianos produced at a given time,9 but they constituted a prominent and established dimension of musical culture in the second and third decades of the twentieth century and complicate a narrative of the development of sound recording that proceeds linearly from analog to digital, from sound-based to data-based.10 Indeed, they undermine a central tenet of Rothenbuhler and Peters’s argument about the dichotomy between analog and digital, because the reproducing player-piano was very much both. The Deep Roots of Musical Mechanization

It bears emphasizing, as well, that a great deal of the commentary about the changing sound culture in the early twentieth century included both technologies within its purview. In some cases, a magazine article on one of the new technologies brought the other into its discussion,11 or in other cases, as in the debates over the revision of the copyright law, the phonograph and the player-piano were linked as two aspects of a single phenomenon. When the Copyright Act of 1909 was finalized, the law drew no distinction between the two technologies, treating both as examples of mechanically reproduced copyrighted works. Likewise, John Philip Sousa’s well-known article from 1906, “The Menace of Mechanical Music,” which is usually read as a jeremiad against “canned music” but whose underlying purpose was really to generate support for copyright reform, also grouped the phonograph and player-piano together.12 For Sousa to characterize player-pianos and phonographs as machines was no doubt accurate, but the real significance of the new technologies must lie beyond this fact, because all musical instruments are in essence machines. Indeed, music has been “machine-ridden,” Jacques Barzun has written, since “the moment man ceased to make music with his voice alone.”13 Rather, more important was that the phonograph and playerpiano were particular kinds of machines, developed in a particular time and place, standing in particular relation to the broader development of modern Western society. The significance of this fact comes increasingly into focus as we place the phonograph and player-piano in deeper historical Social Text 102

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perspective, especially with regard to the piano. As Max Weber noted, a careful study of the forms, structures, and technologies of Western music reveals a set of values and tendencies bearing the deep imprint of the social and rational development of capitalism itself.14 Indeed, all musical instruments may be machines, but in the annals of the world’s music, only the modern West has had a musical culture centered upon a complex machine. “In China, Japan, India and the Arab world,” observes historian Geoffrey Hindley, “the classic instruments of the elite music philosopher — ch’in, koto, vina, and ‘ud — are simple lutes or zithers,” but starting in medieval Europe, the quintessential instrument of the West “has been an elaborate keyboard mechanism — organ, harpsichord or piano.”15 Although Weber did not discuss the phonograph or the player-piano, his analysis of the piano suggests an important way to understand the imbrication of prevailing social and economic ideas in musical forms and technologies. The piano both represented and embodied the bourgeois social order, forming the bedrock of the musical culture on which both the phonograph and player-piano were founded. Proceeding by homology (rather than explicit causality), Weber notes that piano culture developed not where and when the piano was invented (in Italy, in the early eighteenth century) but in the industrializing regions of northern and western Europe and eventually North America, whose populations were more “house-bound and home-centered” than those of southern Europe and whose climates were better suited to keeping the instruments in tune (especially before the development of iron-framed instruments). It helped, as well, that unlike organs, which sounded best in large, cavernous spaces, the piano achieved its optimum sound in a room of modest size, like the bourgeois parlor. The development of the culture of the piano, however, depended not just on the conditions of consumption but also those of production, and only a technologically and industrially advanced society could develop and manufacture such a machine. When Jonas Chickering’s iron-framed pianos appeared at London’s Crystal Palace Exhibition in 1851, they were hailed as the zenith of American industry, and two years later, when his firm opened the doors of its new factory, the building was reported to be the nation’s single largest industrial building and the second largest building overall, after the U.S. Capitol in Washington.16 The history of the piano, wrote the eminent music critic Ernest Newman, was “the record of an incessant piling up of mechanism.”17 The instrument’s growing popularity, therefore, was inseparable from the rise of industrial manufacturing, much as would later be true of the phonograph, which was born inside the first professional research and development laboratory and whose commercial production depended on what was called the “American system of manufactures.” “This machine,” Thomas Edison wrote of the phonograph in 1878, “can 18

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only be built on the American principle of interchangeability of parts, like a gun or sewing machine.”18 Even more than the piano and the phonograph, it is the playerpiano that best symbolizes the close relation between music machines and industrial manufacturing — and not just by homology. Although the player-piano’s oldest antecedents probably lay in the water- and airpowered organs of antiquity, its clearest modern precursors were the numerous styles of barrel organs and music boxes that were crafted in Europe from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. The player mechanism in the player-piano resembled these earlier devices, but rather than being programmed by a fixed rotating drum with protruding pins or pegs, its musical notes were indicated by a continuous, interchangeable, perforated paper roll. The forerunner of this design was a system based on perforated cardboard sheets, patented in 1842 by Claude-Félix Seytre, a mechanical engineer from Lyon, whose design was modeled on the famous Lyon silk looms of Joseph-Marie Jacquard. Early in the nineteenth century, Jacquard invented a system to program his looms using a series of interlaced punched cards. But what inspired Jacquard’s design? His system was based on the ideas of Jacques de Vaucanson, the famous maker of automata and previous owner of Jacquard’s looms, who had devised a punched-card system for automating his looms in the 1740s. The ideas of Vaucanson, in turn, drew on those of Jean-Baptiste Falcon, who had programmed his looms using individual perforated cards in the late 1720s. At the beginning of this chain of manufacturing innovation, though, we find music: the inspiration for Falcon’s design was Basile Bouchon, a textile worker and son of an organ maker, who in 1725 fashioned a system to control his looms using a perforated paper roll, a design he modeled specifically on the control of musical automata by pegged cylinders.19 Musical technology, in other words, helped inspire the automation of industrial manufacturing, which then returned to inspire musical technology. Jacquard’s punched cards inspired more than the player-piano, however. Charles Babbage drew on them in the 1830s in the design of his “analytical engine,” a landmark conceptual forerunner of the modern computer. In reality, Babbage’s work was more influential theoretically than practically, but later, the application of the music roll/punched-card idea returned in the work of Herman Hollerith, who devised a revolutionary system for automating the tabulation of the 1890 U.S. Census. Hollerith studied both the Jacquard and player-piano systems in detail, and player-piano rolls became his model for the coding of sequences. 20 His system opened up vast new possibilities in quantitative processing, and in 1896, he founded the company that in 1924 became the International Business Machines Corporation (IBM). Moreover, as IBM became one of the leading developers and promoters of modern computing technolSocial Text 102

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Figure 1. At the IBM exhibit at the World’s Fair in Seattle in 1962, a giant hand-cranked music box taught children that modern computers utilized the same basic principles as old-fashioned music machines. IBM Stockholders’ Quarterly Report, 11 July 1962. Courtesy of the IBM Corporation

ogy, it did not lose sight of the computer’s musical antecedent. The firm’s exhibition at the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair used a large music box, which visitors could operate, to explain to the public how computers worked (figure 1). The company’s quarterly report to stockholders explained the purpose and value of this display: “[The] machine . . . illustrates how stored mathematical information in a modern computer’s memory is based on the same general principle as stored musical information in an old-fashioned music box. As the music box’s cylinder is turned, spikes projecting from its surface release their information in the form of a song.”21 Beyond player-pianos and computers, the connection between music, machines, and modernity comes still further into focus if we take seriously the idea that musical instruments are tools for making something, even if in this case the “something” is sound, not a material product. If all musical instruments are in essence machines, what happens if we view the piano in the broad historical shift from hand- to machine-based production? According to Marx, the shift from manual to machine-based production began when a mechanism first performed “with its tools the same operations that were formerly done by the workman with similar tools.”22 Whether the motive power of the machine was human, electrical, 20

Suisman ∙ Sound, Knowledge, and the “Immanence of Human Failure”

or pneumatic was irrelevant; what mattered was that the tool itself was “taken from man and fitted into a mechanism.” This shift underwent an important advance when the motion of the tool or task was given a fixed path by the structure of the machine. As Harry Braverman noted in his classic study Labor and Monopoly Capital, what was crucial about this for the organization of labor and production was not that the fixed, regular motions of the device were automatic but that they were predetermined. He cites as examples a drill press, a lathe, and a sewing machine, all of which were based on a fixed motion but which were not necessarily automatic. 23 The same tendency can be seen in a piano. A piano produces eighty-eight regular pitches and only those pitches, and it produces them easily and predictably. In contrast, a violinist must produce each note him- or herself, and a fundamental part of the violinist’s skill is finding and forming each note, easily and quickly. With a piano, on the other hand, even the most unskilled operator can walk up to a keyboard and hit a perfect middle C. Braverman’s analysis is particularly helpful in explaining mechanization not as a single, integrated phenomenon, but as a multistage process, spread across a spectrum and progressing by degree. Although mechanization is often associated with deskilling or the degradation of labor, Braverman points out that at early stages in the process, mechanization can actually enhance a producer’s skill, not undermine it. A cabinet maker’s work was improved by the drill press and the lathe, not degraded by it, and the same might be said of a pianist, for whom the keyboard became a means of unprecedented musical control. Granted, of all the pitches in the universe, the piano limited the composer to these eighty-eight, but these could be arranged and played in an extraordinary range of ways. Indeed, a virtuoso could use this machine to produce works far beyond what was possible with only simpler tools or with no tools at all and could consolidate the labor of many other musicians. As Franz Liszt described the piano: “In its seven octaves, it embraces the compass of an orchestra, and our ten fingers suffice to reproduce the harmonies created by an ensemble of one hundred musicians. . . . We can play broken chords as on the harp, long sustained notes as on wind instruments, staccati, and thousands of passages that would once have been possible only on other instruments.”24 Meanwhile, the musical education of pianists, opposed to that of composers, generally focused on standardized execution and submission to the authority of the composer’s score. As one of the leading music educators of the nineteenth century, Adolph Kullak, put it in the concluding paragraph of The Aesthetics of Pianoforte-Playing, “Pianoforte playing is primarily a reproductive art only, the exposition of its subject-matter requires the highest degree of education on the part of the interpreter” (emphasis in original). 25 This stage of mechanization presupposed an extremely high degree of skill, but the point of the player’s labor was, just as it would be Social Text 102

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later with increasingly mechanized technologies, reproduction of sounds determined earlier, by someone else. The player-piano and phonograph appeared further along the spectrum of mechanization, with growing amounts of control and skill now shifting from the operator to the machine. Increasingly, the knowledge and skill of production were relocated inside the mechanism, and human participation was reconfigured as the operator of a machine. It is worth noting, however, that these devices did not represent the endpoint of mechanization, for they did require some degree of operator involvement — choosing which musical selections to play, pumping a player-piano’s foot pedals or winding up a phonograph, adjusting the speed and volume, and so on. Such practices were not, of course, creative forms of labor on the order of conventional piano playing, but they involved more knowledge and input than technologies that were developed even further along the spectrum: reproducing player-pianos, whose paper roll controlled all pianistic and sonic effects, not merely the notes; radios; more recently, the iPod Shuffle, whose users cede control of selecting which songs will play; and programmable clock radios, which, once programmed, no longer depend on human labor to start (and often stop) making music. At some point, the objection could be raised that player-pianos still do not belong in the same class of devices as phonographs because the former is limited to piano music and the latter can encompass music of all kinds. Such arguments weaken, however, when the history of piano music and the actual content of early phonograph records are taken into account. The phonograph was not the first instrument to have a vast musical range, and its repertoire, like that of the player-piano and piano, was based on adaptations. As Liszt suggested, the piano was an instrument of seemingly endless versatility and power, and its protean ability to imitate and assimilate other instruments made it possible to bring into the home many musical works and styles of music not originally intended for private living spaces. This “domestication” was particularly evident in “four-hand” piano arrangements (i.e., for two pianists, sitting side by side), which adapted for the parlor everything from liturgical music and opera to minstrel shows and large-scale orchestral works. 26 As Max Weber noted, one of the primary factors accounting for “the unshakable modern position of the piano” in Western musical culture was “the universality of its usefulness for domestic appropriation of almost all treasures of music literature.”27 Thus, in various published adaptations, piano music encompassed a tremendous range of idioms, and later, the practice of creatively adapting many musical styles for the keyboard continued and expanded with the advent of the playerpiano. Admittedly, the versatility of the phonograph exceeded even that of the player-piano, but the phonograph’s vast sonic offerings were neither unprecedented nor unique. 22

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Moreover, like the piano and the player-piano, the phonograph, too, was an instrument of adaptations. Musical arrangements for the keyboard sometimes had to suffer dramatic modifications, and the same was true for phonograph recordings. Because cello and double-bass parts did not record well, for example, they were often replaced by tubas and trombones. Further, records represented music, Lisa Gitelman has noted, in ways that could likewise be considered forms of adaptation: “ ‘Band’ records were actually recorded by small ensembles representing bands; recorded musical pieces were short segments or pastiches representing whole compositions; comic sketches were two-minute records representing whole fifteen-minute vaudeville ‘turns’; and the earliest [commercial] recordings were announced and even occasionally applauded, representing live performances.” Given these many factors, it is difficult to maintain the argument that player-pianos offered only a narrow and parochial range of “piano music,” in contrast to the more exhaustive and less mediated offerings of the phonograph. 28 Meanwhile, another characteristic that linked the piano, the playerpiano, and the phonograph was that all three used some form of inscription to adapt a wide range of sound to their respective media. With the piano, music was written into the dots and lines of musical notation; with the player-piano, inscription took the form of perforations in a paper roll; with the phonograph, sound was inscribed into a spiral groove on a cylinder or disc. Regarding the phonograph, Adorno wrote, “Music, previously conveyed by writing, suddenly turns itself into writing.”29 To some extent, this remark applies to player-piano rolls, too, although the latter also required an additional form of inscription: a certain amount of editing by hand after the recording. Taken together, however, what distinguished the player-piano and phonograph from the piano was that only a machine was capable of reading the “writing” on which the player-piano and phonograph depended. Although it strained commonsense notions of writing and reading to attribute such behavior to machines, writing and reading were in essence what these technologies did, a recognition of which ultimately prevailed in law. Initially, in an important copyright infringement case, White-Smith v. Apollo (1908), the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the idea that a piano roll was a kind of writing if no human could read it. The following year, though, Congress arrived at the opposite conclusion in the course of overhauling the copyright code; to have done otherwise would have denied that piano rolls and phonograph records were copies of copyrighted material. 30 If both the player-piano and phonograph were forms of inscription, they diverged in what they inscribed — and this divergence illuminates the complementary ways the two technologies contributed to the underlying constitution of modern society. The phonograph inscribed and conveyed Social Text 102

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sound-in-time — that is, sound as the ephemeral vibrations in the air produced by a specific instance of musical labor (or other sound-making activity). The player-piano, by contrast, represented a system of soundin-knowledge — that is, information and instructions on how to make music. It inscribed and conveyed how to perform, over and over, the labor required to produce certain predetermined sounds. In this respect, more than a century before the age of MP3s, the technology of the player-piano was essentially indistinguishable from the modern digital computer, whose basic, underlying properties Alan Turing outlined in his famous article “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” Turing compared a human computer (i.e., a person who computes) with a machine and argued that the latter had to have three characteristics in order to reproduce/automate the (mental) labor of the human: (a) it must have a “store” of knowledge, (b) it must be able to execute some function based on that knowledge, and (c) it must function only within the limits of some preset controls. 31 The player-piano satisfied such criteria; drawing on a predefined body of knowledge, it generated music according to sequences of discrete decisions that led to the execution of a series of discrete actions. By contrast, although phonograph records certainly functioned as a store (as a young Adorno noted with some optimism 32) and operated within evident controls, phonographs reproduced vibrations, not actions based on human knowledge. Thus, between the phonograph and playerpiano, the mechanical reproduction of sound encompassed two divergent, complementary aspects of modernity. The phonograph added to the radical reconfiguration of experiences of time and space, a metaphysical transformation to which many innovations contributed, including those in transportation (e.g., railroads), communications (e.g., the telegraph and telephone), visual representation (e.g., photography, cubism), psychology (e.g., Freud), philosophy (e.g., Bergson), and physics (e.g., Einstein’s theory of relativity, Heisenberg’s uncertainly principle). 33 Indeed, as Barbara Engh has argued, it may even be said that the phonograph altered what it meant to be human (as Roland Barthes said of photography). 34 In counterpoint with the phonograph, the valence of the player-piano was the rationalization of knowledge, labor, and culture, especially in terms of the growing tendency toward quantification, mechanization, automation, and digitization. The fact that the phonograph and player-piano emerged at the same time, as mutually reinforcing phenomena, therefore problematizes an easy binary of analog and digital and a neat narrative of one prefiguring the other.

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Suisman ∙ Sound, Knowledge, and the “Immanence of Human Failure”

William Gaddis and the Rationalization of Culture

Beyond the 1920s, the significance of the player-piano has been difficult to perceive. This is attributable less to the marginal importance of the player-piano than to the conspicuous and inescapable impact of the phonograph and its offshoots. From this perspective, the player-piano may look only like a relic, a trace of a transitional moment in our musical and technological past. This is how it has most often been seen by scholars. 35 To a few writers, however, the player-piano has represented something more revealing — and lasting. Kurt Vonnegut, for example, in his debut novel, Player Piano (1952), used the instrument as an ironic symbol of a mechanized near-future dystopia in which engineers were the only valued members of the workforce, with technological unemployment having rendered virtually all other workers redundant. The titular player-piano factors into the plot only marginally, but it echoes through the novel as a leisure-time symbol of the mechanization and displacement in the workplace, a transformation whose effects were social and psychological as much as economic.36 The player-piano figured more substantially in the work of William Gaddis. Born in 1922, just as the instrument’s star was fading, Gaddis is best known as a novelist, but he worked for many years on a critical cultural history of the player-piano. He had begun thinking about the instrument as the result of a fact-checking assignment for the New Yorker in the early 1940s, and he died in 1998 without ever bringing the book to completion. 37 His deep, ongoing work on the project, however, figured prominently in two of his five novels, and the archive of his personal papers, deposited at Washington University in St. Louis, contains much of his accumulated research. Indeed, it might be said that Gaddis’s opus on the player-piano was the most penetrating, far-reaching history of the instrument never to be written. If music, machines, and money were all part of the fabric of American society, Gaddis sought to scrutinize the tightness of the weave that bound them together, the fibers from which each strand was spun, and the complex way they held each other in place. As with Vonnegut, player-pianos themselves were not really Gaddis’s concern. Rather, it was how the development and proliferation of these instruments undermined, as the critic Ed Park put it, “the possibility of art under the sign of commerce.”38 In the broadest sense, the player-piano was, for Gaddis, a means to understand and explain something much bigger, the formation and effect of modernity itself. Indeed, his was an interpretation of late capitalism grounded not only in the increasing resemblance of art and commerce, both of which had become thoroughly mechanized, but also in the historical, structural, and practical ways that art and commerce had become linked.

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The first of Gaddis’s published books to incorporate his work on the player-piano was J R, his second novel, which appeared in 1975. 39 Earning for Gaddis the first of his two National Book Awards, this mammoth and demanding tour de force chronicles the rise and fall of an eleven-year-old tycoon, the eponymous JR. Throughout most of the novel, the pint-sized venture capitalist remains out of view, however, and the plot’s development focuses instead on other characters, the most important of whom share connections to music and the player-piano business. The first of these characters is Edward Bast, a young, hapless composer who gets roped into serving as JR’s professional surrogate and who embodies the mundane struggle of the artist in modern capitalist society — teaching music to schoolchildren on a corporate grant, scoring music for a corporate PR film, and trying to pick up extra money working for the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP), which employs him simply to listen to the radio for the broadcast of unlicensed music. Through his family, Bast embodies the dual character of music as industrial and cultural production. The family business, run by his uncle, had been a successful manufacturer of piano rolls and later punch cards. By contrast, his father was a reasonably successful conductor and composer. Edward is pulled between the worlds of art and business, trying desperately to make his way as a composer but repeatedly getting sucked back into JR’s business dealings. These conflicts constitute the book’s primary plot. Meanwhile, its secondary story line, which frames JR’s machinations, concerns the attempt to settle the estate of Bast’s recently deceased uncle, who, for technical reasons, may have been Edward’s legal father, underscoring the uncertainty of the young composer’s worldly orientation. In his work at the school, Bast meets Jack Gibbs, a former engineerinventor at the Bast family’s piano roll company who has for years labored on a long, complex critical history of the player-piano. (The book includes a facsimile of Gaddis’s own notes as an illustration of Gibbs’s exhaustive work.) Through Gibbs, Gaddis then articulates his essential views on the transformation of art and society, a tension set in relief by a sign once seen by Oscar Wilde in a Colorado saloon in the 1880s: “Please do not shoot the pianist. He is doing his best.” Posted in a Leadville saloon, this appeal caught the eye of art in its ripe procession of one [traveling] through the new frontier of the ’eighties where the frail human element still abounded even in the arts as Oscar Wilde alone, observing the mortality in that place [as] marvelous, passed on unrankled by that phrase doing his best, redolent of chance and the very immanence of human failure that [a] century of progress was consecrated to wiping out once and for all; for if, as another mother country throwback had it, all art does constantly aspire to the condition of music, there in a Colorado mining town saloon all art’s essential predicament threatened to be laid bare with 26

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the clap of a pistol shot just as deliverance was at hand, born of the beast with two backs called arts and sciences whose rambunctious coupling came crashing the jealous enclosures of class, taste, and talent, to open the arts to Americans for democratic action and leave history to bunk.40

Thus, art declined in proportion to the elimination of risk. As “chance” and the “immanence of human failure” were “[wiped] out” by “progress,” the “enclosures of class, taste, and talent” left no room for the danger and uncertainty on which real human art rested. With this in mind, Wilde characterized the sign he saw — “Please do not shoot the pianist. He is doing his best” — as “the only rational method of art criticism I have ever come across.”41 For Gaddis, risk was the sine qua non of art, while the player-piano, with its predetermined outcomes and detachment from active human involvement, was art’s antithesis. The “immanence of human failure” was not a problem to be solved but rather a precondition of art’s very existence. The title of both Gibbs’s and Gaddis’s work-in-progress was “Agape¯ Agape: A Secret History of the Player Piano,” which, minus the subtitle, became the name of Gaddis’s last novel, published posthumously in 2002.42 With ideas and allusions ricocheting at a dizzying pace, this short, dense book tracks the ideas and feelings of a dying man, among whose greatest preoccupations is his unwieldy and unfinished history of mechanization in the arts. Even more than J R, this book suggested the historical richness and complexity of Gaddis’s project, its allusions careering from physicist Willard Gibbs (namesake of J R’s Jack Gibbs) to cybernetic theoretician Norbert Weiner to pioneering cultural historian Johann Huizinga. As both an heir to Jacquard’s looms and a forerunner of supercomputers, the player-piano refracted the mechanization and rationalization occurring throughout society, as well as modeling how those phenomena had penetrated and undermined the arts. Ultimately, Gaddis saw so many affinities and connections between the player-piano and myriad contemporary forms of social and economic rationalization that he was overwhelmed by the burden of integrating these phenomena coherently and characterized the project as “a casualty of overresearch.”43 The density and complexity of the matrix in which Gaddis saw the player-piano embedded is suggested perhaps by an excerpt from his unpublished nonfiction work, which appeared in a posthumous collection of Gaddis’s shorter writings: Analysis, measurement, prediction and control, the elimination of failure through programmed organization, the player [piano] emerged as a distillation of the goals that had surrounded its gestation in an orgy of fragmented talents seeking after the useful, Rockefeller organizing this world as Darwin the last one and Mrs. Eddy the next, Pullman organizing people and Spies Social Text 102

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labor, Eastman and McCormick patents and parts, Woolworth cash and Morgan credit, Frick power with his own property and Insull with other people’s, Gibbs physics, Comstock vice, and Hollerith the census, while Spencer programmed ethics and Freud the psyche, Taylor work, Dewey facts, James things, Mendel, Correns, Tschermak and De Vries and De Vries, Tschermak and Correns heredity, a frenzied search for just those patterns in communication and control that were even then not only transporting Frank Woolworth’s damaged musical faculty “hatless, dishevelled and gay” in Ride of the Walküres to the mighty Halls of old Walhalla, but carrying all the people rather than the patrician classes toward the utopian equilibrium of John Stuart Mills’s stationary state, where the stream of human industry will “finally spread itself out into an apparently stagnant sea.” 44

Evidently, Gaddis was traveling some of the same ground as Weber, but he went slightly further than Weber, who had great insight about the piano and about capitalism but was silent about the player-piano (although it was in wide circulation by the time he was writing).45 For Gaddis, the player-piano was at its core an instrument of what Marxists would call primitive accumulation and alienation. Its proliferation contributed to the separation of people from the means of (cultural) production and to the process by which people were made foreign to one another and to themselves. To mask such injurious effects, however, the player-piano was promoted as a vehicle for cultural “democracy” — a nineteenth-century notion about which Gaddis harbored profound suspicions. (“Here’s Flaubert,” Gaddis writes in Agape¯ Agape: “ ‘The entire dream of democracy is to raise the proletariat to the level of bourgeois stupidity.’ ”46) To some extent, Gaddis’s claims are self-evident and irrefutable. From the perspective of the production of culture, mechanical reproduction did introduce a divide between production and consumption and did, in many cases, supplant the manual, aural, and cognitive skills required of conventional music making. But as a cultural critique of mechanical reproduction, Gaddis’s analysis took at face value that mechanization had only one, devastatingly negative kind of aesthetic impact. Gaddis assumed that mechanical reproduction was a priori at odds with the goals of art. In the eyes of some composers and critics, however, the mechanical devices held aesthetic possibilities. For these people, whom we might think of as idealists or aestheticists, the essence of music resided in composition; performance, in their view, because it always had a degree of idiosyncrasy, was only a necessary evil. In the 1920s, the German critic and musicologist H. H. Stuckenschmidt hailed a new age of mechanical music, which he believed would enable composers, through piano rolls and phonograph records that they would make themselves, to communicate directly with auditors, without suffering the mediation and distortion of uncertain performers. (Forty years later, Glenn Gould expressed a similar hope, 28

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imagining that recording and editing performances on magnetic tape might enable him to collapse the distance between the auditor and Bach himself.)47 Along similar lines, in the 1910s and 1920s composers Igor Stravinsky, Paul Hindemith, Ernst Toch, and others approached the playerpiano as a novel tool of musical expression — that is, as a means to create new sounds not available through conventional composition and manual instrumentation. This more open-ended approach to the instrument recalls one of the subtle insights of Braverman’s critical analysis of mechanization: that at early stages, machines could enhance a laborer’s skill. For a cabinet maker, a lathe or drill press opened up new productive possibilities; it was an aid, not a threat. The greatest of these experimentalists, however, was undoubtedly Conlon Nancarrow, whose breathtaking compositions for the playerpiano from the 1940s to 1970s earned for him a place in the front ranks of avant-garde composers. In more than forty composed “studies” for the player-piano, Nancarrow created works of seemingly impossible piano sounds, played faster and with more notes than any human could execute, in intersecting rhythmic patterns of vertiginous, mathematical complexity that showered auditors with cascading waves of sound. In Nancarrow’s hands, the piano roll became a new expressive medium, for he was not only doing something novel with the player-piano, but also devising and exploring an entirely new musical idiom. Indeed, it is no small irony that, in 1982, when William Gaddis was awarded a MacArthur “genius” prize, one of the other recipients of the prize that year was Conlon Nancarrow. The player-piano deeply informed the work of both men, but in contrast to Gaddis’s high modern conservatism, Nancarrow was an avowed leftist. Born in Texarkana, Arkansas, he joined the Communist Party in 1933 and fought against Franco as part of the Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. When his American passport was revoked as a result of his political activity, he moved to Mexico City, where he lived until his death in 1997. His compositions, all of which were instrumental, were not overtly political, but they belong to a tradition of political optimism about the relationship between art and mechanical reproduction, visible in everything from Walter Benjamin’s writings to Aleksandr Medvedkin’s cine-trains. Gaddis’s critique of the player-piano in the political economy of culture was sophisticated and compelling, but it was also static. Nancarrow and his experimentalist predecessors demonstrated that musical recording, at least as far as the player-piano was concerned, could have multiple aesthetic (and political) valences.48 The emergence of sound recording in the twentieth century was both an evolutionary and revolutionary phenomenon. In the sense that playerpianos and phonographs were machines that made music, they extended a process that had begun millennia earlier. Indeed, for all the ways that the Social Text 102

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phonograph and player-piano departed from nineteenth-century and earlier musical culture, they also continued and expanded the piano-centered practice of adapting a wide range of music for the keyboard, making available in the home, in adapted form, a vast range of musical styles and works. Although the phonograph broadened this access even beyond that which the player-piano could convey, in the formative period of modern recording culture, up to the late 1920s, the piano, which was the standard-bearer of Western musical technology up to that time, was one instrument whose sounds the phonograph did not capture well. On the other hand, the playerpiano and phonograph were not just machines, but also particular kinds of machines, with a particular relation to the rapidly changing social and economic order. The historical timing of their appearance and the details of their discursive and technological identities were neither trivial nor coincidental. The conception, design, manufacture, and proliferation of these technologies modeled and reinforced the organization, conventions, and values of industrial production and modern consumer marketing. Much is to be gained by recognizing that today’s digital technology itself has a musical history, revealing the ways that music and the development of modern computer technology, from Babbage to Herman Hollerith to Napster, have long been intertwined. In the end, both Gaddis’s and Nancarrow’s visions of the playerpiano have been borne out in notable ways. As Gaddis maintained, the player-piano symbolized and materialized the growing cultural importance of mechanization and automation, and it did so in particularly subtle and telling ways, expanding the practices and values of mechanization into the realm of consumption and into the aesthetic domain of the arts. Such effects notwithstanding, however, Nancarrow and those who composed for the player-piano before him ensured that the impact of the player-piano would not be one-dimensional. By engaging actively and directly with the technology, they swept aside its nominally mimetic character — the implication that it would convey only existing forms of music. Like Henry Cowell’s Aeolian Harp, John Cage’s pieces for prepared piano, and, later, the groundbreaking experimental turntablism of Grandmaster Flash, Christian Marclay, and others, the composers for player-piano intervened in the process of technological acculturation, radically reimagining what the mechanical technology of the player-piano was for and how it could be used. In so doing, they called attention to the technology and the character of recording itself, setting in relief the normative expectations and prevailing assumptions of manufacturers, marketers, and consumers. Certainly, the player-piano could represent the alienation of human labor, the standardization of aesthetic experience, and the reduction of a kind of human risk essential to the nature of art, but so too could it stand for mechanization’s hidden possibilities. 30

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Notes 1. Douglas Kahn’s designation of the “century of sound” is based on the variety of important sound-related developments that took shape in the twentieth century, including the “maturation of phonography and telephony, [and the advent of] microphony, amplification, sound film, incidence of radio, television, synthesis, acoustical engineering, virtuality, and so on.” See Douglas Kahn, “Track Organology,” October 55 (1990): 71. 2. See David Suisman, Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). 3. Theodor Adorno, “The Curves of the Needle,” October 55 (1990): 48 – 55; Theodor Adorno, “The Form of the Phonograph Record,” October 55 (1990): 56 – 61; Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi (1977; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985); Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999). See also Evan Eisenberg, Recording Angel: Explorations in Phonography (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1986). 4. On listening, see, for example, David Goodman, “Distracted Listening: On Not Making Sound Choices in the 1930s,” in Sound in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, ed. David Suisman and Susan Strasser (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). On the phonograph, see, for example, Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002). 5. Eric W. Rothenbuhler and John Durham Peters, “Defining Phonography: An Experiment in Theory,” Musical Quarterly 81 (1997): 242 – 64. “Phonography” defined at 261n1; quotation on 255. 6. Ibid., 254, 255, 258. 7. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), 217 – 52. The references to the phonograph appear on pages 221 and 248 (note 13). Most of the other references to sound appear in relation to cinema. For example, on page 232: “The shooting of a film, especially of a sound film, affords a spectacle unimaginable anywhere at any time before this.” 8. Even reproducing rolls were imperfect reproductions, however; all rolls underwent a postproduction process of editing, by hand, to compensate for errors, distortions, or slight imperfections in the recording process. 9. The peak recorded year for production of reproducing player-pianos was 1923. See U.S. Bureau of the Census, Biennial Census of Manufactures: 1925 (Washingon, DC: Government Printing Office, 1928), 1066. 10. Reproducing player-pianos are quite rare today, but they are regularly demonstrated in places like London’s Mechanical Music Museum, where their effect remains powerful (to judge by the reaction of an audience when I visited). In recent years, recordings of some reproducing player-piano rolls have been reissued on CD. See, for example, George Gershwin, The Piano Rolls, vols. 1 – 2 (Nonesuch, NON 79287 and 79370); and the numerous volumes of the Masters of the Piano Roll series, issued by the Dal Segno label. 11. See, for example, Arthur Whiting, “The Mechanical Player,” Yale Review 8 (1919): 828 – 35. 12. John Philip Sousa, “The Menace of Mechanical Music,” Appleton’s Journal 8 (1906): 278 – 84. On the relation of Sousa’s article to the copyright reform law, see Suisman, Selling Sounds, 150, 163 – 65. Social Text 102

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13. Jacques Barzun, quoted in Eisenberg, Recording Angel, 176. 14. Max Weber, The Rational and Social Foundations of Music, trans. Don Martindale, Johannes Riedel, and Gertrude Neuwirth (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1958), 120 – 24. See also Max Weber, “Value-Judgments in Social Science,” in Max Weber: Selections in Translation, ed. W. G. Runciman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 95 – 96. 15. Geoffrey Hindley, “Keyboards, Crankshafts, and Communication: The Musical Mindset of Western Technology,” in Music and Technology in the Twentieth Century, ed. Hans-Joachim Braun (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 33 – 34. 16. The Jonas Chickering Centennial Celebration (New York: Cheltenham, for Chickering and Sons, 1924), 11; Cyril Ehrlich, The Piano: A History (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), 27. 17. Ernest Newman, The Piano-Player and Its Music (London: Richards, 1920), 18. 18. Thomas Edison, quoted in Andre Millard, Edison and the Business of Innovation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 75. 19. Albert N. Link, Technological Change and Productivity Growth (New York: Harwood, 1987), 67. 20. Garry Wills, Certain Trumpets: The Call of Leaders (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), 124; William Rodgers, Think: A Biography of the Watsons and IBM (New York: Stein and Day, 1969), 69; Mark J. P. Wolf, Abstracting Reality: Art, Communication, and Cognition in the Digital Age (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2000), 37. 21. IBM Stockholders’ Quarterly Report, 11 July 1962, p. 4, in William Gaddis Papers, Washington University Library, St. Louis. 22. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, ed. Frederick Engels (New York: International, 1967), 374. On Marx and piano players, see also Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 93. 23. Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), 188 – 89. 24. Franz Liszt, quoted in Kurt Blaukopf, Musical Life in a Changing Society: Aspects of Music Sociology, trans. David Marinelli (Portland, OR: Amadeus, 1992), 62. In Swann’s Way, Proust’s Mme. Verdurin strikes a similar note after hearing her son’s rendition of a piano sonata: “You never dreamed, did you, that a piano could be made to express all that? Upon my word, you’d think it was everything but the piano! I’m caught out every time I hear it; I think I’m listening to an orchestra. Though it’s better, really, than an orchestra, more complete.” Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin (New York: Vintage, 1982), 231. On the piano as a labor-saving device, see Edward J. Dent, “The Pianoforte and Its Influence on Modern Music,” Musical Quarterly 2 (1916): 272. 25. Adolph Kullak, The Aesthetics of Pianoforte-Playing, 3rd ed., trans. Th. Baker, ed. Hans Bischoff (New York: Schirmer, 1893), 328. 26. James Parakilas, “Music to Transport the Listener,” in James Parakilas et al., Piano Roles: Three Hundred Years of Life with the Piano (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 195 – 96; Thomas Christensen, “Public Music in Private Spaces: Piano-Vocal Scores and the Domestication of Opera,” in Music and the Cultures of Print, ed. Kate Van Orden (New York: Garland, 2000), 67 – 94. 27. Weber, Rational and Social Foundations of Music, 123 – 24.

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28. Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 69. 29. Adorno, “Form of the Phonograph Record,” 59. See also Lisa Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999). 30. Lisa Gitelman, “Reading Music, Reading Records, Reading Race: Musical Copyright and the U.S. Copyright Act of 1909,” Musical Quarterly 81 (1997): 265 – 90. 31. A. M. Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Mind, n.s., 59 (1950): 436 – 39. 32. Adorno, “Form of the Phonograph Record,” 58 – 61. Adorno was twentyfour when this essay was originally published in 1927. 33. See Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990); Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880 – 1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983). 34. Barbara Engh, “After ‘His Master’s Voice,’ ” New Formations 38 (1999): 54 – 63. 35. Two recent exceptions include Lisa Gitelman, “Media, Materiality, and the Measure of the Digital; or, The Case of Sheet Music and the Problem of Piano Rolls,” in Memory Bytes: History, Technology, and Digital Culture, ed. Lauren Rabinovitz and Abraham Geil (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), and Brian Dolan, Inventing Entertainment: The Player Piano and the Origins of an American Industry (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008). 36. Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano (New York: Scribner, 1952). 37. Steven Moore, “The Secret History of Agape¯ Agape” (2000), available at www.williamgaddis.org/critinterpessays/secrethistoryaa.shtml (accessed 1 February 2009). 38. Ed Park, “The Precognitions: On the Posthumous Trail of W. G. Sebald and William Gaddis,” Voice Literary Supplement, Fall 2002, available at The Unarchivable, theunarchivable.blogspot.com/2007/09/piece-on-sebald-gaddis-and-bernhard .html (accessed 1 February 2009). 39. William Gaddis, J R (New York: Knopf, 1975). 40. Gaddis, J R, 288 – 89. 41. Oscar Wilde, “Impressions of America” (1883), reprinted in The Annotated Oscar Wilde, ed. H. Montgomery Hyde (New York: Clarkson Potter, 1982), quoted in The Gaddis Annotations — J R, www.williamgaddis.org/jr/jrnotes5.shtml (accessed 1 February 2009). 42. William Gaddis, Agape¯ Agape (New York: Viking, 2002). 43. Moore, “Secret History of Agape¯ Agape.” 44. William Gaddis, “Agape¯ Agape: The Secret History of the Player Piano,” in The Rush for Second Place: Essays and Occasional Writings (New York: Penguin, 2002), 13. 45. Weber also said nothing about phonographs, although he had used phonograph recordings extensively in preparing the work later published as The Rational and Social Foundations of Music. See Christoph Braun, “The ‘Science of Reality’ of Music History: On the Historical Background to Max Weber’s Study of Music,” in Max Weber and the Culture of Anarchy (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999), 190. 46. Gaddis, Agape¯ Agape, 48. 47. H. H. Stuckenschmidt, “The Mechanization of Music” (1925), in German Essays on Music, ed. Jost Hermand and Michael Gilbert (New York: Continuum, 1994), 149 – 56. See also Alan Durant, Conditions of Music (London: Macmillan,

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1984). On Glenn Gould, see, for example, Glenn Gould, “The Prospects of Recording,” in The Glenn Gould Reader, ed. Tim Page (New York: Knopf, 1984), 331 – 52. 48. See Kyle Gann, The Music of Conlon Nancarrow (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Eric Drott, “Conlon Nancarrow and the Technological Sublime,” American Music 22 (2004): 533 – 63.

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Deaf Jam From Inscription to Reproduction to Information Mara Mills

The voice is what is really at stake in modernity, the voice as specified substance of language everywhere triumphantly pushed forward. Modern society (as has been repeated often enough) believes itself to be ushering in a civilization of the image, but what it actually establishes overall . . . is a civilization of speech. — Roland Barthes, “Lesson in Writing” (1968) Speech, to the telephone engineer, is a commodity that must be picked up in one place and delivered promptly, cheaply, and in good condition in another. — D. W. Farnsworth, “High-Speed Motion Pictures of the Human Vocal Cords” (1940)

In 1954 and 1955, French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan gave a series of lectures on the relationship between psychoanalysis and cybernetics. A favorite theme was the notion of “the message” and the way it seemed to strip speech — hitherto a defining characteristic of the reasonable human — of meaning and intention. Language made people rather than the other way around. We were “thrown into it, committed, caught up in its gears.”1 He returned frequently to the idea of “the circuit”; human subjectivity consisted of interchanges. 2 Like psychoanalysis, Lacan suggested, “cybernetics also stems from a reaction of astonishment at rediscovering that this human language works almost by itself, seeming to outwit us.”3 Midway through his year-long seminar, he described a fantastic machine that seemed to confirm his philosophy of language. It had fulfilled, he claimed, the nineteenth-century attempts by Étienne-Jules Marey and

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others to represent the voice visually. Built at the Bell Telephone Laboratories of American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T), this machine went beyond previous experiments with graphic inscription. It revealed new ways for multiple messages to be passed down the same telephone wire, simultaneously. And, it indicated that certain aspects of a vocalization could be subtracted without a listener perceiving any change. Speech could be broken into bits, much like “the subject” — which, Lacan had earlier announced, “is no one. It is decomposed, in pieces. And it is jammed.”4 The telephone company treated the ephemeral voice as the material of communication, and it raised important questions about the self-evidence of “inter-human relations”: This doesn’t mean that fundamental things happen between human beings. It concerns what goes down the wires, and what can be measured. Except, one then begins to wonder whether it does go, or whether it doesn’t, when it deteriorates, when it is no longer communication. This is what is called, in psychology, the jam, an American word. It is the first time that confusion as such — this tendency there is in communication to cease being a communication, that is to say, of no longer communicating anything at all — appears as a fundamental concept.5

There is more than one way to understand the significance of “jamming,” and here psychoanalysis and telephony diverge. In Lacan’s account, “the jam” is the failure, interruption, and misinformation inherent to all communication. Censorship, false information, unconscious discourse, and forgetting were integral to talking itself. One of the analyst’s roles, as Mladen Dolar has explained, is to be “the interpreter deciphering the coded messages.”6 Communication engineers performed a different sort of work on human speech, and they multiplied the instances when communication “cease[d] being a communication.” Jamming, in their discourse, referred to outside attacks on communication that interfered with reception, such as the deliberate addition of noise to a signal. In the name of efficiency, engineers worked to eliminate jams and accidental line noise from transmissions — as well as the “irrelevant” and “redundant” material that suddenly seemed to be intrinsic to speech. When Dennis Gabor inaugurated the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory in 1953, he insisted that economy had radically altered communications, more so than procedures for recording or transmission fidelity: “When electrical communications started the first requirement was completeness. Morse had to transmit the whole alphabet; Graham Bell the whole range of speech sounds. But the question of economy also came in, almost from the start. It was soon found that it was necessary, but also sufficient, to make the transmission line, and the terminal equipment, responsive only to those frequencies which the human voice apparatus can 36

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produce, and which can be heard by the human ear” (emphasis in original).7 For economy’s sake, Western Electric (the manufacturing arm of the AT&T monopoly) launched a comprehensive study of speech and hearing in 1913. First directed by Irving Crandall, this decades-long program was taken over by Harvey Fletcher shortly after the 1925 founding of Bell Telephone Laboratories as an independent unit. The goal of this research was to transmit and reproduce speech in the most cost-effective manner, all the while convincing the human ear that it heard “live,” unmodified talk. (To engineer, by definition, means “to contrive” as well as “to construct.”) AT&T grew to become the largest company in the world. Its campaign for “universal service,” the constraints of infrastructure, and price regulation by the U.S. government led to corporate efficiency measures that would eventually include information theory and digital signal processing. 8 The telephonic medium — by which I mean its history, infrastructure, technical components, and cultures — thus deserves a more prominent place in media studies. To support this agenda, members of Fletcher’s department experimented with a number of methods for making speech visible and concrete. The unidentified machine in Lacan’s second seminar — the sound spectrograph — was the first device to accurately and automatically record the frequency components of a complex sound wave.9 Bell engineers initially proposed the spectrograph to improve telephone transmission as well as to support oral education and visual telephony for deaf people. The first serviceable model was built during World War II, as part of a cryptanalysis endeavor with the military. Spectrograms exposed the coding of telephone communication: temporal inversion, time-division scrambling, masking with noise, or the shuffling of frequency bands. The early twentieth-century telephone was not a particularly faithful medium of reproduction; engineers reasonably assumed that certain parts of speech could be (profitably) “lost” without a listener’s awareness. Phonetician Dennis Fry explains that the spectrograph was an early tool for determining which features of a vocal wave counted as “speech”: The speech sound waves which reach our ears embody a lot of information which we do not need for making phonemic decisions. Out of the wealth of data our brain picks the items which it has learned to use for the purpose. . . . The invention of the sound spectrograph itself was an attempt in this direction for it was hoped that by making the patterns of speech visible one would throw into relief the features which were really important for recognition.10

In addition to linguistic features, spectrograms promised to reveal acoustically redundant or irrelevant material.11 The Bell spectrograph team enrolled deaf students and volunteers as spectrogram-readers, to idenSocial Text 102

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tify the fundamental information buried within the sounds of speech. They imagined that deaf subjects would use this information to interpret telephone calls and to regulate their own voices — assuming speech and normative pronunciation standards to be ideals of human communication. From a telephone engineering perspective, deafness was the ultimate jam in interpersonal relations.12 As part of its mission of “universal communications,” AT&T extended Alexander Graham Bell’s founding commitment to oralism and assistive technology into the twentieth century. The telephone, the first technology for sound reproduction, itself derived from the tradition of inscription; as is well known, Bell’s experiments with a phonautograph, using a human tympanic membrane to transmit sound waves to a stylus and then to a plate of smoked glass, were part of the foundation for the electrical transmission of speech.13 In company publications, the sound spectrograph was explicitly positioned within the genealogy of “visible speech,” especially as it pertained to deaf education. Robert Brain has noted the significance of deafness to the very emergence of “the graphic method” in linguistics; deaf educators, convinced that the eye might substitute for the ear to “unjam” the circuit of oral communication, invented numerous methods for recording and displaying waveforms.14 Surveying the history of experimental phonetics, Hans Günter Tillmann makes deafness central to this new speech science of the nineteenth century: “It was assumed, first, that speech could be exhaustively investigated as a purely mechanical process, and secondly that the listener could be replaced by a deaf observer.”15 The sound spectrograph changed the course of graphic inscription in a number of respects. For one thing, the machine was modeled not on the middle but on the inner ear, which seemed to dissect sound into simpler wave components, along the lines of Fourier analysis. Rather than represent an acoustic waveform, spectrograms thus depicted its perception. Deaf educators and others gradually admitted that the eye could not be made to behave as an ear; this failure was resolved through media that replicated or translated hearing. Moreover, the milieu of the sound spectrograph was twentiethcentury communication engineering, a field that tackled the efficient manufacture and modification of speech itself — beyond the construction of instruments for sound recording and transmission. Graphic inscription and deaf oral education had proven that “sound” could be captured or transmitted by a wide variety of media — an important development in the recasting of sensuous phenomena as “signals.” The sound spectrograph helped map the parameters of normal speech; the ability of deaf subjects to read spectrograms was the best evidence for the identification of information-bearing features in a complex speech wave. Telephone engineers 38

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hoped to eventually compress and encode speech by eliminating redundant material. The sound spectrograph caused speech to be considered not in terms of meaning, nor in terms of its absolute physical representation, but in terms of the characteristics of its production and perception and the minimum features by which it could be reconstructed; Telstar engineer John Pierce would list the machine as one of the “most contributive” influences on information theory.16 The passage from inscription to reproduction to information was accompanied by mounting interest in self-regulation by humans and machines. Deafness underscored the role of feedback in communication, and sound-writers of all forms were used to teach deaf students to monitor their own voices. In the twentieth century, sound spectrography became the primary means for machines to recognize human speech, through the matching of incoming sound-wave patterns to those in a stored database. Across decades, national contexts, and technical shifts, however, deafness ultimately served as a “pretext” to other engineering concerns — in some cases a precursor, in others a pretense. Inventors often abandoned collaborations with deaf students and their educators after initial trials, as their technologies transferred to more profitable realms. Certain inventors simply lifted ideas and inspiration from the world of deaf “assistive” technology, which flourished due to the stigmatization of sign language and the real desires of many deaf people (especially those with “late-deafening”) for oral communication. For other engineers, deafness was never more than a metaphor or an advertisement. David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder term the use of disability as a literary prop or metaphor narrative prosthesis.17 I suggest the phrase assistive pretext as a complementary explanation of the resourcing of disability within technoscience. Iconic Alphabets

The close of 1945 saw the first swell of publicity regarding a “visible speech” machine that had been secretly built during the war. Ralph Potter, director of “Project X” — in which vocoder technology was used for speech encryption — also coordinated a wartime cryptanalysis project. His team built the sound spectrograph as the vocoder’s twin, a codebreaker. When Potter introduced the sound spectrograph to readers of Bell Laboratories Record, he described it as a translator and tutor for deaf people as well as a tool for engineers: A person totally deaf, particularly if he has been so since birth, can be taught to speak only with the greatest patience, and at best his speech is unpleasant sounding and difficult to understand. Being unable to hear his own or any other voice, he has no criterion to guide his efforts, and the Social Text 102

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sounds he produces depart widely from those of normal speech . . . although speech training for those without hearing is of most immediate concern, it is likely that visible speech may ultimately enable the deaf to read the speech of others, and particularly to use the telephone. There are many other uses for these patterns of sound than those of special interest to the deaf. Since in telephony our problem is mainly one of speech transmission, this new way of picturing speech sounds and the effects of noise and distortion upon such sounds should be of considerable value.18

Spectrograms served four initial purposes: to characterize speech sounds, to give feedback to deaf oral speakers, to provide a basis for visual telephony, and to decode or encode telephone conversations (see figure 4). Potter coauthored a full-length book on sound spectrography with George Kopp and Harriet Green, published in 1947 by Van Nostrand and titled simply Visible Speech. Kopp and Green were hired in 1943 to run a three-year experimental training program in the interpretation of spectrograms. Kopp was a Columbia phonetics professor with an interest in speech privacy systems. Harriet Green, his student, was a psychology doctoral candidate with previous degrees from Brooklyn College in speech pathology and audiology and certification as a “teacher of the deaf” from the Lexington School.19 Visible Speech opened with a glance back. The authors presented sound spectrography as a third-generation technique. In the nineteenth century, the science of visible speech had adhered to two methods — iconic notation, whereby alphabets were produced that (presumably) mimicked sounds or the physiology of the vocal apparatus, and graphic inscription, whereby sound waves were translated into visible form via registering devices. Potter, Kopp, and Green recounted the phonetic research and “universal alphabet” of Alexander Melville Bell, as well as the phonautograph —  an inscription device — made by his son. The sound spectrograph, they announced, had realized at last the dream of “natural phonetic symbols translated from speech itself.”20 Modern phonetics turned speech and language into the subject matter of science. The inception of this discipline is often tied to the mid-nineteenth-century work of Alexander Melville Bell and his German counterpart, Ernst Wilhelm Ritter von Brücke. 21 Bell, who followed his father into the field of elocution and whose wife was deaf, developed an “iconic” script for representing sounds in the 1860s. Alexander Ellis, a British phonetician who generally worked with symbols from the Roman alphabet, praised Bell’s ingenuity and credited it to his experience in the field of speech pathology: “Mr. Melville Bell, in forming an alphabet, rejected all existing alphabets. They were all formed on very imperfect knowledge, or superficial observation. He applied himself directly to the organs of speech, with which his long practice as a corrector of the defects 40

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Figure 1. Alexander Melville Bell’s Visible Speech alphabet, derived from the “postures” of the vocal organs, is seen on the blackboards in a classroom at the Rochester School for the Deaf (c. 1910). Students are also using carbon-telephone amplifiers. Courtesy of the Rochester School for the Deaf Archive Center, Rochester, New York.

of utterance had rendered him familiar in all their relations.”22 Begun after the London Alphabetical Conferences of 1854, Bell published the original Visible Speech treatise in 1867. His “physiological alphabet” symbolized the positions of the vocal organs (primarily the lips and tongue, but also the palate and throat) during the production of speech sounds (figure 1). As early as the seventeenth century, John Wallis had advised using a set of symbols to reduce communication to the “motion and posture in the organs of speech.”23 Mathematician, cryptographer, and member of the Royal Society, Wallis became familiar with the materiality of language while teaching deaf pupils Daniel Whalley and Alexander Popham to speak. Grammarians and philologists, however, tended to dismiss speech as a debasement of (scholarly) written language. Two hundred years later, Bell and his colleagues continued to advocate “living” speech over “dead” writing as the basis of phonetics. Henry Sweet, for one, insisted that the meaning of language should be disregarded in favor of its form: “All attempts to reduce language to strict logical or psychological categories, by ignoring its formal side, have failed ignominiously. The form of language is its sounds.”24

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Bell foresaw a number of applications for Visible Speech: aid to pronunciation for deaf people; correction of unphonetic English spelling; and the possibility of improved international telegraphy, without the intermediate step of translation. Bell also called upon the exigencies of empire to advertise his alphabet: it could allow “the speedy diffusion of the language of a mother country throughout the most widely separated COLONIES . . . the acquisition, by Rulers, of the languages of their Colonial Subjects, will, of course, be facilitated in an equal degree.”25 Bell framed his project as a natural “universal alphabet” that could potentially represent the sounds of every language. Quickly, however, he attached Visible Speech to a proposal for one “universal” language — English. In an 1888 publication on “World English,” Bell reasoned, “no language could be invented for International use that would surpass English, in grammatical simplicity, and in general fitness to become the tongue of the world. The only drawback to the extension of English has been its difficult and unsystematic spelling.”26 The spread of oralism as a method of deaf education in the nineteenth century was part of a larger cultural impulse to streamline communication in industrializing nations. 27 As Carolyn Marvin has shown, promoters of global telegraph, telephone, and wireless networks imagined that “the world society that would arise spontaneously in the absence of barriers to communication would resist autonomous minorities.”28 Experimental Phonetics

Concurrent with these innovations in alphabetics, a new “universal language of science” emerged in the 1800s — graphic inscription. This “language” largely served to record motions that were otherwise invisible or too rapid for the eye to see. In the nineteenth century, vibration seemed to be the universal manifestation of natural phenomena. Central to the history of the telephone, electricity was found to travel in waves, analogous to water, sound, and light energy. Although “inscription” has become an expansive theoretical term in science and media studies, often referring to writing and recording in general, the narrower science of self-recording machines originated with James Watt’s “indicator,” which automatically registered the pressure relations in steam engines. 29 (Watt also built a “governor,” an early servomechanism that regulated steam flow, and hence speed.) Carl Ludwig introduced the graphic method into the experimental life sciences in the 1840s with his kymograph — a drum, rotated by clockwork, on whose blackened surface a vibrating bristle recorded the fluctuations of blood pressure. The kymograph and many derivative self-registering devices soon formed the nucleus of a laboratory-based approach to language — experimental phonetics. Unlike idealized alphabet-scripts, here the sound waves resulting from 42

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Figure 2. Edward Wheeler Scripture’s kymograph, which took simultaneous recordings from the nose and mouth. Reprinted with permission from E. W. Scripture, “Registration of Speech Sounds,” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 7 (1935): 140. Copyright 1935, Acoustical Society of America.

the gestures of speech organs “wrote themselves,” with some measure of control and replicability (figure 2). 30 Sound waves required amplification to adequately stimulate a bristle, or any other transcribing implement. Édouard-Léon Scott, one-time typesetter, conceived a phonautograph (automatic sound-writer) on the model of the ear in the 1850s, after helping to print a textbook that included a discussion of human hearing. The phonautograph made use of a sensitive membrane — which he compared to “the physiological tympanum” — to transfer sound vibrations to a stylus, which then left traces of pressure change over time upon a sooted plate or kymograph drum. 31 Scott tested the sensitivity of various membranes on a deaf friend. The phonautograph, Scott predicted, would guarantee the transmission of sound waves from mouth to air to membrane; it should be easy “to have the deaf-mute who knows how to read follow the performance of a dictation printed on a table behind the operator, at once on the lips of this last by sight and on the tympanum which vibrates by means of tactile feeling.”32 The famous instrument-maker Rudolph König collaborated with Scott on improvements to this machine. Perhaps more important, König produced his own model of the human ear — as a sound analyzer. Timbre, or tone-quality, accounts for the distinction between two Social Text 102

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instruments sounding the same note, or the fact that a word can be identified when it is spoken with varying pitch and loudness. In 1843, Georg Ohm posited that the ear performed Fourier or harmonic analysis to distinguish the simple frequency components within a complex sound wave. Hermann von Helmholtz later illustrated Ohm’s Law with reference to concertgoing: From the mouths of the male singers proceed waves of six to twelve feet in length; from the lips of the female singers dart shorter waves, from eighteen to thirty-six inches long. The rustling of silken skirts excites little curls in the air, each instrument in the orchestra emits its peculiar waves, and all these systems expand spherically from their respective centers, dart through one another, are reflected from the walls of the room and thus rush backwards and forwards. . . . [The ear] analyzes the interdigitation of the waves . . . separates the several tones which compose it, and distinguishes the voices of men and women — even of individuals — the peculiar qualities of tone given out by each instrument, the rustling of the dresses, the footfalls of the walkers, and so on. 33

Helmholtz proposed that the ear’s analysis occurred because fibers or hairs at different locations along the cochlea resonated to different frequencies of sound. Different speech sounds are created as the vocal tract changes shape, reinforcing, through resonance, particular patterns of overtones. What the ear perceives thus corresponds to the movements of the mouth and throat. In the 1860s, König attempted to render this process visible via his “manometric flame,” which used “the vibration of the diaphragm to vary the pressure of the gas supply to a sensitive flame, which oscillated up and down in accordance with the spoken sounds. When viewed through a rotating mirror, the resulting bright/dark boundary line appeared as a waveform — of sorts.”34 By adding up to fourteen resonators to this apparatus, König created a “harmonic analyzer” that revealed the intensities of particular speech components. 35 Wallace Clement Sabine later described the manometric method as “at best qualitative and difficult” for characterizing vowel sounds.36 Alexander Graham Bell hoped to adopt the device for articulation training, but he “saw it was hopeless to attempt to photograph it for the information of [his] Deaf pupils.”37 Deaf education established close ties to experimental phonetics. 38 Étienne-Jules Marey, whose La Methode Graphique dans les Sciences Expérimentales (The Graphic Method in the Experimental Sciences) gave an encyclopedic account of the graphic method, began to work on visualizing language in 1875, at the request of a delegation of linguists who visited his laboratory. With one of these linguists, the expert on deafness Charles Rosapelly, Marey coauthored an article on “graphic phonetics” in Scientific 44

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American; this publication influenced Thomas Edison as he worked on the phonograph.39 A stated goal of their research was “a more scientific method of education for deaf mutes, by conveying to the mind of the latter the necessary instruction through the medium of graphic traces.”40 The graphic method was more than an instrument of “mechanical objectivity.” Anson Rabinbach describes Marey as an “engineer of life”; members of Marey’s laboratory regularly applied graphic inscription as a means of feedback for controlling and economizing time and motion.41 In even greater detail, Marta Braun documents the movement of graph, photograph, and cinematograph into the American scientific management system, where they were used to instill self-discipline among the labor force. She further suggests that the analysis of time and motion facilitated the conversion from mechanization to automation in the factories, with robots built to enact particular micromotions.42 When psychologist Granville Stanley Hall surveyed the graphic method in 1881, he mentioned that some of his contemporaries already believed the “mechanized knowledge” provided by automatic recording devices would someday lead to “the actualization of a universal self-mending, self-governing, self-reproducing, self-knowing machine.”43 Paralleling this application of communication to control in servomechanisms, deaf oral instruction immediately began to employ the graphic method for programmed self-correction among students. Marey transitioned from chronography to chronophotography in the early 1880s, around the time he took on Georges Demenÿ as his assistant. A decade later, Hector Marichelle of the National Institute of Deaf-Mutes approached Demenÿ with a proposition for an experiment. If speech were just “a rapid succession of movements,” could these not be caught by a series of chronophotographs — and then somehow reassembled? In 1891, the two men performed a demonstration on a deaf student, which they reported to the Academy of Sciences: they had photographed all the lip movements for a particular phrase and then arranged this series within the cylinder of a zoetrope. By observing the images — independently, and connected to one another through the zoetrope’s motion — the student was evidently able to reproduce the original statement. His slight mispronunciations pointed only to the errors in photography.44 That December, at a lecture before the National Conservatory of Arts and Crafts, Demenÿ discussed his forays into deaf education, projecting his speech chronophotographs one by one with a magic lantern. Demenÿ eventually built a new machine to project chronophotographs in motion for the first time — the Phonoscope. This apparatus made use of glass discs with photographic series arranged along their perimeters. He and Marichelle demonstrated the Phonoscope with three students and the director of the National Institute for Deaf-Mutes. One of the students Social Text 102

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performed remarkably, matching the pace of his pronunciation to changing speeds of projection. The experiment failed when Demenÿ tried to trick the boy by projecting the phrase in reverse. Demenÿ exclaimed that he had “played the deaf-mute like a Barberi organ” — a portable automatophone, one of the player-pianos fed rolls of mechanized music.45 Laurent Mannoni places the Phonoscope at the very origin of moving photograph projection and the film industry, and Tom Gunning has argued its importance in founding the cinematic close-up.46 Demenÿ anticipated screen interactivity; in 1892, a reporter for the London Globe appreciated that through the Phonoscope, “photography may be turned into a means of inter-communication.”47 The device was a sensation in its own time, and Demenÿ quickly abandoned deaf education in favor of marketing his “animated portraits” to a broad audience. In the end, as Virgilio Tosi has theorized, deafness was merely “the scientific part of the research, the pretext and the occasion to refine the instrument.”48 The felicitously named psychologist Edward Wheeler Scripture was the most avid promoter of “the graphic method” in the United States (see figure 3). Scripture’s research increasingly focused on the recording of speech waves, rather than other time-based human behaviors, and by 1899 he had dedicated part of the Yale Psychological Laboratory to experimental phonetics. In 1906, Scripture started a research program on the speech of people with epilepsy at Columbia’s Vanderbilt Clinic. Alongside his wife, May Kirk Scripture, who was employed as a speech therapist at Columbia’s Teachers College, he also began to take on deaf pupils.49 Scripture was strongly influenced by the Abbé Rousselot’s laboratory for experimental phonetics at the Collège de France, which he had visited in 1897. Rousselot recommended graphic inscription for the perfecting of accent during foreign language learning. Inscription devices provided curves of “normal” speech for students to imitate through a process of self-comparison and correction. Scripture also learned to magnify and trace the grooves in phonograph recordings. He briefly experimented, in the 1930s, with reading the sound track along the edge of a talking filmstrip. He opened an article in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, on the topic of what film technology might reveal about English vowels, with a newly sympathetic perspective on deafness: “To avoid presuppositions and illusions we must begin the study of these tracks as if we had never known anything about sound, that is, as if we had been born deaf and had never read anything on the subject. Our conclusions must be based solely on what we see in the curves or in what we can deduce from our observations by the eye.”50 Though he found deafness antithetical to communication, it served as a model subjectivity for the objective, optical space of the lab.

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Figure 3. Edward Wheeler Scripture’s speech schema (1936), one of many forerunners to Claude Shannon’s diagram (1948) for a generalized communication system. From A History of Psychology in Autobiography, Vol. 3, ed. C. Murchison (Worcester, MA: Clark University Press, 1936), 257.

Specters of Bell

A few years after Scripture’s death, Potter, Kopp, and Green reprinted his speech curves in Visible Speech — as an example of the sound-recording technology they hoped to supersede. Scripture’s mechanical devices had drawn only a single line of wavering amplitude over time; they revealed changes in loudness and pitch, but they could not be translated into words by the eye.51 Potter, Kopp, and Green were more generous regarding the similar inscription experiments of Alexander Graham Bell, their corporate ancestor. Bell spent his early career teaching his father’s Visible Speech to deaf children, who copied the word-pictures with their mouths. Students were to “memorize the picture of the pronunciation of the words and sentences they understand when written and spoken,” Bell explained, “and we will substitute a power of inward self-correction for correction constantly applied only by pressure from without.”52 Bell created the ear phonautograph as a second-generation “visible speech,” to supply more precise visual feedback to his students and to assist his own investigations into the nature of vowels. Yet phonautograph plates represented only brief cuts from a speech stream, and Bell admitted that he himself “found it impossible to recognize the various vowel sounds by their tracings.” In those same years, Bell experimented with a multiple telegraph system, using different frequencies to send several messages simultaneously. Bell tinkered with a “multiple phonautograph” — one that would record speech overtones for the purpose of deaf instruction — but this work remained unfinished as he turned his attention to the telephone and the electrical reproduction of sound waves.53 Potter, Kopp, and Green also discussed the inadequacies of the oscillograph, the output of which they compared to the letters of a word or phoneme being piled one on top of another in writing. In his comprehensive history of early oscillography, Vivian Phillips demonstrates that acoustics Social Text 102

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and phonetics “provided the initial impetus” for waveform display. Eventually, diaphragm and stroboscopic methods also offered “concrete, visible proof” of electrical oscillations. Oscillographs, developed in the 1890s by French physicist André-Eugène Blondel, among others, recorded the temporal changes in an electrical signal and became essential for “rendering visible what was happening in electrical circuits.”54 Phillips argues, “Although the needs of the electrical engineer and the acoustician arose from quite different causes, those needs actually coalesced as time went on.”55 In the 1920s, following a proposal to use relay circuits to split vowels and consonants into separate channels, I. B. Crandall of Bell Laboratories took oscillograms of all the basic English speech sounds, using a planimeter to perform a time-consuming Fourier analysis of the curves. (For the same purpose, others used mechanical harmonic analyzers and synthesizers —  early analog computers that were themselves inscription machines.)56 In 1928, Ralph Hartley used an oscillographic record as evidence for his groundbreaking insistence that information be defined according to physical, rather than psychological, terms: “The actual physical embodiment of the word consists of an acoustic or electrical disturbance which may be expressed as a magnitude-time function.”57 Visible Speech located the “physical embodiment of the word” in the frequency domain. Potter, Kopp, and Green described the sound spectrograph as “a mechanical ear” that analyzed sound in a manner at least roughly analogous to human hearing.58 For the prototype, Potter recorded sentences and replayed them twelve times, activating a different electrical filter in each instance to divide the speech into bands of 350 Hz. The output from the filters triggered a stylus, which left records of the component waves on a sheet of electrosensitive paper. By 1944, Potter’s team had constructed a real-time Visible Speech Translator — an instantaneous moving image on a cathode-ray tube or a phosphor belt to allow for visual telephony. Time was shown on the horizontal axis, frequency on the vertical, and loudness was determined by the darkness of the pattern on paper or its brightness on the screen. The Visual Telephony phase of the project launched in the fall of 1943, when eleven female Bell employees began training to read paper spectrograms of short phrases. Edgar Bloom, an engineer who had been deaf since birth, joined the class the following December, once the movingscreen translator was complete. Bloom had been a lip-reading champion in his New York elementary and high schools.59 Later, with two bachelor’s degrees and a master’s in chemical engineering from Columbia, he applied twice for employment at Bell Labs; he was turned down in each instance because of his deafness. According to an article in the Deaf American, Bloom’s “lucky break occurred in the mid-1940s when the Laboratories’ scientists wanted a reliable deaf person for a guinea pig for their startling 48

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Figure 4. Spectrograms as feedback for oral speech. Courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of American History Archives Collection 1130.

experiments on ‘Visible Speech’ for the deaf.”60 Public exhibitions of Visual Telephony, featuring Bloom and Green, commenced as soon as the war ended, drawing praise from Life, National Geographic, and the New York Times. In 1946, Harriet Green and George Kopp (they eventually married) moved to Michigan to begin a five-year experimental research program sponsored by Bell Labs. They brought a sound spectrograph to the speech pathology department at Ann Arbor and the original cathode-tube translator — along with a telephone booth for the simulation of visual telephony — to the school for the deaf at Ypsilanti, chosen because it was one of the largest in the country. Green was to train deaf children to speak orally, and Kopp was to carry on with the attempt “to discover the intelligibility essentials of speech sounds . . . [including] the frequency range of various sounds; the area in the frequency range that receives the greatest Social Text 102

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reinforcement; and, the influence that combined sounds normally exert on one another.”61 At the same time, communication engineers began using spectrograms to quantify speech. One Bell researcher explained its simplest application: “By examining numerous spectrograms of the same sounds, spoken by many persons and in a variety of contexts, an investigator can arrive at a description of the acoustic features common to all of the samples, and in this way make progress toward defining the so-called invariants of speech, that is, the essential information-bearing sound elements on which the listener’s identifications critically depend.”62 With John Steinberg, Potter imaged all of the English consonant and vowel sounds, along with their influences on one another. Eventually, data compiled from the spectrograms of hundreds of speakers allowed the average duration, amplitude (loudness), and range of overtones for these sounds to be estimated.63 Dennis Gabor (who later won the Nobel Prize for inventing holography) was one engineer who reconceived the “representation” of speech in terms of the minimum parameters necessary for its reconstruction, based on human speech production and perception. Estimating the “untapped” resources of the line, Gabor concluded: In telegraphy a letter is transmitted in the Baudot system by five “binary selections” or five “bits.” . . . In a telephone channel on the other hand, with a bandwidth of 3000 cycles and a signal : noise ratio of 30 decibels the number of bits/second is 2 3 3000 x 3.2 3 3 5 60,000, yet even in rapid speech the number of speech sounds per second is only about 15: thus it takes about 4000 bits to transmit a letter instead of 5. Of course the telephone transmits more than mere letters; it conveys the individuality of the speaker and the emotional content of his message, but even allowing for this there remains a large untapped source of potential gain. But if we want to realize this, we must go a little beyond the narrow definition of communication engineering.64

Gabor came up with countless experiments for “sampling” and compressing speech via spectrograms. As one example, he suggested painting over the darkest sections of a spectrogram, ignoring the others, and playing the result back to see how much intelligibility and quality had been impaired.65 He speculated that a speech transmitter need only have a capacity of two hundred cycles; if every twenty-five milliseconds of a spectrogram were horizontally divided into sixty-four frequency strips, the peaks and valleys of the three darkest bars in each time unit could be denoted by a mere six numbers. Claude Shannon’s “mathematical theory of communication,” worked out at Bell Labs, allowed one to calculate the minimum number of binary digits (“bits”) required to code a given word, sound, or image. Shannon 50

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demonstrated that any continuous source could be made discrete — through sampling and quantizing — and any discrete source could be made more efficient. Messages could be compressed by removing their noninformation, or inherent redundancy, a term Warren Weaver defined as “the fraction of the structure of the message which is determined not by the free choice of the sender, but by the accepted statistical rules governing the use of symbols in question.”66 Although Shannon intended “information” to include things like television and radar transmission, his cases were largely language-based. To explain coding based on redundancy, Shannon often referred to Morse code, in which the letter “e” was given the shortest symbol — a single dot — because of its commonness.67 He also referenced Godfrey Dewey, whose 1923 Relativ Frequency of English Speech Sounds was one of the first statistical approaches to phonetics — written entirely in “fonetic” spelling.68 In the case of oral language, redundancy could also be found in physiological characteristics, such as the slowness with which the lips and tongue changed positions (“temporal redundancy”).69 At the Seventh Macy Conference on Cybernetics, Shannon mentioned the constraints of consonant-vowel patterns as another example.70 For continuous sources such as sound, however, exploiting the “requirements of the message destination” promised the greatest feats of compression.71 Gabor depicted communication theory as a sea change in the history of representation: The basic problem of structural communication theory is the adequate representation of signals. By adequate I mean that the representation must contain everything that can be observed by the physical receiver, and nothing else. Once it was believed that a sound, for instance, could be represented by some continuous function s(t) . . . the first step in structural communication theory is to replace this naïve view by what I propose to call the Expansion Theorem . . . any signal could be linearly expanded in terms of certain elementary signals.72

The sound spectrograph was one tool for elucidating what the ear “observed.”73 Images of invisible sound waves traveling through the air were transformed into images that documented frequency components (formants, timbre) as analyzed by the ear, revealing linguistic information as well as material that was acoustically redundant. Fidelity was relative; the requirements for reproduction could be set according to the receiver. “The Deaf May Lead the Way!”

In Visible Speech, Potter, Kopp, and Green forecasted applications of the spectrograph beyond deaf education and visual telephony: the study of Social Text 102

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patterns in animal and insect sounds, the portrayal of the heartbeat, voiceprinting for identification and surveillance, and the discovery of “better ways to take speech sounds to pieces.”74 Potter advertised the spectrograph as a tool for musicians and filmmakers: to generate “audiovisual music,” to control and manipulate sound, and even to “play-back” or translate graphic designs into acoustic form.75 Visible Speech concluded with an exclamation about deaf education and the future of communications: “While there are many potential interests, the important proving ground for visible speech seems certain to be in the field of deaf education . . . What happens during the coming years in the field of deaf education can have a considerable effect upon the future of visible speech. If it comes into general use as a voice-written language for the deaf it could even start a trend toward modernized writing and printing. The deaf may lead the way!”76 Deaf people seemed to be the most objective observers, helping to extract those aspects of speech communication that were universal across different media. Over the next decade, spectrography became profitable in linguistics, ecology, and communication engineering. It became the basis for speech recognition, machine speech, and spectral audio editing. Information theory spawned countless methods for digitizing sound waves based on the compression of redundant material or the elimination of irrelevant material (this latter case is today exemplified by the “lossy” perceptual coding found in MP3s, which capitalizes on the limitations of human hearing). Once again, deaf needs lapsed into the status of precursor and pretext. In a revised edition of Visible Speech, Green confessed that Bell Labs never outfitted any other machines for visual telephony: “Lack of equipment has imposed severe limitations on the extent and nature of the translator research program. There is still only one, original model of the cathoderay translator.”77 Nevertheless, the “miracle” of deaf oral communication continued to assist the advertisement of spectrography in other fields. In the case of spectral phonocardiography, or “heartprinting,” as late as 1968 the following notice appeared in the New York Times: “ ‘Visible Speech’ as a means of communication between deaf people visualizes word-picture patterns, shown as levels separated by contour lines. Now, in an experiment at a member hospital of the United Hospital Fund, this technique has been successfully applied to the analysis of cardiovascular sounds to assess heart defects.”78 Edgar Bloom was possibly the only deaf individual to converse over the telephone using the Visible Speech translator. When the sound spectrograph project ended, he continued to work at Bell Labs for the next twenty-five years as an analytical chemist.79 Bloom served multiple terms as president of the Professional Society of the Deaf and the New York Society for the Deaf. In a 1970 interview in the Deaf American, he 52

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reflected darkly, “My several years of association with hearing people have proven to me beyond doubt their apathy to our problems.”80 Two years later, Bloom described his frustrations more specifically to the White Plains Reporter Dispatch: Being deaf is a severe handicap! We are further handicapped by attitudes toward us. People don’t seem to realize that the deaf are just as capable, if not better, than their hearing peers. We are given jobs that rarely use our potential. We are seldom invited to conferences to review our work, compare notes, make plans for the future, etc. We have to be exceptional to get jobs. We’re not promoted because we can’t use the telephone. Hogwash! We have been taking it on the chin. 81

By 1972, the social importance of the telephone had increased such that, in the words of B. Ruby Rich, “to be without a telephone amounted nearly to a revocation of citizenship.”82 And the sound spectrograph, which worked against sign language all along, had disappointed even its deaf oral supporters. Lacan’s “astonishment” at the outwitting maneuvers of language had not been shared by communication engineers, who moved on with making speech more profitable and efficient. Notes 1. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954 – 1955, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (New York: Norton, 1991), 307. 2. Ibid., 80. 3. Ibid., 119. 4. Ibid., 54. 5. Ibid., 83. 6. Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 158, 160. 7. Dennis Gabor, “Communication Theory, Past, Present, and Prospective,” IEEE Transactions on Information Theory 1 (1953): 2 – 4. 8. Signal quality in the presence of noise was also a concern. 9. The analog spectrograph discussed in this article has largely been replaced by digital, computer-based versions. It is also known as the spectrum analyzer or sonagraph (not to be confused with the ultrasound sonogram). 10. Dennis Fry, The Physics of Speech (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 131. 11. See Walter Frischer, Digital Television: A Practical Guide for Engineers (Berlin: Springer, 2004), 65: “Redundant means superfluous, irrelevant means unnecessary. Superfluous information is information which exists several times in the data stream . . . or simply information which can be easily and losslessly recovered. . . . Irrelevant information is the type which cannot be perceived by the human species.” 12. As Grace Barstow Murphy remarked in her midcentury autobiography, “the fact of deafness is a monkey wrench thrown into the machinery of communication.” Grace Barstow Murphy, Your Deafness Is Not You (New York: Harper, 1954), 7. Social Text 102

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13. On this chain of events — a collaboration between Alexander Graham Bell and otologist Clarence Blake — and on the men’s later attempt to integrate a human tympanum into the speaking telephone, see Clarence Blake, “The Membrana Tympani Telephone,” American Journal of Otology 2 (1880): 180 – 83. See also Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). 14. Robert Brain, “Standards and Semiotics,” in Inscribing Science: Scientific Texts and Materialities of Communication, ed. Timothy Lenoir (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 249 – 85. 15. Hans Günter Tillmann, “Early Modern Instrumental Phonetics,” in Concise History of the Language Sciences: From Sumerians to the Cognitivists, ed. E. F. K. Koerner and R. E. Asher (Oxford: Pergamon, 1995), 402. 16. Along with things like telegraphy, vocoding, and statistical mechanics. John R. Pierce, “The Early Days of Information Theory,” IEEE Transactions on Information Theory 19 (1973): 3 – 8. Pierce always insisted that “communication theory has its origins in the study of electrical communication.” John Pierce, Symbols, Signals and Noise: The Nature and Process of Communication (New York: Harper, 1961), 24. 17. David Mitchell, “Narrative Prosthesis and the Materiality of Metaphor,” in Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities, ed. Sharon Snyder, Brenda Jo Brueggeman, and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2002), 17. 18. Ralph Potter, “Visible Speech,” Bell Laboratories Record 24 (1946): 7. 19. With the assistance of a grant-in-aid from the American Institute of Physics, I interviewed Harriet Green in 2006 and collected her manuscripts (cited throughout) for the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. 20. Ralph K. Potter, George A. Kopp, and Harriet C. Green, Visible Speech (New York: Van Nostrand, 1947), 4. 21. Ernst Wilhelm Ritter von Brücke was Sigmund Freud’s teacher; he developed an iconic alphabet based on prior work done in deaf education. Tillmann, “Early Modern Instrumental Phonetics,” 401. 22. Quoted in Alexander Melville Bell, Visible Speech: The Science of Universal Alphabetics (London: Simpkin, Marshall, 1867), 24. 23. John Wallis, “A Letter of Dr. John Wallis to Robert Boyle Esq, Concerning the Said Doctor’s Essay of Teaching a Person Dumb and Deaf to Speak . . . ,” Philosophical Transactions (1665 – 1678) 5 (1670): 1093. 24. Henry Sweet developed his own “organic alphabet,” based on Visible Speech; it had some influence on the notation of International Phonetics. Henry Sweet, Collected Papers of Henry Sweet, ed. H. C. Wyld (Oxford: Clarendon, 1913), 85. 25. Melville Bell, Visible Speech, 21. 26. Melville Bell’s pronunciation standards for English were, in fact, not set according to efficiency or popularity, but according to the codes of the ruling class. Alexander Melville Bell, World English: The Universal Language (New York: Hodges, 1888), 7. 27. In 1880, the International Congress of Deaf Educators, held in Milan, famously endorsed oralism as a pedagogical strategy, leading to bans on sign language in many schools. The Milan Treaty was an attempt to enforce mainstream communication and eradicate what is now known as Deaf culture. 28. Carolyn Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking about Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 192. 54

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29. Robert Brain, “Representation on the Line: The Graphic Method and the Instruments of Scientific Modernism,” in From Energy to Information: Representation in Science and Technology, Art, and Literature, ed. Bruce Clarke and Linda D. Henderson (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 162. Brain notes that the few prior self-registering devices did not significantly influence scientists and engineers. 30. Earlier modes of representing sound, for instance Ernst Chladni’s eighteenthcentury plates, focused on musical tones rather than speech. Chladni’s plates bore pictorial patterns rather than time-based waves. 31. Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, “Principes de Phonautographie” (“Principles of Phonautography”), 26 January 1857, trans. Patrick Feaster, 9. Available at www.firstsounds.org/public/First-Sounds-Working-Paper-01.pdf (accessed 17 September 2009). 32. Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, “Fixation Graphique de la Voix” (“Graphic Fixation of the Voice”) (lecture to Société d’Encouragement, 28 October 1857), trans. Patrick Feaster, 12. Available at www.firstsounds.org/public/First -Sounds-Working-Paper-03.pdf (accessed 17 September 2009). 33. Hermann von Helmholtz, “The Physiological Causes of Harmony in Music,” in Selected Writings of Hermann von Helmholtz, trans. A. J. Ellis, ed. Russell Kahl (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1971), 88. 34. V. J. Phillips, Waveforms: A History of Early Oscillography (Bristol: Adam Hilger, 1987), 5. 35. The sound “signal” could exist as pressure variations in a variety of media. Rudolph König, “On Manometric Flames,” Philosophical Magazine 45 (1873): 105 – 14. 36. Wallace Clement Sabine, A Student’s Manual of a Laboratory Course in Physical Measurements (Boston: Ginn, 1906), 32. 37. Alexander Graham Bell, The Bell Telephone: The Deposition of Alexander Graham Bell (Boston: American Bell Telephone Company, 1908), 25. 38. Linguist John Joseph contends that “experimental phonetics, the detailed measurement of speech sounds, offered the first truly positivistic approach to language.” John E. Joseph, “Trends in Twentieth-Century Linguistics: An Overview,” in Concise History of the Language Sciences: From Sumerians to the Cognitivists, ed. E. F. K. Koerner and R. E. Asher (Oxford: Pergamon, 1995), 222. 39. Douglas Kahn, “Concerning the Line: Music, Noise, and Phonography,” in From Energy to Information: Representation in Science and Technology, Art, and Literature, ed. Bruce Clarke and Linda D. Henderson (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 189. 40. Étienne-Jules Marey et al., “Graphic Phonetics,” Scientific American, 17 November 1877, 307. 41. Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (New York: Basic, 1990), 116. 42. Marta Braun, Picturing Time: The Work of Etienne-Jules Marey (1830 – 1904) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 348. 43. G. Stanley Hall, “The Graphic Method,” in Aspects of German Culture (Boston: Osgood, 1881), 72. 44. My account is taken from Laurent Mannoni, Georges Demenÿ: Pionnier du Cinema (Paris: Cinematheque Francais/Pagine, 1997), 41 – 42. 45. “En un mot, je jouais du sourd-muet comme on joue d’un orgue de Barbarie.” M. G. Demenÿ, “Les Photographies Parlantes” (“Talking Photographs”), La Nature 20 (1892): 314. 46. Mannoni, Georges Demenÿ, 47. Social Text 102

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47. Quoted in Braun, Picturing Time, 180. Braun dismisses the phonoscope as “nothing more than a projecting phenakistoscope.” 48. Virgilio Tosi, Cinema before Cinema: The Origins of Scientific Cinematography, trans. Sergio Angelini (London: British Universities Film and Video Council, 2005), 140. 49. E. W. Scripture, Stuttering, Lisping, and Correction of the Speech of the Deaf (New York: Macmillan, 1923). 50. E. W. Scripture, “Film Tracks of English Vowels,” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 6 (1935): 169. 51. Frequency, which correlates to the perception of pitch, was calculated by the number of oscillations or cycles per second. Scripture described his method for the harmonic analysis of vowel curves, using a micrometer microscope and a “somewhat complicated” set of calculations, in “Inscriptions of Speech,” Volta Review 22 (1920): 426 – 34. 52. Alexander Graham Bell to Mrs. Bingham, 8 [?] 1885, Alexander Graham Bell Papers Series, Box 1, Folder 3, Alexander Graham Bell Association for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing Collection, The History Factory. 53. Robert V. Bruce details Alexander Graham Bell’s passage from harmonic telegraph and phonautograph to telephone — along with the contemporary research of Philipp Reis and Elisha Gray — in Bell: Alexander Graham Bell and the Conquest of Solitude (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973). 54. Phillips, Waveforms, 8. 55. Ibid., 6. 56. See Dayton Clarence Miller’s chapter on mechanical harmonic analysis in The Science of Musical Sounds (New York: Macmillan, 1916). 57. R. V. L. Hartley, “Transmission of Information,” Bell System Technical Journal 7 (1928): 542. 58. Although Potter described spectrograms as “correlated” to hearing in early publications, he acknowledged that a true “aural spectrograph” had not yet been achieved. Moreover, different filter combinations and overall bandwidths might allow “visual hearing” beyond the range of the human ear. Ralph K. Potter, “Visible Patterns of Sound,” Science 102 (1945): 463–470; Ralph K. Potter, “Objectives for Sound Portrayal,” Journal of Acoustic Society of America 21 (1949): 1–5. 59. Loretta McDermott Winters and Catherine Teresa McDermott, “Visual Hearing and the Deaf,” Volta Review 48 (1946): 326. 60. Robert L. Swain Jr., Deaf American, September 1970, 4. Clipping in the “Edgar Bloom” folder, Deaf Biographical File Case, Gallaudet University Archives. 61. “Report on Visible Speech Experiments: Summer Session, 1947,” p. 3, Box 3, Folder 11, Harriet Green Kopp Papers, Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of American History. 62. Franklin S. Cooper, Alvin M. Liberman, and John M. Borst, “The Interconversion of Audible and Visual Patterns as a Basis for Research in the Perception of Speech,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science 37 (1951): 318. 63. R. K. Potter and J. C. Steinberg, “Toward the Specification of Speech,” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 22 (1950): 807 – 20. 64. Gabor, “Communication Theory, Past, Present, and Prospective,” 2. 65. Dennis Gabor, “Lectures on Communication Theory,” p. 41 (lectures, Research Laboratory of Electronics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Fall 1951), in DSpace at MIT, hdl.handle.net/1721.1/4830 (accessed 25 June 2008).

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66. By this time, pulse code modulation (PCM) had already been used to digitize telephone calls simply by sampling a speech wave in time and transmitting patterns of pulses or numbers that corresponded to the amplitudes of the samples. Information theory suggested that signals could be greatly compressed by assigning the shortest codes to the most common material, or by eliminating material that was unnecessary because it was imperceptible (irrelevant). Warren Weaver, “Some Recent Contributions to the Mathematical Theory of Communication,” in The Mathematical Theory of Communication, by Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver (1949; repr. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1963), 13. Elsewhere, Shannon defined redundancy as “the extent to which it is possible to compress the language.” Claude Shannon, “The Redundancy of English,” in Cybernetics: Circular Causal and Feedback Mechanisms in Biological and Social Systems, Transactions of the Seventh Conference, ed. Heinz von Foerster (New York: Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation, 1951), 124. 67. C. E. Shannon, “Prediction and Entropy of Printed English,” Bell Systems Technical Journal 30 (1951): 50 – 64. Jill Lepore reminds that Morse himself “studied quantities of different letter types in a printing shop to determine letter frequency.” Jill Lepore, A Is for American: Letters and Other Characters in the Newly United States (New York: Knopf, 2002), 151. 68. Godfrey Dewey’s father, Melvil (of Dewey Decimal fame), had previously studied the frequencies of written words. Godfrey applied the Funk and Wagnall’s dictionary to the “pronunciation” of words from various written sources. He offered his results to the electroacoustic community: “For the research laboratory of the engineering or manufacturing corporation dealing with such acoustic devices as the telefone or fonograf, these analitic quantitativ data provid important material for study of the most efficient or effctive transmission or reproduction of speech sounds.” Godfrey Dewey, Relativ Frequency of English Speech Sounds (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1923), viii. 69. Grant Fairbanks, W. L. Everitt, and R. P. Jaeger, “Method for Time or Frequency Compression-Expansion of Speech,” Transactions of the IRE Professional Group on Audio 2 (1954): 7. 70. Shannon, “Redundancy of English,” 144. Coding eventually included the replacement of “bad redundancy” with cost-efficient redundancy to ensure “spare parts” for messages traveling through noisy or error-prone channels. 71. Pierce, “Early Days of Information Theory,” 5. 72. Dennis Gabor, “Communication Theory and Cybernetics,” Transactions of the IRE Professional Group on Circuit Theory 1 (1954): 19. 73. Moreover, as Frederik Nebeker has recently argued, “the technique itself — time-frequency signal representation — came to be widely used in signal processing.” Frederik Nebeker, Signal Processing: The Emergence of a Discipline, 1948 to 1998 (New Brunswick, NJ: IEEE History Center, 1998), 44. 74. Potter, Kopp, and Green, Visible Speech, 417. 75. Ralph K. Potter, “Audiovisual Music,” Hollywood Quarterly 3 (1947): 66 – 78; Ralph K. Potter, “New Scientific Tools for the Arts,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 10 (1951): 126 – 34. 76. Potter, Kopp, and Green, Visible Speech, 421. 77. Ralph K. Potter, George A. Kopp, Harriet Green Kopp, Visible Speech, rev. ed. (New York: Dover, 1965), v. To a limited extent, the sound spectrograph continues to be applied to speech correction, mostly in service of intonation and articulation (as opposed to the direct translation required for visual telephony). For various reasons, spectrograms proved extremely difficult to read as “words.”

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78. “Seeing Heart Sounds,” New York Times, 26 October 1968, 62. 79. In the 1960s, Edgar Bloom once again became a Bell test subject — this time for the Picturephone, which was publicly inaugurated in 1964 with a call between two deaf schoolchildren. 80. Swain, Deaf American. 81. Edgar Bloom, quoted in White Plains Reporter Dispatch. Clipping in the “Edgar Bloom” folder, Deaf Biographical File Case, Gallaudet University Archives. 82. B. Ruby Rich, “The Party Line: Gender and Technology in the Home,” in Processed Lives: Gender and Technology in Everyday Life, ed. Jennifer Terry (New York: Routledge, 1997), 224.

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Splicing the Sonic Color-Line Tony Schwartz Remixes Postwar Nueva York Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman

When Tony Schwartz died in 2008, his Manhattan neighborhood lost a steadfast anchor and devoted chronicler. For over sixty years, Schwartz and his wife, Reenah, made their home in a converted church in the upper Fifties between Ninth and Tenth avenues. Here the Schwartzes lived, worked, raised their children, and quietly amassed an archive of more than thirty thousand recordings now housed in the Library of Congress, the lion’s share of which Tony made just feet from their front door. Recording began as a hobby but quickly became an obsession; it soothed the agoraphobia Schwartz had struggled with since age thirteen. His recording equipment enabled him to turn a concrete grid of strangers into a familiar home filled with potential friends. While unable to leave his New York postal code without extreme discomfort, the portable recording technology Schwartz developed allowed him to explore the many thousands of lives lived on the streets of New York 19, now 10019.1 His relationship with independent record label Folkways allowed him to travel even further, at least metaphorically; Folkways released ten records of his material by 1962. 2 While the success of his early recordings exhibited an almost gravitational pull — Paul Robeson, Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Harry Belafonte, Mahalia Jackson, Langston Hughes, and W. E. B. Du Bois all came to the Schwartz home to record in the 1950s — his investment in and fascination with the everyday sounds, music, and stories of the people in his neighborhood never ceased. Even at the end of his life, Schwartz took afternoon walks to check in with friends, neighbors, and favorite shop owners. Schwartz and his tape recorder have been two constants in a perpetually changing neighborhood. His immense audio archive documents Social Text 102 • Vol. 28, No. 1 • Spring 2010 DOI 10.1215/01642472-2009-060  © 2010 Duke University Press

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Figure 1. Tony Schwartz making live street recording, New York City, circa 1955. Courtesy of Anton Schwartz

decades of flux within New York City’s core. Schwartz not only witnessed the city’s postwar demographic shifts but was an active participant, strapping microphones to his wrist and capturing Manhattan’s shifting soundscape with the twelve-pound Magnemite recorder over his shoulder (see figure 1). Sometimes called Midtown, Schwartz’s community is a diverse crossroads of several neighborhoods: Hell’s Kitchen, the Upper West Side, Times Square, and the now-defunct San Juan Hill and Lincoln Square districts, razed to build Lincoln Center in the early 1960s. When Schwartz migrated to Midtown in 1944 — against the tide of “white flight” — he arrived amid one of the neighborhood’s biggest population shifts, when New Yorkers of Irish, Italian, Jewish, and German descent began leaving in droves and Puerto Rican migration brought more than a hundred thousand new residents, pushed from the island by economic hardships wrought by U.S. economic policy and pulled to Manhattan by promises of opportunity. In 1955, Schwartz released a Folkways album called Nueva York: A Tape Documentary of Puerto Rican New Yorkers.3 Culled from over 120 hours of tape, his 45-minute composition mixes interviews, ambient sounds, and musical performance to represent various Puerto Rican migration experi60

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ences. The record is organized loosely along an archetypal “im/migrant experience,” beginning with the arrival of a plane from San Juan and using snippets of stories, interviews, and music to depict the migrants’ quest for employment, housing, cultural centers, and schooling. Schwartz only occasionally reminds listeners of his presence as an interviewer, relying instead on editing strategies to remix and reorder sounds without any narration, a technique he later dubbed “sono-montage.”4 Behind many of the interviews are the sounds of midcentury city life: rushing traffic, honking horns, children playing, and murmuring crowds. Nueva York blends the voices of Puerto Rican migrants with the sounds of their new city to examine the stakes of assimilation alongside the material effects of racism. At the time, Schwartz’s audio interventions seemed a lo-fi novelty to many listeners, perhaps explaining why he has little scholarly legacy today. Although public radio tributes abound, this is the first full-length scholarly article to be published on Schwartz’s life and work.5 The initial dismissal of his recordings as mere “sound effects” is perhaps unsurprising in an era when hi-fi enthusiasts regularly brought home records featuring roaring tigers, subway trains, and ringing telephones to fine-tune their speaker setups.6 Certainly, the small circulation of Folkways records factors into the critical silence surrounding Schwartz; Nueva York’s production folder only shows approximately 589 sales between 1960 and 1981, although digitization has since enabled it to be heard anew.7 Ultimately, though, Schwartz’s critical neglect may be due to a long-standing scholarly “deaf spot” concerning audio culture. Western culture’s deeply embedded visual bias has meant that sound is treated primarily as an augmentative effect of vision rather than as an epistemology in its own right. Or, as Schwartz once told a reporter: “History up to now has been writing and pictures. . . . I should like to start a public archive of the sounds of our times.”8 This essay represents a first engagement with Schwartz’s sonic archive, treating its contents not as a random assortment of “sound effects” but as heavily mediated sounds grounded in time and place and engineered to intervene in public discourse. Working from assumptions located in sound studies, namely that sound represents a realm of knowledge related to — yet distinct from — vision, I argue that Schwartz’s recordings are essential listening for two reasons. One, Schwartz’s meticulous attention to the “sounds of [his] times” (and, I would add, of his place) helps scholars reconstruct the 1950s from an entirely different vantage point: the ear. Two, Schwartz understood something that sound studies scholars are only beginning to tease out: sound is not merely a scientific phenomenon —  vibrations passing through matter at particular frequencies — it is also a set of social relations. Listening to the 1950s through Nueva York amplifies precisely how much sound has played a role in historical processes of racialization, both Social Text 102

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in terms of assigning and maintaining clearly racialized identities and segregating urban space. To understand Schwartz’s audio intervention, I examine how sound already appeared in the dominant discourse of race during the postwar era, a period that simultaneously marked the beginning of the modern conception of “color blindness” and the high-water mark of segregation. Through original archival analysis, I trace the emergence of sound as an efficient medium for racial discourse during this period of white racial crisis, what Howard Winant has called “the postwar racial break.”9 Sound not only operated in conjunction with visual racial hierarchies but — in the context of color blindness — it frequently operated in its place, especially in volatile debates over the American metropolis and its supposed decline into a dangerous urban wasteland overwhelmed by people of color. In this essay, I theorize the mutually constitutive relationship I find between sound, listening, and race as the “sonic color-line,” and I hear Schwartz’s Nueva York as symptomatic of the ways in which listening experiences both reflect and generate ideas about racial difference and its historical connection to American citizenship. Schwartz himself is not immune to processes of racialization; while actively involved in the Puerto Rican life of his neighborhood, he was neither Puerto Rican nor Spanish speaking, factors which constrain and compel his project to take on what the liner notes for Nueva York describe as “various forms of translation.” While he does manage to unsettle the voices of white New Yorkers within the edited dialogue of Nueva York, the various aural translations that Schwartz undertakes — of Spanish to English, of urban noise to city sound, of white stereotype to Puerto Rican realities — yield to the listening ear of white consumers and amplify his own privileged access to recording technology and radio media, largely unavailable to Puerto Ricans themselves. Beyond describing racialized modes of perception and reception, the sonic color-line also demarcates unequal access to modes of sonic production that have historically separated the recorders from the recorded. Because Nueva York asks its listeners to examine sound as a primary discourse that is socially constructed and historically contingent, both context and theorization are essential to my analysis. Therefore, “Splicing the Sonic Color-Line” closes with a reading of the record rather than beginning with it. I open by detailing my methodology and theorizing the sonic color-line, locating my intervention at the intersection of ethnic studies and the emerging field of sound studies and positing listening as an interpretive site where racial difference is coded, produced, and policed. The subsequent section uses original archival material to reconstruct the historical soundscape of Tony Schwartz’s street recordings and reveal the sonic color-line as the aggregated racialized constraints and protocols regarding sound that Nueva York is both embedded in and struggling 62

Stoever-Ackerman ∙ Splicing the Sonic Color-Line Nueva York

against. Through an analysis of mainstream media representations of urban space contemporary with Nueva York, I excavate invocations of “peace and quiet” and descriptions of “noise” to reveal the racialized edges of both terms. My final section returns to Nueva York to trace the way in which Schwartz’s “sono-montage” splices the sonic color-line, translating mainstream representations of the so-called homogenous “noise” of Puerto Rican life into textured, meaningful sound to assimilated (white) Americans. Flipping the script on white flight, Nueva York uses sound to rewrite the dominant narrative of fear and (white) victimization as an exercise of power and xenophobia. Methodologies of the Sonic Color-Line

Certainly, bringing theories of racial formation to bear on conversations about sound and music is not an entirely novel proposition.10 I am particularly informed by Fred Moten’s examination of sound’s role in/as “blackness” in In the Break, especially his careful attention to a wide range of sonic phenomena within the black radical jazz tradition — screams, cries, groans, hollers, and whistles — and his exploration of literature’s overlooked aurality. Josh Kun’s Audiotopia also utilizes a multigenre archive to articulate the resistant role popular music plays in shaping American racial identity, although he emphasizes liberatory “audiotopias” that belie the limits of American racial formation. Inspired by and indebted to this work, I broaden it by theorizing the racialized constraints that created the conditions of/for the sonic resistance that Moten and Kun detail.11 To further a more comprehensive understanding of listening as a racialized practice, I depart from an emphasis on musical production and reception to examine representations of everyday auditory experiences in urban soundscapes, of which music is only a part. “Splicing the Sonic ColorLine” acknowledges how listening has been and continues to be imbricated in the processes of raced and gendered subjection that we usually ascribe to the visual realm.12 My notion of the “sonic color-line” bridges the theoretical with cultural and historical representation to provide a framework for understanding the crucial and undertheorized relationship between listening and oppression. Without foreclosing the resistant possibilities of listening that are integral to a work like Nueva York, I believe that interventions like Schwartz’s help us to understand how listening and sound are always already enmeshed in power relations. Tracing the sonic color-line in its historic and cultural contexts necessarily requires an interdisciplinary methodology that traverses multiple archives and utilizes more than one critical method. Because of the well-documented visual bias in Western culture and scholarly criticism, sound is frequently marginalized within historical accounts and/or treated Social Text 102

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as ancillary to visual media.13 Finding rich audio material like Nueva York is rare enough, but properly contextualizing it within larger historical American attitudes about sound is especially challenging, involving listening for aural representation in multiple representational outlets, including written sites where it is not usually or easily located — such as newspaper coverage, readers’ letters, film, and memoir.14 Once located, I use closereading strategies to distill what Richard Cullen Rath described as “sonic protocols”: culturally specific and socially constructed conventions that shape how sound is made, used, and interpreted at a given moment.15 The sonic color-line forms a dominant sonic protocol that attempts to contain the sound of “Others” and silence alternative listening practices as aberrant and dangerous, even inhuman. In effect, sounds from the past come to us already listened to; they are mediated through and by raced, gendered, and historicized “listening ears,” an expression I use as a theoretical construct to describe how listening functions as an embodied cultural process that echoes and shapes one’s orientation to power and one’s posture toward the world. To reconstruct the historical presence of the sonic color-line and examine its mobilization against Puerto Rican migration in the immediate postwar period, I close-read the New York Times as a primary source document symptomatic of mainstream white American attitudes at the beginning of the cold war.16 My close-reading practice — theoretically informed and culturally and historically contextualized — enables me to intervene at the critical site where audio intersects the literary and both meet the epistemological: language. Precisely because newspapers were designed for rapid consumption and were never meant to be subject to the scrutiny of close reading, they are especially revealing of cultural mores and historical attitudes concerning race and sound. I pored over articles specifically addressing Puerto Rican migration, white migration to the suburbs, and urban renewal–related construction in Manhattan from 1949 to 1959, looking for mentions of “noise.” Although several newspapers were published in New York during the 1950s, I chose the New York Times for its large circulation and deliberately centrist politics. While more overtly racist references to Puerto Rican soundscapes abound in the Hearst-owned Daily Mirror and more sharp racial awareness and strident cultural critique are present in African American papers like Harlem’s Amsterdam News, this essay focuses on news coverage that professed “unbiased” color-blind representation from a (white) mainstream vantage point.17 I argue that it is in moments where race is strategically and deliberately downplayed that the sonic color-line performs the most cultural work. Furthermore, the Times covers the same terrain recorded so thoroughly by Tony Schwartz, while self-consciously publishing with both a national and international audience in mind.18 The Times’s representations of New York City during 64

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this period reached beyond the city’s borders; its coverage treated the city as a microcosm for American identity at large and was self-conscious about how the city appeared on the world stage during the cold war. Theorizing the Sonic Color-Line

I have developed the term sonic color-line to describe the relationship between listening and bodily codes of race. Inspired by and indebted to W. E. B. Du Bois’s concept of the visual color-line in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) and his later reimagining of that color-line as a suffocating plate-glass enclosure in Dusk of Dawn (1940), my notion of the sonic color-line posits listening as an interpretive site where racial difference is coded, produced, and policed.19 In essence, we hear race in addition to seeing it. Sonic phenomena like vocal timbre, accents, and musical tones are racially coded, like skin color, hair texture, and clothing choices. At one level, the sonic color-line posits racialized subject positions like “white,” “black,” and “brown” as historical accretions of sonic phenomena and stereotypes that can function without their correlating visual signifiers and can often stand in for them. The tropicalized “jungle drum” motif that opens the film version of West Side Story (1961), for example, signifies nonwhite bodies in the streets of Manhattan long before the Puerto Rican Sharks make the scene. 20 Through multiple simultaneous processes of dominant representation — such as the journalistic and phonographic evidence of this essay — particular sounds are identified, exaggerated, and sutured to racialized bodies. These sounds include musical ones like the drums described above, vocal sounds like accents, dialects, “slang,” and extraverbal utterances, as well as ambient domestic and street sounds. For example, Lisa Gitelman describes how early recording technologies ushered in a new era of blackface minstrelsy in which “sounding black” was far more important for white minstrels than applying burnt cork, positing music as “another possible substance of intrinsic racial difference.”21 White-constructed ideas about “sounding Other” have historically circumscribed the complex range of sounds actually made and produced by people of color, marking the main contour of the sonic color-line. Aural signifiers of race are thoroughly enmeshed with the visuality of race; they never really lose their ultimate referent to different types of bodies despite being able to travel beyond an immediate physical presence. While “sounding black” is certainly linked to looking black, aural ideas of “blackness” often trump any notion of authenticity proffered via the racial logic of visible phenotype. White actors Freeman Fisher Gosden and Charles Correll played the neominstrel characters Amos and Andy on the radio, for example, while black actor Frank Wilson was not hired to narrate the 1941 Social Text 102

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radio program Freedom’s People because he sounded “too much like a white man” to both white and black producers. 22 These examples point to the instability of sound as a racial determinant and the possibility of crossing the sonic color-line; however, they also highlight that there are very definite ideas within American culture that connect racialized bodies to sounds, even if these labels prove to be unproductive and inaccurate. Ideas about race are thus (re)produced through aural imagery and performance. Traffic across the sonic color-line is policed at the level of representation. Whiteness, on the other hand, is notorious for reproducing itself as “invisible”23 — or in this case, inaudible — a condition and expression of power that has dramatically shaped the contours of the sonic color-line. The inaudibility of whiteness is due to a considerably wider palette of representation, as well as to a general perception that white representations stand in for “people” in general, rather than “white people” in particular. The inaudibility of whiteness does not mean that it has no sonic markers, 24 but merely that they can be harder to hear because of their perceived role as the keynote of American identity, which I will address in the following section. As the dominant “listening ear” is disciplined to process white male ways of sounding as default — natural, normal, and desirable —  alternate ways of listening and sounding are deemed aberrant and, depending upon the historical context, as excessively sensitive, strikingly deficient, or impossibly both. While it never seems to speak its own name, the centrality of white sonic identity is imagined against circumscribed representations of black and brown sound that are often white-constructed. The binary hierarchy of proper/improper marks one border of the sonic color-line; the socially constructed divisions between sound/noise and quiet/loud mark two others. The centrality of whiteness has meant the construction of direct associations between particular brands of white speech and “standard English.” The propriety of standard white speech is amplified — and represented as continually threatened by — dialects, accents, and “improper” slang terminology attributed to immigrants and/or people of color. The entanglement of whiteness with “correct speech” has direct material effects when it comes to obtaining good housing and employment, as Schwartz’s Nueva York illustrates and as sociologist John Baugh’s research into linguistic profiling has borne out. 25 In addition to speech, other sounds linked to racialized bodies, such as music and the ambient sounds of everyday living, are frequently deemed as “noise”: sound’s loud and unruly “Other.”26 Like Schwartz, I understand the concept of noise not merely in scientific terms — loudness measured in decibels. Schwartz resolutely maintained that the definition of a concept like noise was almost entirely in the ear of the beholder: “Noise is an editorial word. When you talk about noise, you are talking about sound that is bothering you. There’s no party so noisy 66

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as the one you’re not invited to.”27 I define noise as a shifting analytic that renders certain sounds — and the bodies that produce and consume them — as Other: different, out of place, dangerous, ignored, and/or what Cornel West describes as “incomprehensible and unintelligible” under white supremacist epistemologies. 28 Loudness, in particular, seems to be a quality of noise frequently linked to ethnic communities. While cultural uses of the term are not exclusive to race — the noise of industry, for example, or of a sporting event — I refer specifically to the ways in which noise is invoked in direct connection to (or as a metonymic stand-in for) people of color. Sometimes tolerated, but more often fetishized as exotic or demonized as unassimilable, noise and loudness frequently function as aural substitutes for and markers of race. “Quiet Surroundings” versus “Hives of Buzzing Spanish”: Imagining the Postwar Urban Soundscape

In her memoir, Silent Dancing, Judith Ortiz Cofer remembers the year her family left El Building — the Puerto Rican tenement barrio in Paterson, New Jersey — for an apartment over the Schultz family grocery store in a white neighborhood. After buying a home in affluent West Paterson, the Schultzes decided to rent to Cofer’s father based on his “fair skin, his ultra-correct English, and his Navy uniform,” three important qualifications for first-class American citizenship during the 1950s.29 In the hopes of inhabiting the apartment and the racialized class status attached to it, Cofer’s father set out to prove to the Schultzes that they “were not the usual Puerto Rican family.”30 Her father lovingly but constantly corrected her speech — “not ‘jes’ but ‘y-es.’ Y-es sir” — and insisted that they remove their shoes to remain inaudible during the store’s operating hours. “We were going to prove how respectable we were,” Cofer recalls, “by being the opposite of what our ethnic group was known to be — we would be quiet and inconspicuous.”31 The sonic color-line’s determination of what “usual Puerto Rican” families sounded like caused Cofer’s family to discipline their speech, bodies, and psyches to an ever-present and unceasingly judgmental white American listening ear. After moving across the sonic colorline, the entire family is ensconced in a profound silence. So where did the bonds between sound, race, and citizenship originate? How did the aural stereotype that Puerto Ricans were noisy and loud become disseminated throughout American culture? How did silence and quiet become the province of white suburban identity? I subsequently address these questions by tracking the sonic color-line in the dominant discourse of the 1950s — represented by the New York Times — and reconstructing the racialized soundscape that Cofer remembers and Schwartz’s Nueva York documents. Social Text 102

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The Times’s 1955 series “Our Changing City” provides a sociohistorical backdrop for the complex intersections among race, sound, socalled urban renewal, suburbanization, and American identity. The series paints a fearful portrait of a treacherous concrete jungle threatened by mass migrations of poor people of color, using taglines that echoed the gloom of film noir and the doom of science fiction: “poverty and overcrowding,” “creeping urbanization,” “Bronxification,” “gang fights and muggings,” “West-siders fleeing a Puerto Rican influx.”32 “Our Changing City” tells the story of white residents struggling to comprehend the rapid transformations of “their” city — at the precise moment they are leaving it in large numbers for Westchester tract homes, racially exclusive Levittowns, and posh Connecticut hills, ensuring the proliferation of the very ghettos they so feared. The series reflected and shaped the dominant perspective that white residents were being pushed out of the city by im/migration rather than pulled into the suburbs by a new spatialization of white privilege. Within “Our Changing City” — and similar Times coverage from the period — writers frequently utilize sound as a stand-in for race. By racializing sound and mapping it onto particular spaces and bodies, white New Yorkers constructed new pockets of segregated space without explicit reference to race or wholesale acknowledgment of racism. White flight during the immediate postwar period was increasingly justified by characterizations of the city as a noisy place, where victims of industrial and construction noise (largely poor people of color and/or immigrants) were represented as its natural and essential causes. When zoning laws and other forms of citizen activism failed to keep the noises of the city at bay, wealthier whites sought a private solution “by turning inward and creating acoustically efficient refuge from the noises of public life” in the suburbs. 33 The sonic color-line demarcated the “quiet” suburbs as a selective respite for economically and racially privileged Americans while allowing them to evade responsibility for their role in creating the din experienced by increasingly (re)segregated black and brown residents of the inner city. In spite of the fact that white flight often preceded Puerto Rican in-migration, Puerto Rican New Yorkers are represented throughout “Our Changing City” as an invading mass — a hive, a swarm, a teem, a spill — that displaces previous residents. Signaling the power and material consequences of representation, the article on the Lower Bronx reports that the “flight of whites has begun in some cases with the announcement of a forthcoming [housing] project, perhaps years before it is completed.”34 Careful to operate within the bounds of postwar color blindness, the writer notes that the arrival of Puerto Rican (and African American) migrants is “not so apparent” as “some of the outward evidences of change apparent to the eye.”35 While apparently easy on the eyes, New York City’s newest residents are frequently depicted as grating on the ears. As a 1966 ret68

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rospective on migration put it, the “typical Puerto Rican neighborhood looks peaceful enough though it is teeming with life all of the time and often noisy.”36 To the listening ears of the so-called average American across the sonic color-line, the familiar city landscape was transformed by an invasive Puerto Rican soundscape. “Loud” and “voluble Spanish” filled the air, along with “Caribbean rhythms and guitar twangs,” “wild shouts [of] children in the streets,” “boisterous” and “characteristic Latin dissension,” and the sound of “television and radio blaring simultaneously.”37 Puerto Rican Pentecostal storefront churches were described as “unseemly” gatherings filled with “noisy hymn-singing camaraderie and handclapping.”38 Puerto Ricans were sonically represented by the Times as “rough, rowdy, loud, and hilarious,”39 terms that evoke the antithetical image of the disciplined decorum of body and voice demanded by (white) American cold-war norms and listening practices. As Cofer recalls in her memoir: “We were expected to behave with restraint . . . to defeat the stereotype of the loud, slovenly tenement-dweller.”40 Stereotypical descriptions of Puerto Ricans deemed them out of place in dominant (white) America; the racialized social construction of noise was a key arena where their alterity was built and maintained. During these postwar migrations, the “noise” of Spanish and the much-derided Puerto Rican accent became sonic stand-ins for Puerto Ricans themselves. The “Our Changing City” feature on Western Brooklyn described how old “family mansions have been subdivided into warrens” for Puerto Rican residents, transforming them into “hives of buzzing Spanish,” an image with obvious industrial and insectoid resonance.41 A 1949 article about anti – Puerto Rican sentiment describes how mainland Americans “considered all Puerto Ricans ignorant, unintelligent, and stupid because they [did] not speak English.”42 “Spic” — a derogatory term whose origins date back to 1913 — made a dramatic resurgence, racializing Puerto Ricans by the sound of their speech rather than through color.43 The sonic color-line socialized mainstream American listening ears to discern a particular type of English as a citizenship standard and deemed the very sound of Spanish — or Spanish-inflected English — as a threatening and racialized sign of intellectual, cultural, and national inferiority. The forcibly exaggerated vocal representations of 1940s and 1950s Hollywood stars Carmen Miranda and Desi Arnaz signified this generalized “Latin accent” to mainstream Americans.44 For Puerto Ricans, the sonic color-line worked in conjunction with the vestiges of the visual color-line to mark them as noisy and foreign, thus silently contesting and undercutting their legal claims to U.S. citizenship. As Alberto Sandoval-Sánchez has argued, images of the Puerto Rican migrant hovered on the tense border between “Latino Foreign Other” and Social Text 102

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“Latin domestic ethnic and racial other.”45 For example, Spanish-speaking Puerto Rican voters were subject to the New York State literacy test, a state law from 1922 to 1965 that required all persons to speak and write fluently in English to register to vote; the test dramatically reduced the political voice of Puerto Ricans in New York.46 Furthermore, the sound of Spanish or a “Latin accent” to a landlord’s ears often meant de facto segregation into substandard and overpriced housing.47 Under the logic of the sonic color-line, the sound of a Spanish accent or a Spanish last name became noise that immediately classed and raced Puerto Ricans, labeling them slum dwellers and preventing them from moving into areas that lighter skin privilege may have afforded them under the visual color-line.48 The marker of noise labeled as “slums” the inner-city neighborhoods with ethnic enclaves — like the Bronx or the West Side of Schwartz’s Nueva York — making them vulnerable to wholesale displacement and demolition in the name of progress under urban renewal programs. In a 1958 letter to the New York Times titled “Invasion of Privacy by Noise,” a reader went so far as to declare the entire city “an audio slum.”49 Another Times letter writer pleaded on behalf of the “peaceful people in the nice, quiet, clean neighborhoods, upon whom the hordes of Puerto Ricans descended.”50 When thus linked to the bodies of Others, noise was a classed and raced marker of difference that implicitly threatened the idea of a unified American nation and was used to justify segregation, disenfranchisement, and forced intracity migration. Heavily supported by federal investment in suburbanization, the postwar sonic color-line hailed newly constructed suburban neighborhoods and their white inhabitants as quiet in contrast to the “slums, dirt, and noise” of the sonically polluted metropolis.51 As Schwartz was becoming interested in the sounds of city life, the New York Times was publishing lifestyle pieces in the Home section such as “A Quiet House,” which detailed how recent advances in acoustical engineering could banish noise from one’s suburban home.52 Other pieces hailed the overwhelmingly white suburbs of Queens, Long Island, Westchester, and Fairfield as “quiet surroundings where people can live, work or seek refuge from the din of homo mechanicus.”53 In positing the suburbs as a quiet refuge from the noise of modernization projects and industrial labor, the article deftly elides the fact that the majority of urban-renewal projects in New York City were undertaken in the interests of facilitating automobile traffic from outlying areas and increasing office space for suburban workers. The resulting din of modernization projects undertaken in the service of white privilege — like the construction of the Cross Bronx Expressway in 1948 — is neutralized as a sign of necessary progress and slum clearance. Schwartz heard this firsthand in the West Side. Many of the recordings that eventually became Nueva York were 70

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made in San Juan Hill and Lincoln Square, neighborhoods that planner Robert Moses slated for slum clearance in 1955 to develop Lincoln Center. In addition to living just blocks away from years’ worth of earsplitting demolition and construction, Schwartz understood how thousands of his neighbors were silenced in order to create the quiet entertainment space for the powerful, prosperous, and privileged. Schwartz produced a radio program for WNYC in protest, drawing on the many Puerto Rican, Jewish, and Italian musician-residents he had recorded within the new center’s looming footprint. A skeptical Schwartz closed the program with the equivocal “hope [that] it [Lincoln Center] brings as much culture to the community as did the people who were displaced.”54 While Puerto Rican residents displaced by urban renewal generally resettled in other New York neighborhoods, Jewish, Italian, and other (newly) white ethnic identities frequently shed their inner-city immigrant pasts for a “deeply racialized fantasy of suburban whiteness,”55 which often meant exchanging certain sonic markers of difference for suburban peace, quiet, and conformity. In 1952, for example, 160,000 Jews either shortened or replaced their last names.56 The popular radio program Meet the Goldbergs was renamed Molly in 1949 when its cast left the Bronx for the fictional suburb of Haverville and the show migrated to television screens; Molly’s accent also became “much less Yiddish.”57 Kun describes a similar exorcising of the Yiddish sound from both Hollywood and Tin Pan Alley as part of a wholesale racial project to “reconfigure the Jew as meltably ethnic, white Americans no different from anyone else on the suburban block.”58 In a 1950s cultural landscape, suburban automatically equaled white American. For Jews eager to enter the ranks of the fully assimilated, the stakes of “sounding Jewish” in public were too high. Rather than risk the stereotype of “the Jew as a language-corrupting, racial alien,”59 Jews silenced the aural markers of Jewishness or left them behind as echoes in the aural palimpsest of inner-city neighborhoods like the West Side. Nueva York

At the moment when other Jewish Americans were leaving New York City by the thousands, Schwartz’s life took the opposite trajectory. Rather than shedding his “not quite white” past — his father was a Romanian immigrant who grew up in a Lower East Side tenement — Schwartz rejected suburban homogeneity in favor of Manhattan’s intercultural crossroads.60 While his decision to move into the city (rather than flee from it) belies the mobility of his racial and class privilege, this decision was not without its own sociopolitical stakes: “Those who fought urban renewal, or who sought to make a home in the urban ruins, found themselves locked out of the middle class. They also faced an ideological assault that labeled their Social Text 102

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neighborhoods slums and them slumdwellers.”61 For Schwartz, making a home in New York City went hand-in-hand with countering ideological assaults on the city’s residents through artistic representation. Almost immediately after moving to Manhattan in the mid-1940s, Schwartz bought his first wire recorder. Liberated from recording studios — “studios are for silence, not sound,” Schwartz proclaimed — his mobile technology allowed him to make live recordings on the street and in his neighbors’ churches, schools, stores, and homes.62 Though he was neither an anthropologist nor a trained ethnographer, Schwartz’s stake in documenting West Side life, in general, and Puerto Rican migration, in particular, was shaped by his father Samuel’s turn-ofthe-century immigrant experiences. Samuel’s story embodies the “bootstraps” European immigrant success story so prevalent in mainstream American culture of the 1940s and 1950s. Tony described his father surviving with fifty words of English — learning at the rate of one word a day — while doing heavy lifting at the shipping department of Klein’s, a discount women’s store near Union Square.63 As Tony returned to ethnic urban space, Samuel was becoming “meltably ethnic,” even joining the cold-war effort in the Army Corps of Engineers. While privately sharing his immigrant past via bedtime stories in suburban Peekskill, New York, Samuel publicly achieved the middle-class success of the assimilated (white) American ideal. The sonic juxtapositions of Nueva York, however, undercut the coldwar era’s quintessentially American immigrant success story by representing im/migration as a sequential practice of spatial discrimination. Nueva York posits racism as endemic to American society, targeting assimilation as a form of cultural amnesia and a process of absorbing and perpetuating racial discrimination rather than of resisting and altering it. While his father’s experience gestured toward a more tolerant America, Schwartz observed: “In the 1940s and the 1950s I saw Puerto Rican families moving into the same areas [where my father had lived]. I heard and saw situations that reminded me of the stories that my father told me. New Yorkers who had a few years or a generation ago been in the same situation were dealing with the Puerto Rican New Yorkers with the same misunderstanding they had been dealt.”64 By representing the voices of assimilated New Yorkers as willfully misunderstanding Puerto Ricans, Schwartz calls attention to the racism underpinning the dominant narrative of American immigration and amplifies the deliberate exclusions that facilitated the 1950s expansion of whiteness. Despite their supposed citizenship privilege, Puerto Rican migrants were corralled into the same areas circumscribed for America’s Others generations ago. For the privilege of being considered unmarked New Yorkers, former immigrants and their descendents became the newest gatekeepers of the white America that had once vehemently excluded them. 72

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Framed as a corrective to nostalgic immigrant stories and a counter­ argument to nationalist-edged racism, Nueva York uses sono-montage to navigate across the sonic color-line and tell a different story of Puerto Rican migration. Schwartz’s sono-montage relies heavily on editing to create meaning and narrative flow; there is no plot or narration, no names are used, and little context is given for any sound beyond brief liner notes like “Landlord comment.” Time is almost completely collapsed within the cords grooves; while Schwartz culled the pieces over eight years, the edits are so smooth that Nueva York sounds like a continuous experience or collective day. Using editing to create narrative, Schwartz’s splices reimagine 1950s New York as a space of heteroglossia, full of competing, coexisting, and conflicting languages that cannot be contained or neatly cordoned off from one another, regardless of segregation and monocultural American identity discourses. However, Schwartz does not claim totalizing representation of “the” Puerto Rican story in Nueva York, offering only to reveal “some understandings” of the “problems of a people.”65 Similarly, my reading is not intended to be comprehensive, but focuses instead on how Puerto Rican and (white) American voices are represented on the record overall, especially in two moments when sounds are spliced together to create edited encounters. Because the sono-montage technique retains a large amount of ambiguity and openness to alternative listenings, I highlight the way in which editing can suggest new meaning under the sonic color-line. Nueva York is particularly attentive to how sounds of English are equated with American identity while Spanish sounds represent a simplistic foreign noise. Five minutes into the record, an anonymous resident of Riverside Drive — a traditionally wealthy street whose residents felt particularly affronted by Puerto Rican migration — sneers that her new neighbors “don’t want to learn how to speak the language.” The remaining forty-five minutes counter with a broad range of Puerto Rican voices in terms of accent, tone, language, gender, age, and social class; as the liner notes do not depict the speakers’ ethnicities, listeners’ assumptions of what Puerto Ricans sound like are frequently challenged. The multiplicity of voices rejects any notion of a homogenous Latin accent and creates an aural spectrum ranging from monolingual Spanish to bilingualism, code-switching, monolingual English, and varied linguistic competencies in both languages. Through strategic placement of (white) American voices within the sono-montage, Nueva York illustrates how Puerto Rican encounters with American English are structured by colonial power. Voices sound white not simply because of their Standard English or New York accent but because of their authoritative tone and the way in which they structure the record’s narrative. Although both white and Puerto Rican voices remain Social Text 102

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anonymous, Puerto Rican voices are quoted largely as private residents; white voices operate as authorities of capitalism and other institutions of Americanization, representing landlords, shop owners, social service workers, and teachers. From the mechanized drone announcing “the arrival of flight 848” to the closing teacher’s insistence that her students “have additional problems in their home life,” white American voices are represented as telling Puerto Ricans what to do, where to go, and how they are. I trace this confluence of power, voice, and race through two edited “encounters” that dramatize white and Puerto Rican conflicts over urban space. The first, titled “Housing Discrimination,” deals with Puerto Ricans’ right to claim the city’s interior spaces and the second, which I will refer to as the “Music” segment, examines the conflict over public space. In “Housing Discrimination,” Schwartz splices white and Puerto Rican voices together, amplifying how the sonic color-line shapes listener’s perceptions of racial identity and who belongs where. Such assumptions, based on what people think they hear, have profound material consequences. The segment opens with a man imitating the rude tone of Americans who, from the “moment they hea[r] [his] foreign accent,” decide “they ‘do not open the door to foreigners!’ ” Though not “foreigners,” Puerto Ricans were frequently represented as such in the dominant discourse; the man’s Spanish accent was enough to trigger racialized assumptions that led to his rejection. Schwartz juxtaposes the Puerto Rican man’s story with an audibly angry comment from a “West Side” woman, a spliced representation of those on the rejecting side of the door. In a thick New York accent, this woman voices virulent judgments that echo the discourse of “Our Changing City” and the New York Times’s letters to the editor. While the woman’s tone is agitated, her pacing is slow, and she hardly breathes throughout her litany, producing a memorized — almost bored — effect. In her neighborhood, she says: The houses are very beautiful and very well kept. Between the streets of West End Avenue and Riverside, the houses are filled with Puerto Ricans. They dirty the steps, they sit all day in front of the house, they make lewd remarks when I pass by. I can look in the window and see them, living in filth and misery. . . . I wish they hadn’t come here in the first place. They aren’t welcome. They don’t want to learn how to speak the language and it’s a shame they don’t stay in their own country.

Her tone suggests an automatic, learned anger; she blames Puerto Ricans for the crowded and noisy conditions on the West Side, as opposed to the “very beautiful and very well kept” (white) streets bookending the neighborhood. Quite certain she knows Puerto Ricans, she finds their visual and sonic presence offensive — “they dirty the steps . . . they make lewd remarks” — even as she feels entitled to voyeuristically peep through their 74

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windows. There is no hint of irony in her voice when she sneers “they aren’t welcome,” a passive phrase that masks her aggression and ignores that her Puerto Rican neighbors are, in fact, “in their own country.” After a slight pause, Schwartz juxtaposes the angry woman’s thick accent with an “accentless” female voice, ironizing the way in which sound has been used to mark race and claim citizenship. The second woman’s tone is calm, even, and pleasant, contrasting with both the West Side woman and the story she tells: He started telling us, “oh the people around here you don’t have to worry about them, they’re terrific. . . . And one thing you don’t have to worry about ever: ‘Puerto Ricans’ ” he says. . . . So after a little while Andy says to him, “oh, you know something, we’re Latins,” and I think his face got white and he says, “Oh no!” because he’d already talked to us and he liked us. . . . so I figured, well, why let him know that I am a Puerto Rican, lose the chance on getting a terrific setup like we would have. . . . we figured in some time to come we will let him know, so that he’ll realize that not everybody is the same.

Nueva York’s editing strategies produce several ironies here. First, the woman’s “accentless voice” evacuates the bluster from the angry woman’s claim that Puerto Ricans “don’t want to learn how to speak the language” and casts aspersions on her own accented speech. Second, this woman’s story reveals the angry woman to be one of the “terrific” people in the neighborhood who have joined together to ban Puerto Ricans. Finally, Schwartz’s editing practice utilizes voice and accent to raise the issue of “passing” — both visually and sonically — to unsettle perceived assumptions about Puerto Rican racial identity. By refusing to reveal the ethnicity of the various speakers, Schwartz forces listeners to become aware of how much they use sound to determine a speaker’s identity and how much cultural baggage accents are freighted with. This specific passage places potentially hostile white listeners in the point-of-audition of the surprised landlord, who assumed the speakers’ whiteness until they revealed their “Latin” identity. The speaker’s English is flawless — as is her husband’s, whose story directly follows hers.66 Even though they are visibly and sonically white according to the normative codes of the period, the young couple’s disclosure jeopardizes their “chance on getting a terrific setup”; the fact that this couple is essentially forced to pass to obtain adequate housing exposes the racialized power dynamics of the postwar housing market and questions the visual and sonic color-lines that supposedly divide the white American self from a Puerto Rican Other. A subsequent speaker further marks the sonic color-line barring Puerto Ricans from adequate housing in New York City. As upsetting as the young couple’s story may be, Schwartz splices in a thickly accented Social Text 102

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woman who reveals their relative linguistic privilege. An unhappy tenant, she details her substandard accommodations and the exploitation that keeps it that way: “You know the hall is dark, and I report that about four or five times. And then later and tomorrow and then later and never come. . . . I am waiting until summer because no se I’ll come back to Puerto Rico because this is terrible. It is a place terrible. You can’t sleep because many troubles [voice fades out].” The neglected tenant’s story also counters the West Side woman’s narrative of dirty Puerto Ricans and places the onus for substandard housing on the shoulders of the landlords who profit from unsanitary conditions. Schwartz’s choice to fade her voice out while she is still talking mirrors her marginalization within the system; by tuning her out, like her landlord, Schwartz suggests that she has only begun to expose the horrors of her building. As her story fades, the even tones of a man speaking Standard English rise: “Well, I think it’s good business to give good housing,” he says. Placed directly following the woman’s story, the landlord’s speech is jarring, especially the way he speaks in abstractions of units, square footage, and tenants. Schwartz’s splicing creates what Mikhail Bakhtin describes as a “contact zone” across the sonic color-line, using the woman’s accented and racialized voice — a voice in Bakhtin’s schema “frequently not even acknowledged in society” — to challenge the landlord’s “authoritative discourse.”67 Though the landlord goes on to describe renovations that will give tenants “twice the space for the same money,” his authority has been dramatically undercut by the voices that came before. The juxtaposed vocal grains and accents comprising this segment both affirm and challenge the ways in which sound functions as a material and social relation in 1950s American culture. Accompanying the Puerto Rican struggle to obtain quality domestic space was a fight for equal access to the public sphere. In addition to issues of voice and language, Nueva York takes on the mainstream representation of Puerto Rican street music as threatening noise — a frequent complaint in the New York Times — especially the percussion groups popular with New York youth (see figure 2). Schwartz features young percussionists in the segment titled “Music.”68 Young men’s voices layer mambo lyrics over a polyphonic beat encompassing fingertips on car fenders. An abrupt cut directs attention to one man’s voice, whose simmering Standard English punctuates his critique of a group he identifies only as “they.” To ears tuned by and attuned to the sonic color-line, there might be just the briefest recognition, an expectation that this young man is about to critique “they” who make noise in the streets. However, the young man is a Puerto Rican New Yorker — on the inside of the drum circle — and he candidly criticizes the objectifying gaze of outsiders: “They come by and they watch us dancing out in the streets. . . . they think it’s terrible and disgusting, but you know they do the same thing too, only they do it in the nightclubs.” 76

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Figure 2. Tony Schwartz recording children on the street, New York City, circa 1955. Courtesy of Anton Schwartz

The speaker makes a potent critique of the voyeurism inherent in the act of watching — whether through windshields, apartment windows, or newsprint — calling attention to its power dynamics and limitations as a way of knowing others. A horn honk punctuates his statement, an aural reminder that this exchange takes place on the street and that the musicians are engaged in a tense cultural conflict over what constitutes the proper sound and movement of bodies through urban space. Nueva York amplifies how Puerto Rican youth tried to make themselves visible and audible in defiant violation of white cultural norms concerning privacy, propriety, and “peace and quiet.” The interlocking forces of poverty and racial segregation, which limited migrants’ access to private space — in combination with Puerto Rican cultural views regarding the street as an active, shared public sphere — compelled Puerto Rican youth to make space for themselves on New York City’s streets. In recognizing the judgment of the gaze, in which dancing in public is immediately equated with a brown (hyper)sexuality deemed “terrible and disgusting,” the speaker calls attention to the displacement of white sexuality onto this same construction. After all, those who watch like to shake it to the mambo beat Social Text 102

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as well, but only inside the cordoned-off space of the exclusive nightclub, as a privilege of both class and race. In the next sound bite, Nueva York continues to refute charges that street music is noise by exploring its sonic affinities with the sounds of mambo emanating from the Palladium nightclub.69 After the young man’s speech, there is a lengthy silence and a cut to an older man’s voice with a mambo orchestra behind him. He reveals himself to be the “owner of the Palladium, the Home of the Mambo,” precisely the type of place where the young man argues that “they” go to dance. The Palladium was particularly symptomatic of the appropriation of mambo within mainstream American culture and the Anglicization of its sound in the mid-1950s.70 As the club owner advertises: “We have 95% Puerto Rican people come in on Friday, Saturday, Sunday. On Wednesday nights, we have nothing but Americans come and see us. We play nothing but mambo music and we have a terrific show.” By exploiting sound’s ability to bleed into other sounds, Nueva York shows that mambo music was being generated on the segregated streets of New York City — not just imported from Cuba and other Latin American countries — and was being consumed in nightclubs equally segregated. The owner’s words are literally drowned out by a large, professional band playing a mambo typical of Xavier Cugat or Perez Prado, with screaming horns charging over a quirky staccato beat. The orchestra sounds distant and slightly canned when compared to the sound of the teenagers jamming on the street that still lingers in the cut, even as their beat is echoed faintly within the smooth, polished stylings of the nightclub musicians. Starting the music sequence with the boys’ street band encourages listeners to hear echoes of their rhythms playing in the sound of the professional mambo band that follows their segment, rather than the other way around. The music climbs to a fevered pitch and then: silence. Suddenly, two young girls’ voices singing a cappella in Spanish take over. Listeners have left the nightclub and are back on the street, which Nueva York’s edits have repositioned as a wellspring of musical expression, the source of its energy and life rather than its noisy debasement. By surrounding the familiar strains of popular mambo music with the noise of the streets, Nueva York alters the sound of both. Mediating the Sonic Color-Line

In segments like “Housing Discrimination” and “Music,” Schwartz’s recording privileges the voices of Puerto Ricans in the story of their migration and, in so doing, calls explicit attention to the absence of their voices in the unitary language of official media. While interviewing Puerto Ricans may seem a commonsense necessity rather than a resistant decision, I must underscore that the New York Times printed hundreds of 78

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panicky articles about “our changing city” and the “Puerto Rican problem” in the same period and rarely, if ever, do the articles invoke a Puerto Rican perspective or include even one quotation from the Puerto Rican community. In the mainstream American media, Puerto Ricans are spoken about by city officials, by angry white New Yorkers, by politicians, and by police; and they are spoken for by academics, journalists, teachers, and settlement workers; but they are rarely spoken to, and they are almost never allowed to speak directly about their lives and the issues affecting them.71 Nueva York succeeds in presenting a sono-montage of different Puerto Rican voices to embed a believable image of a divergent, multi­ racial American city emergent within segregation’s silences. Schwartz used aural media channels to challenge mechanisms like the sonic colorline that create — and then silence — Others. However, in splicing the sonic color-line, Nueva York risks becoming ensnared in it. Because it focuses so intently on reforming white listeners, there is a way in which the record can also work to domesticate Puerto Ricans, undercutting their narrative agency. While Nueva York calls attention to the way in which sound functions as a set of social relations, its representational strategies also remind us that sound is not a utopic space devoid of power. The sono-montage technique problematically enables Schwartz to evacuate his audible presence from the final recording — except as a somewhat distanced arbiter of sound — creating a false boundary between the recorder and the recorded that allows his own cultural deaf spots to go unchallenged. Furthermore, the very project of countering mainstream imaginings of noisy Puerto Rican life during the 1950s moves the narrative along a pathway predetermined by (white) American expectations of assimilation and citizenship. Using sound to emphasize sameness and interpolate Puerto Rican migrants so heartily into the “We are immigrants, all” narrative of American identity risks what Juan Flores has described as the “enforced melting-down of genuine cultural diversity”72 by constructing American identity as ahistorical and unchanged by its divergent citizens, muting the distinctive challenges that Puerto Ricans faced as a colonized people. During the 1950s, cultural and linguistic assimilation offered only a perpetually second-class American citizenship for Puerto Rican migrants, unlike the social mobility that enabled former European immigrants to leave their inner-city enclaves behind. Therefore, while Nueva York culminates in a section where Puerto Rican children are heard learning English — saluting the American flag, singing “America,” and reciting the rhyme “Pollito — Chicken, Gallina — Hen, Lápiz — Pencil, y Pluma — Pen” — the sonic color-line reemerges to fracture any unitary reading of this moment as a triumph of Americanization for both white and Puerto Rican listeners. Placing this segment so near the record’s end Social Text 102

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submerges the history that Cofer traces in Silent Dancing — including the fact that, for most of the twentieth century, Puerto Ricans have been forced to learn English before ever setting foot on U.S. soil. “My father began his school day by saluting the flag of the United States and singing ‘America’ by rote, without understanding a word of what he was saying,” Cofer remembers; “to this day, I can recite ‘Pollito-Chicken’ mindlessly, never once pausing to visualize chickens, hens, pencils or pens.”73 While the form of Nueva York gives rise to a more nationalistic interpretation of the children’s performance, the actual content of the sound remains ambiguous. Their recitation could sound earnest, mindless, or both at once. More than any one argument or interpretation, perhaps Schwartz’s best legacy to his listeners is the realization that resistance and subjection are never so easily separable and, like “noise,” remain dependent upon the listening ear of the beholder. Far from being a natural or arbitrary function of perception, listening is an act riven with power relations. Notes I thank the family of Tony Schwartz (especially Anton Schwartz) as well as Ann Weiss, Ava Chin, and Nisha Kunte for their research support in New York City. I am also indebted to Andy Lanset, archivist at WNYC; Jeff Place, archivist of the Ralph Rinzler Collection at the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Culture; and Janet McKee, the librarian for the Recorded Sound Reference Center at the Library of Congress, for their tireless assistance. Binghamton University provided research funding, and my colleagues in the English Department were particularly incisive readers, especially David Bartine, Donette Francis, Praseeda Gopinath, Scott Henkel, Joe Keith, Kelly Kinney, and Monika Mehta. Liana Silva provided key translations of portions of Nueva York. Frances R. Aparicio also shaped this essay through careful comments and wonderful conversation while visiting the BU Sound Studies Collective in spring 2009. I remain grateful for the enthusiasm of Josh Kun, and the feedback given by Fred Moten, Judith Jackson Fossett, Joanna Demers, and Carla Kaplan during my graduate studies at the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. I also wish to thank my editor and anonymous reviewer at Social Text for their particularly thoughtful comments. Finally, this essay is indelibly imprinted by years of conversation with Charlie Ackerman and the stellar scholarly work and editorial feedback of Priscilla Peña Ovalle. 1. The boundaries of New York 19 are Sixtieth Street to the north, Times Square to the south, Fifth Avenue and the Hudson River on the east and west. 2. Folkways was an independent record label headed by Moe Asch that boasted the “World’s Largest Collection of Authentic Folk Music” by 1956. The stakes of Folkways’ mission were great — misrepresentation, mistranslation, exoticization, appropriation, and exploitation — and their recordings often risked reifying the sonic color-line while purporting to dissipate it. 3. Tony Schwartz, Nueva York: A Tape Documentary of Puerto Rican New Yorkers, Folkways Records (FP 58/2, 1955). 4. “The Sound of the Family of Man: A Sono-Montage by Tony Schwartz,” n.d., NSI XTV 124896, Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections, Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Culture, Washington, DC. 80

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5. There is only one other scholar that I know of working on Schwartz: Angela Blake, at Ryerson University, in the context of what she describes as “urban acoustic ecologies.” 6. Schwartz himself put out a high-fidelity test record that was given away with stereo purchases at a local shop, although in typical Schwartz style, the 45 — titled 11 People — was a measured collection of street interviews designed to rattle the ears of audiophiles seeking sterile, studio-produced hodgepodges of sound. Tony Schwartz, 11 People, Standard Brand, FW-45-4607, Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections, Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Culture, Washington, DC. 7. Tony Schwartz Production Folder, Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections, Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Culture, Washington, DC. This data provides merely a baseline. Sales data from Moe Asch is notoriously unreliable, especially because of his abysmal record of royalty payments. There are several requests for overdue payments from Schwartz in the production folder. I do want to add that Folkways had a longer reach than their sales data shows, as their marketing concentrated primarily on libraries, academic conferences, and magazines devoted to audiophiles. Folkways’ largely white audience is detailed in Tony Olmstead’s business history Folkways Records: Moses Asch and His Encyclopedia of Sound (London: Routledge, 2003). 8. Quoted in Ira Henry Freeman, “About New York: Collectors: Of City Sounds, Magician’s Props, Dolls of Stars, Antique Apothecary’s Jars,” New York Times, 2 September 1953. 9. Howard Winant, The World Is a Ghetto: Race and Democracy since World War II (New York: Basic, 2001). 10. See W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903; New York: Penguin, 1996); Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Lisa Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999); Mark M. Smith, Listening to Nineteenth Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Mark M. Smith, How Race Is Made: Slavery, Segregation, and the Senses (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); Richard Cullen Rath, How Early America Sounded (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003); Alexander Weheliye, Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); Shane White and Graham White, The Sounds of Slavery: Discovering African American History through Songs, Sermons, and Speech (Boston: Beacon, 2005); Josh Kun, Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). 11. Although Kun, in Audiotopia, describes “the American audio-racial imagination” — a phrase he uses to summarize the “extent to which meanings about race, racial identity, and racialization within the United States have been generated, developed, and experienced at the level of sound and music” (26) — it functions predominantly as a backdrop for the resistant listening practices of popular music’s artists, fans, and connoisseurs. 12. While the studies that connect race and listening are still few, those that connect listening and gender are fewer still. Susan McClary’s Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1991) continues to be a key text, while Nichole T. Rustin and Sherrie Tucker’s new edited volume Big Ears: Listening for Gender in Jazz Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008) takes up the lack of critical work on this subject. Social Text 102

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13. See R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape, or the Tuning of the World (New York: Random House, 1977); Jacques Attali, Noise: A Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985); Peter Bailey, Popular Culture and Performance in the Victorian City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Michael Bull and Les Back, introduction to The Auditory Culture Reader, ed. Michael Bull and Les Back (London: Berg, 2003), 1 – 18; Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). See also Moten, In the Break; and Kun, Audiotopia. 14. Literary sound studies scholar Bruce Smith describes this process of finding and cataloging historical sound as “acoustical archaeology” and describes it as a process of “learning to hear, and not just see” the evidence embedded in written materials. “Listening to the Wild Blue Yonder: The Challenges of Acoustic Ecology,” in Hearing Cultures: Essays on Sound, Listening, and Modernity, ed. Veit Erlmann (Oxford: Berg, 2004), 24. 15. Richard Cullen Rath, How Early America Sounded (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 152. 16. A New York location was a crucial selection factor here, as Puerto Rican migrants overwhelmingly selected the city as their residence in the states, with more than 245,880 people — 82.9 percent of the entire Puerto Rican diaspora — relocating there in 1950. Carmen Teresa Whalen and Victor Vásquez-Hernández, The Puerto Rican Diaspora: Historical Perspectives (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005), 3. 17. According to the New York Times’s chronicler Edwin Diamond, the daily’s reputation as a leading American paper was well established by 1950. Readers did not turn to the Times for flash or gossip, but rather “its thorough reporting, and its air of serious purpose” see Behind the Times: Inside the New “New York Times” (New York: Villard, 1994), 51. 18. The international edition of the New York Times began publishing in 1946. Pride in the international edition suffused the paper at the local level and contributed to the gravitas of the Times’s postwar reportage. 19. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk; and his Dusk of Dawn (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2007). I retain Du Bois’s hyphenation of “color-line.” 20. West Side Story, DVD, directed by Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins (1961; Los Angeles: MGM, 2003). 21. Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines, 135. Barbara Dianne Savage dubbed the vocal tone of minstrelsy as “aural blackface” in Broadcasting Freedom: Radio, War, and the Politics of Race, 1938 – 1948 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 74. 22. Savage, Broadcasting Freedom, 74. 23. See Richard Dyer, White (London: Routledge, 1997). 24. See Derrick Valliant’s discussion of the “sounds of whiteness” as the baseline identity for U.S. radio broadcasting in “Sounds of Whiteness: Local Radio, Racial Formation, and Public Culture in Chicago, 1921 – 1935,” American Quarterly 54 (2002): 25 – 66; see also Geoff Mann’s work on how American country music “became white” in “Why Does Country Music Sound White? Race and the Voice of Nostalgia,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 31 (2008): 73 – 100. 25. John Baugh, “Linguistic Profiling,” in Black Linguistics: Language, Society, and Politics in Africa and the Americas, ed. Sinfree Makoni, Geneva Smitherman, Arnetha F. Ball, and Arthur K. Spears (London: Routledge, 2003), 155 – 68. 26. For additional theoretical discussions of “noise,” see Schafer, Soundscape; Barry Truax, Acoustic Communication (Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1984); Attali, Noise; 82

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Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1994); Douglas Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999); Emily Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900 – 1933 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002); and Moten, In the Break. 27. Tony Schwartz, quoted in Alan L. Otten, “Noise?” Wall Street Journal, 31 May 1973. 28. I use white supremacy here as Cornel West defines it in Prophesy Deliverance! An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1982), as “the controlling metaphors, notions, and categories of modern discourse that develop and delimit specific conceptions of truth and knowledge, so that certain ideas are rendered incomprehensible and unintelligible” (74). 29. Judith Ortiz Cofer, Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood (Houston: Arte Público, 1991), 63. I thank Frances Aparicio for pointing me to this reference. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid., 53, 64. 32. Emanuel Perlmutter, “Our Changing City: Northern Brooklyn; Area Has Had Big Population Shifts, But Is Still Drab,” New York Times, 22 July 1955; Richard Amper, “Our Changing City: Conflicts in the Upper Bronx; Creeping Urbanization Meets Staid Suburbia,” New York Times, 15 July 1955; Merrill Folsom, “Our Changing City: To Westchester and Fairfield; Hinterlands to the North Get Big Office and Shopping Centers,” New York Times, 15 August 1955; Peter Kihss, “Our Changing City: Upper and Middle East Side; U.N. Buildings and Big Apartments Remake Face of Four Square Mile District,” New York Times, 1 July 1955. 33. Thompson, Soundscape of Modernity, 168. 34. Sydney Gruson, “Our Changing City: New Faces in the Lower Bronx,” New York Times, 11 July 1955. 35. Ibid. 36. Paul Hoffmann, “Rising Hispanic Migration Heightens City Tensions,” New York Times, 4 April 1966. While the article was written after the bulk of Puerto Rican migration, I find this piece to be symptomatic of the entire decade, as well as a representative compendium of many articles written in that time span. 37. Ibid. 38. George Dugan, “Churches Scored on Puerto Ricans,” New York Times, 9 March 1958. 39. “Bias Here Charged by Puerto Ricans,” New York Times, 19 November 1949. 40. Cofer, Silent Dancing, 119. 41. Charles Grutzner, “Our Changing City: Downtown Brooklyn Glistens,” New York Times, 19 July 1955. 42. “Bias Here Charged by Puerto Ricans.” 43. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the term as a “contemptuous and offensive name for a Spanish-speaking native of Central or South America or the Caribbean; a spiggoty” and cites the etymology of the word as deriving from “broken English.” In the memoir When I Was Puerto Rican (New York: Da Capo, 1993), Esmeralda Santiago remembers asking her father about the term spic while still in Puerto Rico during Eisenhower’s presidency: “Well,” he tells her, “there are many Puerto Ricans in New York and when somebody asks them a question they say ‘I don’t spik English’ instead of ‘I don’t speak English.’ They make fun of our accent” (73). Social Text 102

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44. Carmen Miranda’s radio and film scripts were prewritten in heavy dialect emphasizing her (incorrectly) assumed ignorance of English; newspaper quotes depicted her words in thick, grammatically incorrect visual dialect. I thank Priscilla Peña Ovalle for calling my attention to Miranda’s radio work; see her chapter on Miranda in her forthcoming book from Rutgers University Press. Also see Shari Roberts’s “ ‘The Lady in the Tutti-Frutti Hat’: Carmen Miranda, a Spectacle of Ethnicity,” Cinema Journal 32, no. 3 (1993): 3 – 23, for a more thorough treatment of the press representation of Miranda’s accent. 45. Alberto Sandoval-Sánchez, José, Can You See? Latinos On and Off Broadway (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999), 63. 46. According to José Ramón Sánchez, in 1952, for example, only 35,000 Puerto Ricans registered to vote out of a potential 250,000. Mass disenfranchisement, coupled with the fact that Puerto Rican voters were not centralized in one borough or district, prevented Puerto Ricans from being heard by politicians or electing city officials who would listen to them during this period. Boricua Power: A Political History of Puerto Ricans in the United States (New York: New York University Press, 2008), 120. 47. In 1947, Charles Abrams, special counsel to the New York State Joint Legislative Committee on Housing and Multiple Dwellings, described Spanish accents as enabling “housing bias against Puerto Ricans — light and dark. The ‘Spic,’ as the Spanish-speaking, slum-dweller is scornfully called, is rated a less than desirable tenant than the native Negro.” Charles Abrams, “How to Remedy Our ‘Puerto Rican’ Problem,” Commonwealth, February 1955, 122. 48. Cofer writes in Silent Dancing of her father’s multiple failures to secure good housing because of their last name, Ortiz, “even though my father had the fair skin and light brown hair of his northern Spanish family background and our name is as common in Puerto Rico as Johnson is in the U.S.” (89). 49. Erica Landis, “Invasion of Privacy by Noise,” letter to the editor, New York Times, 3 September 1958. 50. Domenick Roamer, “Who’s to Blame?” letter to the editor, New York Times, 1 November 1959. 51. “Essayist, 14, Finds Manhattan Is Roseate Even to ‘Thorn’ of Slums, Dirt, and Noise,” New York Times, 30 June 1947. 52. Mary Roche, “A Quiet House,” New York Times, 19 November 1944. 53. “City Is among Tops for ‘Noisiest’ Title,” New York Times, 6 May 1949. The term homo mechanicus explicitly debases New York City life and characterizes its residents as mechanized and dehumanized; after all, “people” seek “quiet surroundings.” 54. Tony Schwartz, “Lincoln Center Community,” RXF 4787, Recorded Sound Reference Center, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. 55. Eric Avila, Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 15. 56. Alvin J. Kugelmass, quoted, in Kun, Audiotopia, 50. 57. Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about Race in America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press), 157. 58. Kun, Audiotopia, 50. 59. Ibid., 68. 60. Tony Schwartz’s father moved the family to Peekskill, New York, when Tony was four and commuted to the city to work as a civil engineer designing subway tunnels. Schwartz returned to Brooklyn after high school to attend Pratt Institute;

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after graduating in 1944 and briefly serving as a graphic artist in the Navy, he eventually moved to West Fifty-sixth Street in Manhattan. 61. Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks, 50. 62. Tony Schwartz, interview with Peter Goldsmith, 7-18-91, PG035, Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archive and Collection, Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Culture, Washington, DC. 63. Ibid. 64. Liner notes, Nueva York. 65. Ibid. 66. I have been able to identify the two speakers as Norma and Amador “Andy” Chaidez, whom Schwartz thanks in the liner notes. In personal correspondence, Schwartz’s former assistant Forrest Gray described Norma Chaidez as a close friend of Schwartz. His archive includes recordings, made during the mid-1950s, of the waiting room during the birth of her child and of her singing to her newborn baby in English and Spanish. 67. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982), 342, 344. The concept of “contact zones” has been productively furthered by Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), and by Josh Kun in Audiotopia. 68. Schwartz used recordings of the music of Puerto Rican youth on almost every recording he put out on Folkways, including 1,2,3, and a Zing, Zing, Zing (FW 07003, 1953), Millions of Musicians (FW 05560, 1954), New York 19 (FW 05558, 1954), and Sounds of My City (FW 07341, 1956). 69. The Palladium was a famous ballroom that mambo saved from bankruptcy in 1947. The club went from an all-swing to an all-mambo policy in 1952. For a discussion of how the Palladium finally opened up to Latinos, see César Miguel Rondón’s The Book of Salsa: A Chronicle of Urban Music from the Caribbean to New York City (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008). 70. Kun, Audiotopia, 79. Perry Como and Rosemary Clooney both had hit mambo songs by the time Nueva York was released. 71. The first literary explorations of Puerto Rican migration were both published in 1952 — “El pasaje” by José Luis Gonzáles and La carreta by René Marqués —  but were written in Spanish and were not yet translated or accessible to a mainstream American readership. Jesus Colón’s collection of English vignettes, A Puerto Rican in New York and Other Sketches, was not published until 1961, and although he was writing prolifically for the Daily World and the Daily Worker during the 1940s and 1950s, the circulation of these papers dropped rapidly due to anticommunist paranoia and persecution. Piri Thomas’s groundbreaking memoir, Down These Mean Streets, was not published until 1967. 72. Juan Flores, Divided Borders: Essays on Puerto Rican Identity (Houston: Arte Público, 1993), 14. 73. Cofer, Silent Dancing, 56. “Pollito–Chicken” is also the name of a 1981 short story by Puerto Rican writer Ana Lydia Vega, which similarly deals with the resonances of English as a colonial language. Carmen Lugo Filippi and Ana Lydia Vega, Vírgenes y mártires (cuentos) (Río Piedras: Antillana, 1984), 73 – 80.

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Never Heard Such a Thing Lynching and Phonographic Modernity Gustavus Stadler

Over the course of the 1890s, recorded sound became increasingly viable as a form of commercial entertainment. Improvements in the quality and durability of the small cylinders used for recording and playback meant that the commodity for sale was no longer simply the quasi-magical fact of sound reproduction, which had been the focus of phonographic exhibitions in the late 1870s and 1880s, but also the subject matter reproduced. While most people’s encounters with this sound technology still took place in public settings such as phonograph “parlors” and traveling exhibits, they were able to hear an increasingly wide variety of musical genres and spoken word recordings. These developments among phenomena that have traditionally been identified with “modernity” intersected directly with the social practices of another, contemporary arena of “the modern,” the legal and extralegal enforcement of racial segregation and white supremacy, in a number of forms — notably the dialect sketches and “coon songs” that recording artists and their record companies were borrowing from the minstrel stage. Another, heretofore unexamined area of this convergence was the production and consumption of phonographic recordings of the lynching of African Americans. A handful of texts document the existence of such recordings, at least some of which purported to be, and were taken as, “real,” that is, produced on-site, as the events took place. Indeed, some continue to be referred to as authentically “live” documents by present-day historians and other commentators, despite the insurmountable technical problems that would have faced any attempt at recording an event of a lynching’s dimensions in the 1890s. The personal memoirs and brief newspaper articles that discuss these aural documents stand in place of Social Text 102 • Vol. 28, No. 1 • Spring 2010 DOI 10.1215/01642472-2009-061  © 2010 Duke University Press

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the silence of the recordings themselves, none of which are known to have survived to the present day. Yet these written texts map a national network of public phonographic exhibits offering audio representations of ritualized racial violence during the 1890s and the first decade of the twentieth century. All of these texts amply affirm Jacqueline Goldsby’s insistence “that we conceive of anti-black mob murders as a networked, systemic phenomenon indicative of trends in national culture” as that culture rapidly modernized.1 In this essay I try to construct a sense, however partial in the face of absence, of the cultural dimensions of these recordings as artifacts in the nation’s growing sense of itself as “modern.” The interest in the cylinders, and the apparent desire among many to see them as “real,” reflect an unexamined aspect of the importance played by race, and specifically blackness, in the formation of sound recording as a medium and as a sector of the cultural market. The challenge posed by the absence of the recordings is, of course, considerable, though that absence ought to be treated as a palpable feature of the study of early sound recording in a political context. In an effort to meet this challenge, I have divided the essay into two parts. The first presents and examines the recordings through their textual traces, in an attempt to contextualize them within the early history of sound recording; it also suggests factors that may have contributed to the belief in their authenticity. The second part of the essay proposes some conceptual connections between the lynching recordings and a broader early history of blackness, the body, and recorded sound. In 1893, the prominent African American entrepreneur, veterinarian, civic leader, Civil War veteran, and antilynching activist Samuel Burdett was passing along the streets in the city of Seattle, Washington, “whiling away an idle hour seeing the sights.”2 Eight years later, in a self-published pamphlet titled A Test of Lynch Law, an Exposé of Mob Violence and the Courts of Hell, Burdett recounted a gruesome interruption of this expedition. As he strolled through what he called “this thriving little city” he came upon a crowd “attending some sort of entertainment on the street.” He pushed his way through the crowd “to where a man was mounted on a stand or platform of some sort.” On this scaffold, the man had mounted a “phonographic entertainment” that “consisted of photographic views, coupled with phonographic records of the utterances of a negro who had been burned to death by a mob in Paris, Texas, a short time before.”3 The experience was a curious admixture of private and public space; in general, one would listen through a set of earphones while standing beside four or five other people hooked into the same cylinder at the same time. Recalling his own initial close encounter with sound recording in his antilynching pamphlet eight years later, Burdett wrote: “I had never heard or seen such a thing, and like others who were there, took up the tubes of 88

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the phonographic instrument and placed them to my ears. Oh, horror of horrors! Just to hear that poor human being scream and groan and beg for his life, in the presence and hearing of thousands of people, who had gathered from all parts of the country to see it.” After a brief description of the photographs in the exhibition, Burdett went on to describe more details of what he heard through the earphones: voices of a sheriff, the crowd, and finally of the lynching victim: The sheriff of a county in stentorian tones that struck terror to the doomed man’s heart, commanded some one to “bring on the hot irons!” Oh, Heaven forgive! The helpless victim almost went mad at the very thought of being tortured as he saw that he was going to be. He hollered out in an agonizing, heart-rending manner, “Oh, Lord, Mr. —  — , for God’s sake don’t burn me; don’t burn me — Oh, oh, kill me, kill me! Shoot me, shoot me!” His crying and entreaties fell on deaf ears. Hot irons were brought out, and then his eyes were burned out. The moans and screams which he uttered cannot be described, and perhaps it is as well that they cannot. It were better that it all might be forgotten, and that nothing of the same character should ever transpire again. The things seen and heard there have haunted the writer from that day to this. (17 – 18)

In Burdett’s text, a preeminent form of technological modernity converges with a preeminently modern form of racial violence. Burdett’s language both describes and acts out this convergence by leaving what he had until now “never heard or seen” ambiguous. It is unclear, that is, whether he is describing the encounter with phonographic technology or the events represented by means of that technology. If the passage has the air of an initiation, or a fall from grace, this uncertainty makes Burdett’s “haunting” an entry into modernity in which racialized power relations and violence not only persist, but are reformulated along lines compatible with technological modernity’s reorganization of the capacities of the senses — a process whose riveting attraction depends upon the representation of the suffering and destruction of an African American. Thus ends, in Burdett’s story, the modernity of urban flaneurie in a Seattle he describes as a place “where we pretend that we are educated, enlightened, and on advance ground in everything which tends to advancement” (18).4 In the haunted modernity he has entered, the vaunted collapse of time and space made possible by telecommunications technology brings the Texas mob and its victim directly into Burdett’s ears as he stands in a crowd presumably made up of awestruck whites. A similar experience of this neat fit between modernity and white supremacy befell a young white Georgian, Mell Barrett, at a country fair in 1896. In a passage from a memoir quoted in Edward Ayers’s The Promise of the New South (and in several other works of contemporary scholarship), Social Text 102

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Barrett writes: “With the tubes in my ears, the Pitchman was now adjusting the needle on the machine . . . My excitement increased, my heart was pounding so I could hardly hold the tubes in my ears with my shaking hands . . . ‘All Right Men. Bring Them Out. Let’s Hear What They Have to Say,’ were the first words I understood coming from a talking machine.” Two young men confessed to committing a rape and plead for their lives. Barrett next heard: The sounds of shuffling feet, swearing men, rattle of chains, falling wood, brush, and fagots, then a voice — shrill, strident, angry, called out “Who will apply the torch?” “I will,” came a chorus of high-pitched, angry voices. [Then came] the crackle of flames as it ate its way into the dry tinder, and the victims asking God to forgive their tormentors. The crowd fell quiet; only the sound of the flames remained. My eyes and mouth were dry. I tried to wet my lips, but my tongue, too, was parched. Perspiration dripped from my hands. I stood immobile, unable to move. Now the voice of the Pitchman saying, “That’s all gentleman — who’s next?” . . . [and] sensing what my trouble was, said, “Too much cake, too much lemonade. You know how boys are at a picnic.”5

Both of these accounts dramatize the way that the practice of lynching provided a ready-made narrative, with a chilling climax. At this point in phonographic history, that narrative would have had to last no longer than about three minutes, the recording capacity of the wax cylinder technology that would only begin to be displaced in the late 1890s. Barrett’s account makes clear the vivid aural details that characterized the representation of the lynching — the confession and pleading, the “shrill, strident” calls for showing no mercy, the prayers, and the crackling sounds that conveyed the burning of the men on their wooden poles. It is striking, too, that while the exhibit encountered by Burdett included both visual and audio images, it is the latter that clearly “haunts” him most powerfully: “The moans and screams which he uttered cannot be described, and perhaps it is as well that they cannot.” Beyond these two vivid accounts, there is very little evidence of the content of purported recordings of lynchings of black men. However, reports of such recordings did surface around the country, in various newspapers, in the late 1890s. For instance: • I n the Decatur, Illinois, Daily Review of 22 May 1897, a letter to the editor complains that the “good influences” of the town, who had previously shut down a kinetoscopic exhibition of “the big fight,” were “slumbering” as an exhibitor “comes to town, opens up business on North Water Street, and advertises views and phonograph descriptions of the burning of a negro in the south.” This 90

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letter was signed “JUSTICE,” perhaps as an intentional reference to that word’s having been painted on the scaffold upon which Henry Smith was tortured.6 • L  ater that year, a brief article in the Titusville, Pennsylvania, Herald complained about a similar exhibit, condemning the crowd at the lynching for having made the recording; the writer thus reflected what must have been a broader belief that the recording had been made “live.” In an ironic nod to the then-common celebration of the phonograph’s ability to preserve the words of the living beyond death, the article sarcastically congratulated the lynch mob for “thoughtfully ha[ving] a phonograph on hand to perpetuate a dying man’s last words.”7 • A  ccording to a local newspaper, a phonograph exhibitor was kicked out of Colorado Springs in 1898 for an exhibit featuring “pictures” and “sounds” representing the Smith lynching; the article reported that “the sounds reproduced were said to be the cries of the negro roasting to death.”8 Although spare on details describing the recordings, these articles each display moral outrage at the recordings’ existence, but more prominently at their having been “exhibited” in the local area. Indeed, these newspaper pieces tend to displace any anger and/or shame onto such matters of propriety and what would today be called “community standards,” removing the possibility of any reference to the broad problems of racial violence and injustice then permeating the nation: 1896, it should be remembered, was the year of the Supreme Court ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson, affirming the constitutionality of the “separate but equal” doctrine. Thus, even outside of the South and many thousands of miles away from Paris, Texas, lynching was treated as equivalent to a popular boxing match and, by implication, as a spectacle of recreational violence that had veered too near the realm of the obscene.9 The articles suggest that lynching recordings may have provided an effective means to ignore the consolidation of white supremacy that the practice of lynching both resulted from and reaffirmed — not simply because they turned the practice into a form of entertainment and consumption, but because they allowed the discussion of it to become primarily concerned with obscenity in new media. Two other prominent points are evident from these reports. First, the Smith lynching emerges as the predominant event represented in these recordings. This focus is not surprising. Smith’s grisly murder (he was tortured with hot irons by the father of his alleged victim and then burned alive) must be seen as a signal moment in U.S. media history. The tightly choreographed event, for which the town of Paris closed businesses Social Text 102

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and schools, took place in front of an estimated audience of ten thousand spectators and was front-page news in papers across the nation. Grace Hale has called it “the founding event in the history of spectacle lynchings,” a term with which she refers to racially motivated mob murders of African Americans whose detailed violence and scopic dimensions were spread well beyond the site of their occurrence by means of wire services and photography.10 J. M. Mertins, the local photographer, was commissioned to take a series of images capturing the parade of Smith around the town square and the subsequent mutilation and murder on a large platform, inscribed with the word Justice, in a large field just outside the city.11 The young medium of sound recording, too, played a role in promulgating this particularly modern chapter in the history of racial violence; the historical record suggests that the mob slaughter of Henry Smith carried sufficient currency to circulate throughout the nation in the form of wax cylinders, and perhaps gramophone discs as well, for at least thirteen years. Second, the articles display a willingness to believe in the recordings’ authenticity — that is, to believe that the grooves etched onto the cylinder’s surface were actually made in the presence of Henry Smith and his killers in Paris, Texas. However, there is essentially no possibility that these recordings were made “live.” It is not clear how many people in the 1890s knew — or considered it important to remember — that phonographic technology was supremely ill-suited to recording outside the sheltered space of a studio or studio-like room. In the premicrophone era, recordings were made through the same phonograph horn through which sound emerged during playback. To make live sound inscribe what in 1893 would have likely been the wax surface of a cylinder required that the sound source be positioned directly in front of the horn. No matter how orderly and preplanned the staging of Henry Smith’s death, it would have been essentially impossible to encapsulate on a phonographic cylinder in any manner approaching the completeness and “fidelity” that the memoirs of Burdett and Barrett describe. Even the Mertins photographs of the lynching, taken from points quite distant from Smith himself, illustrate how the crowds and the event’s design made getting close to the scaffold extremely difficult. And none of the early, detailed accounts of the events in Paris makes any mention of a phonograph or phonograph operator being present. Nor do the photographs provide such evidence. It is unclear how many people in the 1890s were familiar with the technological capacities of phonography. It also seems possible, though equally unknowable, that the newspapers could have willfully suppressed more serious doubts about the recordings’ authenticity, although one article I have located, which I will discuss shortly, does directly address this issue. Another article, however, offers a particularly loaded account of the recordings’ supposed genuineness. In an article in the Delphos, Ohio, 92

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Daily Herald, probably reprinted from a New York paper, a presumably white Texan visiting New York in 1901 claimed to have heard a recording of the Henry Smith torture and murder. The white Texan in the article reported that the recording had been made by a black man who witnessed the murder — a claim that perhaps was understood to boost the viability of the recording’s authenticity: “ ‘One of these Negroes,’ said the Texan, ‘had a phonograph with him, and into that phonograph went the agonizing cries of the burning man. His agony was terrible, and his moans and cries could be heard for blocks. Do you know what that Negro with that phonograph did the following day? No? Well, he went around all the towns of Texas close to Paris advertising that he had the cries of the dying Negro in that phonograph.’ ” The “Negro with the phonograph” had made a considerable profit playing Smith’s screams for other local blacks, whose “morbid curiosity” was seen to demonstrate a lack of identification with the victim of the mob’s actions that had surprised the Texan telling the story. “It was like an opera or a fine play or a good prize fight to another class of citizens,” he said.12 This account of the cylinder’s production, with its absolutely absurd projection of a black man being close enough to the events of a lynching to record it with a phonograph, thus became one of the attractions that would draw people to listen to the recording. Particularly in the context of the other articles we have seen, which focused on the maintenance of moral propriety, as well as the emphasis on civic order at the Smith lynching itself, this piece sensationalizes preexisting disdain for the civic behavior of blacks — even among their own “local community.” The article affirms and racializes the shock and outrage evident in the previous ones, in addition to offering a racialized fantasy of the technological capacities of phonography. Instead of overcoming insurmountable technical obstacles, the challenge of recording an event of this sort, it implies, is to find a black man to make the recording. A fantasy of such extravagance was perhaps necessary in the face of the specific constraints on the material practice of 1890s studio recording.13 For it can reasonably be assumed that the cylinders referred to in all of the accounts we have seen were produced in a studio as a forerunner of what we would today call the “reenactment” genre. At least one such recording was definitely an example of this genre. According to ethnomusicologist Patrick Feaster, a recording titled “Burning of Smith at Paris, Texas” was listed in the 1899 catalog of the Talking Machine Company of Chicago.14 This cylinder was not advertised as an authentic document of the event. Instead, it was pitched as the creation of a prolific recording artist, Chicago alderman Silas Leachman. Leachman was largely known as a singer; his performance of a song called “Daddy Wouldn’t Buy Me a Bow Wow” was one of the most popular recordings of the 1890s. He was especially well known for his renditions of “coon songs,” racist ditties descended from the Social Text 102

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minstrel stage that made up a major sector of the market in early recordings of music. Indeed, the listing for the “Burning of Smith” cylinder appears among Leachman’s works in the Chicago company’s catalog just after a selection titled “Big Fat Coon.” That this listing appears in 1899, after the majority of the accounts I have cited, suggests that this was not the only recording of its sort and that Leachman’s cylinder may have been taking advantage of a script that had already proved marketable for other companies, perhaps based in other regions. The Talking Machine Company of Chicago catalog listing Leachman’s “Burning of Smith” recording suggests that the recordings heard by Burdett, Barrett, and presumably thousands of others were part of a genre in the early commercial recording market known as the “descriptive specialty,” or sometimes simply the “descriptive.” As Jonathan Sterne describes these recordings, “Somewhere between a contrived re-creation of an actual event and a vaudeville sketch, descriptive specialties offered their listeners ‘tone pictures’ of different places and events.”15 Many such recordings represented major news items: the charge of the Rough Riders up San Juan Hill, for instance, or the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. Others represented aurally dynamic everyday events — auctions were a particularly popular subject — in ways that often crossed over into the penchant in early recording for imitations, usually parodic, of “ethnic” voices.16 Descriptive specialties representing news events often had a narrator, and were recorded from vantage points — often multiple ones — that it would have been impossible to attain in physical time and space, as is evident from an entry in the 1904 Columbia catalog titled “Capture of the Forts at Port Arthur,” a Russo-Japanese War affair described by the catalog copy as “A scene from one of the Russian forts, with cannonading, and shriek of shells. The Russian band is heard playing the National Anthem. The Japanese approach, headed by their band playing their national air, and take possession of the forts, amid loud cries of ‘Banzai.’ ”17 Other descriptive titles included “Cumming’s Indian Congress at Coney Island,” “Departure of a Hamburg-America Liner,” “In Cheyenne Joe’s Cowboy Tavern,” “Eruption of Vesuvius,” and “Battle of Manila,” to name only a few. However, the historical and cultural conventions within which a cylinder like the “Burning of Smith” was produced extend beyond the range of what most scholarly work on early sound recording covers, since those conventions also include the long tradition of the race melodrama, a multigenre tradition dating back at least to the antebellum era and one that Saidiya Hartman has identified with an American cultural fascination with the “spectacular character of black suffering.”18 The recordings described by Burdett and Barrett, and presumably the one produced by Leachman, drew from scripts that in their broadest outlines recycled and 94

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recast the attractions of a text like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which was often treated as less a unified work than an endlessly pliable set of stock scenes and characters, available for revision and addition, and easily adaptable to both stage and cinema.19 Indeed, the record company catalog’s juxtaposition of Leachman’s “Burning of Smith” recording with a “comic” coon song mirrors the regular mixing of scenes from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s antislavery novel with minstrel sketches on the music hall stage. Indeed, Silas Leachman’s “Burning of Smith” cylinder and others like it may have been forerunners of the soon-to-be-popular cylinder “The Flogging Scene from ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin,’ ” performed in 1904 for the Edison Company by the leading recording artist of the time, Len Spencer. 20 At the same time, the grisly content of these recordings reflects contemporary preoccupations with documentary realism and its aesthetics, as well as with the representational capacities of new media. These interests were also manifest in early film production, which itself constitutes an important reference point for an example of the “descriptive specialty” genre such as “Burning of Smith.” Tom Gunning has influentially portrayed early films by Edwin S. Porter, the Lumières, and others as designed to demonstrate the capacities of the medium to its audiences, a mode of representation he has dubbed the “cinema of attractions.”21 Descriptive specialties might very well be considered a phonography of attractions, meant, on the one hand, to demonstrate but, on the other, to inscribe a set of affective and phantastical associations with the medium. As Sterne describes them, “descriptive specialties emphasized for listeners the ‘realism’ of the medium, even if audiences were aware of the fabrication of the actual performance on record. Like ‘primitive’ cinema, where the camera’s ability to document motion is highlighted, descriptive specialties emphasized the possibility for sound reproduction to present realistic and fanciful accounts alike of events over time.”22 These cylinders, then, were made in studios, and were most likely produced not as intentionally terroristic enforcers of white supremacy, nor as concertedly political antilynching agitprop, nor as an early instance of “snuff” culture — all of these possibilities once seemed viable to me — but as part of a growing culture industry in sound recordings, to be sold as part of an early phonographic genre that re-created major news events in a highly theatricalized form. Given the overall tone of the contemporary responses to them that still exist, they were likely made with little regard for their politics, outside of inspiring the same highly marketable horror and largely apolitical moral outrage solicited by newspaper coverage of lynchings at the time. 23 In other words, these recordings were very much in the mainstream of the emergence of the recording industry as a major form of commercial entertainment. Indeed, although we cannot hear them, I believe these recordings helped to modernize and further capitalize a longSocial Text 102

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standing fascination among whites with black voices, as well as fantasies about the relationship of black voices to black bodies. However, I also suspect that these recordings (and the issue of their origins) represented and racialized a particular uncanny response to phonography itself during a transitional moment in the medium’s early history. As numerous authors have shown, the earliest discourse about the phonograph imagined it as a preservative device for voices, including the voices of the dead: what Sterne, with a lack of romance that productively counters the tendencies of some influential theorists, has called its “embalming” functions. But the 1890s saw a substantial expansion of the market in phonographs and a parallel expansion and diversification in the number and types of recordings available for purchase. It was during this decade that it became clear that the phonograph and similar machines like the gramophone would serve the purpose, first and foremost, of entertainment. Indeed, the gramophone’s inability to record marked a definite turn of the industry toward consumption rather than production of recordings. The emergence of a market in recordings that featured songs in several genres, comedy sketches, and descriptive specialties helped to empty the phonograph of its earlier associations with spiritualism and the occult. There was little ghostly about listening to “Daddy Wouldn’t Buy Me a Bow Wow” or an impersonation of an auctioneer with a heavy Yiddish accent. A transformative sense of the phonographic uncanny is apparent in a fascinating, widely reprinted journalistic investigation into the making of commercial phonograph recordings, titled “The Phonograph Fakir,” which raised questions concerning the authenticity of certain notorious cylinders. The author assumed that his audience lacked any significant familiarity with the making of commercial recordings. In order to construct his exposé of the recordings by professionals in a professional setting, he visited a New York recording studio — or, as it was then called, recording laboratory. Observing a singer record a song brought the journalist face to face with the gap between the material process of recording and the imagined capacities of the phonograph as a recording device. “Among many other details of a phonographic nature,” he writes, “I learned that in order to load [illegible] a cylinder for reproduction the singer or speaker must stand with his mouth not more than six inches from the receiving horn and shout almost at the top of his voice.” The author, then, sought fundamentally to overturn the fantasy of recording as a seamlessly absorptive process by detailing the scene of production (the lab), the multiple persons generally present during the process, and the precise spatial and bodily situations necessary to produce a recording successfully. The article debunks the claims to authenticity of two cylinders. The first is “The Ravings of McCullough,” a widely exhibited cylinder that, it was claimed, had been made inside the insane asylum to which the once96

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popular actor John McCullough had been committed in the 1880s. 24 Later in the article, the journalist writes that a cylinder purporting to represent “the burning of John Smith [sic] by a southern mob” ought to be considered the “prize ‘fake’ ” of them all: The dialogue for this was written from a newspaper report. The negro’s pleadings for mercy, for water and his cursings, mingled with the shouts of the mob, are truly blood curdling when emitted from the phonograph. “That record,” said the manager [of a New York recording studio], “was ordered by one of our customers in a southern city. A hit? Well, I guess yes. Say, the crowd went against the machine to the tune of $25 a day, and we’ve sold hundreds of them.”25

The journalist is bent not only on uprooting any belief in the Smith recordings’ authenticity, but also on confuting claims that recordings could be made that remained “faithful” to live sound. Having already described the manipulation involved in the production of that “live” sound, he describes observing a vocalist sing into the recording phonograph’s horn and then immediately listening to the recording. Of the playback, he writes, “It was not [the singer’s] voice. It was the phonograph voice — mangled and in pain — accompanied by sounds resembling the crackling of leaping flames and the smashing of brittle wood.”26 What the author describes is not so much interference with the delivery of the singer’s voice but the creation of a new voice altogether: the “phonograph voice.” The resemblance between this passage and the descriptions of lynching recordings, particularly those by Samuel Burdett and Mell Barrett, is quite striking — sounds of flames, of cracking wood, and of course of a voice “mangled and in pain” are all details that mirror ones we have already seen noted in the listeners’ accounts. What does it mean that the “phonograph voice” sounds like a lynching recording, the type of cylinder that, it appears, would regularly lead to exhibitors being run out of town? Whereas the uncanniness of phonography had once arisen from the fact that it could “preserve” voices, in these examples, the uncanniness comes from sounds that at once embody extreme states of physical and mental stress and the sound of the machine as it works to produce sound. Interestingly, the focus on the mangled, pained sound of the phonograph voice appears at a time when recordings’ faithfulness to the original performance was improving. But these very improvements likely instigated modes of listening more critically attuned to issues of fidelity than had been the case five or ten years earlier. In the rapidly developing world of phonography of the 1890s, as the sheer awe at the process of sound reproduction began to fade, the lynching recordings may have offered a way to both represent and reembody the new uncanny property of phonography, this “inhuman” Social Text 102

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sound. In several other articles of the time, the phonograph is described as particularly effective at representing screams; Thomas Edison, in fact, was said to have loved the McCullough cylinder because of the sonic intensity with which the phonograph rendered the madman’s screams. 27 The aural violence of lynchings and the screams of the insane drew directly on the sounds that the phonograph was “best” at producing. The bodies of black men being ritually murdered with increasing frequency in the American South offered an especially ripe topic for this historical moment in sound recording, both because the imagined sounds of slaughter were heard as so well suited to the technology and because they offered a way of giving the more unwieldy aspects of that technology a body and a historical referent — that historical referent being the black body’s constitution, in the national imaginary, as the inarticulate subject of violence, and as always available to have violence done to it. The recordings surely also drew upon an established and growing white fascination with the sound of black voices and, in particular, with imagining black voices as in some senses excessively embodied and insufficiently linguistic — that is, as less or other than human. This fascination dates back to at least the seventeenth century, as Ronald Radano has shown. 28 This preoccupation permeated nineteenth-century AngloAmerican culture at multiple levels, from Stowe’s description in Uncle Tom’s Cabin of Topsy as “producing in her throat all those odd guttural sounds which distinguish the native music of her race” to experiments by the British ethnologist G. D. Gibb and his followers designed to demonstrate that the “Negro larynx” resembled the throats of animals more than those of whites. 29 In the age of the phonograph and recording studio, these fantasies took on new forms. In 1891, a note in the industry journal the Phonogram focused on such sounds in articulating an intimate link between blackness and phonographic recording: “Negroes take better than white singers, because their voices have a certain sharpness or harshness about them that a white man’s has not. A barking dog, squalling cat, neighing horse, and, in fact, almost any beast’s or bird’s voice is excellent for the good repetition on the phonograph.”30 Indeed, such assumptions helped to propel the first major black recording artist, George Washington Johnson, to stardom in the 1890s on the basis of his performances on cylinders like “The Whistling Coon” and “The Laughing Song.” These numbers — which were built around refrains in which Johnson whistled and laughed, of course — drew on the same fascination with the black voice as corporeal, inarticulate, prelinguistic, and pushed to the extremes of embodiment as was reflected in the lynching cylinders, and they reaffirmed the sense that these sounds were somehow closest to embodying the process of sound reproduction itself. In imagining these historical connections between black voices and 98

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the “inhuman” voice of the phonograph, I have been assuming a universalized, and hence white, listener and consumer. But as the example of Samuel Burdett demonstrates, not everyone who heard these recordings was white, and some listeners may have been interpellated by the recording in ways that interrupted or complicated the alignment of the inhumanity of the phonograph’s voice with the sound (albeit staged and minstrelized) of black voices being drained of their humanity. Indeed, a strikingly similar anecdote told by another prominent African American, theater and film critic Lester Walton, appeared in the black newspaper the New York Age in 1906, thirteen years after Burdett’s incident in Seattle. In an article titled “The Degeneracy of the Moving Picture Theater,” Walton described strolling in Manhattan one afternoon and encountering not one but two signs advertising “JOHN SMITH [sic] of PARIS, TEXAS, BURNED at the STAKE. HEAR HIS MOANS AND GROANS. PRICE ONE CENT!” (It is worth simply noting here that, again, while this exhibit presumably contained visual imagery, it is the phonographic aspect that drives the barking advertisement, much as Burdett’s account focused on the sounds of the exhibit rather than on the visual images.) Walton described “a crudely painted picture of a colored man being burned at the stake” as a feature of the signs, and expressed his amazement at the theaters’ invitation to “walk in and enjoy the sight of a human being meeting death by burning, with the moans and groans thrown in for a penny.” Thus Walton’s account, like Burdett’s, displays a degree of empathy (including the very deliberate use of the term human being) for the victim of the lynching notably absent from the other newspaper reports, which focused exclusively on the obscenity of representing the event rather than on the historical referent of the recording. Walton continued: “The promoters of moving picture theaters make the assertion that their pictures are of an educational nature. We would like to know where do the elements of education come in so far as the picture in question is concerned.”31 For Burdett and Walton, the outrage that these encounters inspired was useful as a rhetorical stepping-off point with which to raise consciousness and call for political action, particularly among other African Americans. One way of understanding the responses of Burdett and Walton is through a familiar kind of disgust that is commonly allied with distrust of new media. And indeed, the sorts of people who were the subjects of the recordings we have been examining — not only people of African descent, but also the insane, and perhaps even white southerners engaged in a mob killing — belong to demographics that are conventionally seen as refugees from, or victims of, modernity (the fact that in some reports of the events leading to his lynching, Henry Smith is described as mildly insane or developmentally disabled becomes particularly notable in this context). A key characteristic of the othering that binds these demographics is an insufSocial Text 102

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ficient degree of individual will, and to the extent that shrieking, screaming, and shouting constituted the sound of the recordings we have been discussing, they might be seen as the vocal acts that indicate most forcefully a lack of self-possession. And it is tempting to imagine Henry Smith’s life and death as reaffirming that insufficiency of will by passively being taken up as fodder for the new medium of commercial phonography. But both Burdett and Walton present themselves as writing from within modernity; neither their blackness nor their possible identification with these representations of Henry Smith causes them to condemn modernity, specifically. Indeed, in A Test of Lynch Law, Burdett presents himself as a modern black man in a modern city, and Walton, as a critic who was beginning to explore a serious interest in cinema, was clearly someone who felt himself buoyed by modernity despite his critique of certain aspects of it. These biographical data complement the exhortations of Alexander Weheliye that blackness be “understood as an integral structuring assemblage of the modern human” and that black suffering be considered a constitutive force, rather than an exception, within that notion of the modern human. 32 Revising our understanding of the modern human as a formation of blackness rather than a category that excludes blackness means also revising our notion of the inhuman. Indeed, Weheliye argues that sounds traditionally associated with the prelinguistic, and hence inhuman — sounds such as screams and moans — ought to be instead considered “language that does not rely on linguistic structures, at least not primarily, to convey meaning, sense, or expression.”33 Rather than seeing Burdett and Walton as antimodern, I want to cast their responses to the lynching recordings as embedded in a racialized, discursive struggle taking place over notions of modernity and the phonograph’s place in it — more specifically, in the location of the boundary between the “human” voice and the inhuman, phonographic voice. The parameters and lines of this battle are by no means clear-cut. In the rhetoric surrounding lynching recordings culminating in “The Phonograph Fakir” article, we see on the one hand an effort to subsume the voice of the lynching victim into the machine — in a sense, to reenact the lynching by squelching its sounds out. But this subsuming was also a reembodiment of the machine’s production of sound through the idea that the phonograph did not simply make or conduct sounds, but had a “voice.” The article is at once a fantasy about failed fidelity (phonographs sound like burning wood and not singing) and about perfect fidelity, with the implication that the sounds of a lynching align neatly with the authentic “phonograph voice.” In the first fantasy, the inhuman machine interferes with the humangenerated sounds generated by the phonograph’s operation; in the second fantasy, the machine itself becomes human. In elucidating this shifting play between the human and the inhu10 0

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man, it is useful to turn to the work of one of the phonograph’s first major theorists, also an acutely engaged critic of modernity — Theodor Adorno. Writing in 1926, Adorno noted something akin to the historical transformation I have identified above in his brief, speculative essay “The Curves of the Needle.” He marked the loss of earlier, imperfect phonographic sound (which he called “artisanal” rather than “industrial”) and condemned the contemporary “emphasis on concrete fidelity” in sound recording. 34 In an elegant summation of Adorno’s argument in “The Curves of the Needle,” Barbara Engh remarks: “Adorno was writing that the most hopeful thing about the phonograph was its failures. Its distortions, scratches and skips, its winding down, were an assertion of the inhuman, an interruption of the subject’s instrumental relation to the object.”35 As an aesthetic theorist, Engh glosses, Adorno was supremely invested in critique of the notion of “expression” and in approaching art (in his own words) “not in terms of subjective feelings, but in terms of ordinary things and situations in which historical processes have been sedimented, endowing them with the potential to speak.”36 His resistance to fidelity in sound recording stemmed from his desire to hear “the latent language of things,” rather than to subsume the thing in the machine, or the machine’s thingness; indeed, he saw this as a way of articulating his sense that, as Engh puts it, “the oppression and exploitation of human beings is based on the prehistoric and ongoing distinction between the human and the inhuman.”37 In turning back to Burdett and Walton here, I am concerned less with their intentions than with how we ought to frame our approach to what remains of their writings. To construct that frame it is necessary to imagine the attempt to hear things speak — in Adorno’s words, “groping for the latent language of things”38 — as a critical practice. Here it may be useful to turn to the work of Fred Moten, who begins his book In the Break with the sentence, “The history of blackness is testament to the fact that objects can and do resist.”39 It may seem surprising (it is to me) to align a mid-twentieth-century critic who famously condemned African American aural practice with a twenty-first-century critic whose work is grounded in such practices, and I have no interest in erasing the racism present in some of Adorno’s writings. It is nevertheless possible to see Moten’s work as converging with Adorno’s if we recognize aspects of the work of both as meant to rethink the human/inhuman binary by means of a more historically, culturally, and philosophically supple understanding of the constant shifting and interdependence of the categories. Although Adorno, of course, never understood or admitted as much, the inter­ dependence and mutual inflection of these categories in the West has been centrally formed and indelibly marked by the six-centuries-long history of New World slavery. If the phonograph record is to some ultimately an instance of the Social Text 102

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commodification of sound and the sound-maker’s labor, we might take Moten’s notion of “the shrieking commodity,” a category he grounds in the screaming figure of Aunt Hester in Frederick Douglass’s Narrative, as a revisionist notion of sound’s status as a commodity, one formed through a richer understanding of race, slavery, and history itself. And we might understand the “Burning of Smith” cylinder and others like it as an artifact of the same saleability of the voice of racial violence. A mass-cultural offshoot of white supremacist violence, these recordings may seem culturally and politically antithetical to the genealogy and hermeneutics of radical black cultural production that Moten constructs around aural phenomena like the scream, shout, and moan — a genealogy that includes such canonical figures as Cecil Taylor, Ralph Ellison, and Antonin Artaud, all of whom he approaches through their various engagements with recording. Without creating an equivalence, though, it is possible — and, I think, important — to see such work and the recordings we have been examining as rooted in the same historical “hurt,” to use Fredric Jameson’s famous term. Certainly these recordings, like the “coon songs” marketed beside them in phonograph company catalogs, bear and reenact, even as they reinflict, an important part of the traumatic history of race as lived in the United States. The “coon song” genre, like the lynching descriptive specialty, may well have provided an occasion for a black body to be pulled apart, eviscerated, and collapsed into the overall wonder of the technology. Such processes, and the lynching recordings in particular, position death in a manner very different from the theoretical space it has occupied in most treatments of early phonography. Numerous critics have described phonography as a ghostly medium, part of a nineteenth-century fascination with spirits and the possibility of life after death. In such accounts, the phonograph is a preservative device, allowing the dead (such as dead great men, dead relatives, or the dog Nipper’s presumably dead master in the famous “His Master’s Voice” logo) to live after their bodies have ceased to exist. But these recordings do not preserve life; rather, they document a cultural practice whose ritualized performance is centered around the destruction of a life, and they hence point to the indelible whiteness of not only phonographic listening in the 1890s, but also a great deal of recent work on phonography. This coincidence is not surprising, given the fact that such work often takes up the late-nineteenth-century discourse surrounding phonography with relatively little critical perspective. The racialized limits of such work operate in tandem with an often impoverished understanding of the materiality of the technology — or perhaps, as I attempted to suggest vis-à-vis the period belief in the lynching recordings’ authenticity, with a desire to fantasize beyond the material limits of the technology — thus the tendency of widely cited media theorists 10 2

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such as Friedrich Kittler and John Durham Peters to take for granted the preservative power of the technology. And yet, as Sterne writes: “If there was a defining figure in early accounts of sound recording, it was the possibility of preserving the voice beyond the death of the speaker. If there was a defining characteristic of those first recording devices and the uses to which they were put, it was the ephemerality of sound recordings.”40 Too many theorists have drawn their conclusions without acknowledging the tenuousness of the recordings’ existence; the number of recordings produced in the 1890s obviously far surpasses the number available from that time that can be heard today. Moreover, it is quite possible that the existence of certain types of recordings — such as those dealing with particularly charged events such as lynchings — was always particularly tenuous and led to the disposal or destruction of particular cylinders. For in a sense, the subject matter of lynching aligned the cheapness and tenuousness of their medium with the cheapness and tenuousness of black lives as shaped by the white supremacist turn-of-the-century United States. Notes I am grateful to Patrick Feaster, Homay King, Anna McCarthy, and Jill Stauffer, and to audiences at the Columbia University Seminar in American Studies and the Tri-College Faculty Working Group in American Studies for their ideas and incitements. 1. Jacqueline Goldsby, A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 5. 2. Samuel Burdett, A Test of Lynch Law, an Exposé of Mob Violence and the Courts of Hell (Seattle, 1901), 17. Further citations will appear parenthetically. Burdett was a prominent member of Seattle’s black bourgeoisie. He was a Kentucky native and a veteran of the Union Army. He moved in 1890 to Seattle, where he opened a veterinary practice. In 1891, he cofounded the Cornerstone Grand Lodge of the York Masons. In 1901, he founded a local chapter of the antilynching group the International Council of the World, and later that year he wrote A Test of Lynch Law. That same year the Seattle chapter offered a reward for lynchers of Yung Fook, a Chinese cook in Bakersfield, California. See www.blackpast.org/?q=aaw/burdett -dr-samuel-1849 (accessed 18 September 2009). 3. On touring phonographic exhibitions, see Charles Musser in collaboration with Carol Nelson, High Class Moving Pictures: Lyman H. Howe and the Forgotten Era of the Travelling Exhibition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991). 4. Burdett’s claim, it should be noted, erases the history of anti-Asian violence during this period in Seattle. 5. Edward Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life after Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 159; see also Adam Gussow, “ ‘Shoot Myself a Cop’: Mamie Smith’s ‘Crazy Blues’ as Social Text,” Callaloo 25 (2002): 31. 6. Decatur (IL) Daily Review, 22 May 1897. 7. Titusville (PA) Herald, 1 December 1897. 8. Other references to phonographic and photographic exhibitions about the Smith lynching appear in the Fort Wayne (IN) Weekly Sentinel of 19 June 1898 and Social Text 102

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the Daily Kennebec (ME) Journal of 19 November 1895, both of which refer to pictures of the burning of a “negro” in Texas. See also “Shocking Exhibition. Phonograph Operator Promptly Ordered Out of Town,” Denver Republican, 2 July 1898, which describes an exhibit featuring “pictures” and “sounds” representing the Smith lynching; the article reports that “the sounds reproduced were said to be the cries of the negro roasting to death.” 9. The censorship of boxing films, particularly after the emergence of Jack Johnson as the nation’s greatest fighter, was itself a topic greatly charged with racial politics around this time. See Lee Grieveson, Policing Cinema: Movies and Censorship in Early Twentieth-Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). 10. Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890 – 1940 (New York: Vintage, 1999), 207. 11. In Spectacular Secret, Goldsby provides a fascinating account of these photographs, which Mertins copyrighted and which are still officially held by the Library of Congress. 12. “A Burning Negro’s Voice,” Delphos (OH) Daily Herald, 19 November 1901. 13. For more details concerning studio recording in this era, see Mark Katz, Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), and William Howland Kenney, Recorded Music in American Life: The Phonograph and Popular Memory, 1890 – 1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). 14. Patrick Feaster, personal e-mail correspondence, January 2008. 15. Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 243 – 44. 16. On the other hand, popular recordings of speeches by figures like William Jennings Bryan and Booker T. Washington were not considered part of the descriptive genre. Nonetheless, despite claims to the contrary, these recordings were always made in the studio. 17. Quoted in Sterne, Audible Past, 244. 18. Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 3. 19. See Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), and Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O. J. Simpson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). 20. On this recording, see Lisa Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 119 – 21. The recording can be heard at utc.iath.virginia.edu/ onstage/sound/soundf.html (accessed 18 September 2009). In 1910, Spencer and an ensemble also recorded a cylinder titled “Uncle Tom’s Cabin/Entrance of Topsy,” which featured a long banjo rendition of “Dixie” and other musical performances. This recording is available at utc.iath.virginia.edu/onstage/sound/topsentf.html (accessed 18 September 2009). 21. See Tom Gunning, “ ‘Now You See It, Now You Don’t’: The Temporality of the Cinema of Attractions,” in Silent Film, ed. Richard Abel (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 71 – 84. See also Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), on the close relationship between melodrama and the realism of such films. 22. Sterne, Audible Past, 245. 10 4

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23. On lynching and journalism, see Goldsby’s chapter “Writing ‘Dynamitically’: Ida B. Wells” in Spectacular Secret, 43 – 104. 24. For an article that claims this cylinder is an actual recording of John McCullough, see “Voices of the Dead,” Athens (OH) Messenger, 6 February 1890. 25. “The Phonograph Fakir,” Fort Wayne (IN) Weekly Sentinel, 22 September 1897; and Steubenville (OH) Herald, 17 September 1897. 26. Ibid. The account continues: “There is a lot of nonsense about the capabilities of the phonograph. It cannot preserve for us the exact tones and inflection of our dear and great ones, as we have so often been told. Only singers with powerful and penetrating voices of large volume can make a good impression on the wax cylinders. The ordinary voice comes back in a series of faint squeaks which are lost in a tumult of other sounds.” 27. “Truly a Voice from the Tombs,” Charlotte (NC) News, 14 January 1890, reprinted from the New York Sun. 28. Ronald Radano, Lying up a Nation: Race and Black Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 29. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life among the Lowly (New York: Penguin, 1986), 352. On the larynx experiments, see Joseph Deniker, The Races of Man: An Outline of Anthropology and Ethnology (New York: Scribner, 1900), 96. Deniker writes that there is not enough work done on racial differences in larynx, tongue, and so on, but that they “must certainly be observable.” See also John Kerkering, The Poetics of National and Racial Identity in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 187. 30. Quoted in Tim Brooks, Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1890 – 1919 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 30. 31. See the discussion of this essay in Anna Everett, Returning the Gaze: A Genealogy of Black Film Criticism 1909 – 1949 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 19 – 21, from which I have drawn these quotations. The original article is Lester Walton, “Degeneracy of the Moving Picture Theater,” New York Age, 5 August 1906. 32. Alexander Weheliye, “After Man,” American Literary History 20 (2008): 6. 33. Ibid., 12. 34. Theodor Adorno, “The Curves of the Needle,” in Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 271. 35. Barbara Engh, “After ‘His Master’s Voice,’ ” New Formations 38 (1999): 54. 36. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. C. Lenhardt (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), 163. One of the most compelling aspects of this essay is its juxtaposition of Adorno’s aesthetic theory with his writing on phonography. 37. Barbara Engh, “Adorno and the Sirens,” in Embodied Voices: Representing Female Vocality in Western Culture, ed. Leslie C. Dunn and Nancy A. Jones (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 126. 38. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 89. 39. Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 1. 40. Sterne, Audible Past, 287.

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Can You Feel the Beat? Freestyle’s Systems of Living, Loving, and Recording Alexandra T. Vazquez

“I had been a little girl with two guys on the side and six producers up her ass. It was time for Lisa Lisa to come out on her own and grow up.” — Lisa Velez, She Bop: The Definitive History of Women in Pop, Rock, and Soul

Please Don’t Go

Nayobe Gomez is a Brooklyn-born and -reared Cuban musician who came of age in the mid-1980s. While she now performs a remarkable repertoire that includes merengue, cumbia, and salsa, Gomez initially made a name for herself as one of the main players in freestyle. Freestyle is both a musical genre and, as a multitude of fanzines will tell you, a lifestyle. The playwright Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas evoked our teenage surround when he called it a “system of living.”1 Described as “android descarga” by music critic Peter Shapiro and “a soap opera set to music” by the vocalist Judy Torres, there is general agreement that freestyle is constituted by a nebulous Latin feel that is spoken about but not necessarily accounted for (beyond its use of Roland TR-808 Claves). 2 But I enter the scene of freestyle with the assumption that it is both tinge and fringe — and by that I mean both marginal part and decorative border. To do so means to surrender the accolade of theorist for stylist, to harbor the hard work of listening from scholarly convention. I begin with a set of Gomez’s early performances, a recording and a cinematic counterpoint, to illustrate how freestyle has been wedged in the trajectory of popular music. At the same time, though, I argue that it is by way of these performances that Gomez troubles freestyle’s position-

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ing, which is also to say, her own. In 1985, Gomez recorded her biggest freestyle hit, “Please Don’t Go,” when she was fifteen years old. Beginning with a gospel setting of the scene backed by a piano, the song unravels as a sustained plea for mercy in the face of an angry, vengeful, and unpredictable lover — a call to prevent a potential crime of passion. It is tragic, the laying down of that last desperate card, saved for one who threatens to depart forever. Gomez’s voice literally sounds like it is on its knees, holding onto a pant leg in a half-open doorway. At the same time, in its crisp and fluid play within the octave, her voice sounds like it has already moved away, out of reach, capable of defending itself. Her punctuation (a righteous underlining of “don’t go there tonight / it just isn’t right”) makes known some hard-earned wisdom and, with it, hard-earned technique. The gospel-to-disco substance behind her subtle belter is the reason that vocalists are better called interpreters: their creative toolboxes are things of wonder. Her vocals are featured over a steady dance beat with fill-in percussive flashes, mechanized claps, a winding xylophonic refrain, and a programmed string section. After cutting her chops as an understudy for Lena Horne in an Off Broadway production of The Wiz, Gomez was featured in the 1985 film Krush Groove, also when she was fifteen. 3 In the tradition of historical fiction, the movie enacts the founding of the Def Jam record label by Russell Simmons and Rick Rubin from a dorm room at New York University. Jimmied between scenes featuring the Fat Boys’ disorderliness and a pubescent LL Cool J lip-synching his hit “I Can’t Live without My Radio,” we are introduced to Nayobe, mid-song, from the inside of Def Jam’s provisional studio. She is auditioning for one of the coveted spots during the label’s talent search. Gomez performs “Please Don’t Go” in front of three production executives in suits: Joseph Simmons and Darryl McDaniels from Run DMC and a sleeping Rick Rubin. After she finishes her song, the camera frames Nayobe while we hear her now-unseen audience jeer at her: “She’ll do work,” followed by, “get a name and number for me, too, I want a piece.” The comment attempts to hook her as she makes her exit. After the slightest pause, Gomez responds with a roll of the eyes and one of those up-yours smiles — one not quite polished by the privileges that age carries, but well on its way there. In the film, Gomez’s cameo runs just under a minute. Nevertheless, her performance in this minute powerfully tweaks a number of narratives that have overdetermined freestyle, its performers, and audiences. While the movie makes visible freestyle’s development and place alongside hiphop music and culture, the minor role it is made to play depends upon Gomez’s gendered and foreign place in the studio.4 Despite her seriousness and craft, this particular audience attempts to reduce Nayobe to a piece of ass and a joke. That the studio doubles as a bedroom brings an additional 10 8

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charge to the scene. Beyond the studio, freestyle’s one-minute presence in a film considered to be the earliest dramatization of hip-hop as a commercial industry carries its own implications. Its most obvious point: women and immigrants, women immigrants, and women bearing the traces of immigrants are said industry’s narrative afterthoughts. Freestyle is relegated to that seemingly less hard-core and less politicized milieu called “dance music”; its makers are available and then forgettable. Far from being exceptional, this cinematic wedging reproduces a historical conundrum forced upon dark-skinned Latinas: their ethnic difference complicates their racial place in the United States. This difference-as-foreignness binds their work up with sexual accessibility. The violences let loose by the men’s reduction of Gomez in form and content further the troubling precedents set for young U.S. Latinas in popular culture. Although the ways in which Gomez is framed in the movie spell out a few of these qualifications of entry, her performance challenges their enforcement. Gomez’s commanding performance makes clear the power of her voice and this specific song for the talent competition. Gomez wails into the microphone; in fact you could say she yells at it, as she overdubs and supplements the recorded version of herself playing in the background. Deepest attention must also be paid to the performance’s aftermath, in the form of the response she hurls in the direction of the judges.5 Her gesture documents her back-talk to the way in which she was positioned and cataloged in the space of the studio, which, after all, is a space of recording. In this minute, Gomez teaches us to move past facile readings that would disregard her performance because we stopped ourselves at a place called “bad representation.” To leave her performance and final gesture behind would make her a disposable figure, part of a supposedly disposable genre. Nayobe has already done work, and not the kind solely intended for another’s consumptive pleasure. The work she has done is durable and unforgettable: she at once affected the players in that studio, negotiated the tight space of genre, and gave us a sense of the pain and pleasure of being a not-quite-hot commodity in the music industry. Nayobe’s final gesture in particular signals a legacy of techniques developed to navigate the procedures of recording, including, but not limited to, those that go down in studios. All this and more, I’d like to remind you, when she was just fifteen years old. To try and tell freestyle’s story is to say a great deal about a moment when large numbers of young women found themselves on the inside of recording studios. It bears its own annals of the uncredited, adding volumes of names to those who have lent their uncompensated talents to the advent of studio-based recording. As this essay unfolds, I’ll pick up some of the actual, material leaving-behind of such performances by other vocalSocial Text 102

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ists in Nayobe’s cohort. I will underscore their collective undoing of the qualifications of entry to the recorded sphere, be it protocols of reception, technique, circulation, and most crucially, sound. And finally, throughout this essay I suggest how freestyle’s audiences have taken up this material leaving-behind — matter that cannot be made to sit still — from the back then and have extended it into the beats thereafter. While they have meant so much to audiences who came of age in a particular way, I’d like to acknowledge (up front) freestyle’s vocalists here and now — even if it is beyond the scope of this essay. Performers like Nayobe deserve futurity, some room to grow up, and the option to change locations. Let the Music Play

Following the earnest melodic strains that front the music, I’ll proceed with a necessary seriousness to situate freestyle, which has long been understood as a sound track of nonseriousness. To rehearse what freestyle is depends upon an ethos of makeshift understanding, but that is also part of its wonderful premise. As such, I’d like to make a brief return to Cortiñas’s “system of living,” a serious and nonserious phrase that rejects quantitative logic even as it evokes it. Cortiñas’s phrase does not provide a schema of stable demographic markers for those unfamiliar with freestyle. Instead, it offers a poetic snapshot of those feelings and material ornaments borne and worn by those of us who came of age in immigration’s centers — a hairstyle worn with a teja, webbed Florsheim loafers, fanned bangs, gold hoops, Jean Naté body splash, Z. Cavariccis, and so on.6 And if not donned by you specifically, then these things were formative parts of your provisional worlds. By provisional worlds, I mean both actual spaces, where experiences of migration and arrival (actual or approximate) played a critical part of coming-of-age in the United States, and affective conditions, such as those that envelop the changeover from niña a mujer. In this essay, I’m working with one detail of this “system of living” — freestyle music — that is also the sound track for the whole.7 I understand freestyle as a sustained moment, a feeling and a sound with a few shared characteristics. For contextual purposes, and working against my own resistance to the demand to periodize, I will situate freestyle in two moments: an “old school” that began in the mid-1980s, which gave way to a “new school” in the early 1990s. However, to frame it this way would presuppose its death — a fatal error in the presence of freestyle’s fandom. If you don’t already believe, you will always be reminded: freestyle never dies. The worn accompaniments have changed, of course. I’ve seen (and worn) these changes, most memorably at the sold-out Freestyle Extravaganza at Madison Square Garden in April 2006, the reunion of freestyle greats both past and present, spanning from the Cover Girls 11 0

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to Stevie B. Much of the audience wore what could be described as a New York/Midtown/after-work aesthetic. And then there were the more resourceful who managed a quick trip to Joyce Leslie for a different top between clocking out and happy hour. Fronted predominantly by young women vocalists, this genre called their backs can be partly situated within the trajectory of Latina/o music made in the United States. “Latin” is often a ghosted qualifier even as its sonic mothership is understood as the African American Shannon’s “Let the Music Play” (1983). Its initial, older-school recordings were helmed predominantly by Boricuas and Cuban Americans from El Barrio, the Bronx, and Miami in the mid-1980s. While this might easily illuminate why Latin freestyle and freestyle are often used interchangeably, the effects of this conflation have been odious as well as invigorating. For some vocalists, “Latin” was a way of marketing the genre that kept them (and their audiences) in their proper quarters. It has also ruffled many non-Latina/o fans and artists who have long been loyal members to freestyle’s endeavors. And yet the interchangeable use of Latin with freestyle productively troubles what both signs sanction, be it populations or creative traditions. The ghosted “Latin” enables a sense of influence and belonging that empiricism cannot contain (which is not to say the truth of such impacts and assemblies is immaterial). Consider Pinay, a contemporary group of Filipina musicians who form part of the new pantheon of freestyle divas; and Joyce Sims, the African American songstress behind “All and All.” Stay with the idea, far from novel, of an audience that likes its New Order and Joy Division spun alongside its Johnny O and Exposé. And finally, feel free to be at a complete analytical loss regarding those who have swum through the Kraftwerk-to-freestyle-to–Miami Bass continuum. Freestyle’s lyrical content is overwhelmingly about love requited and not. Its deceptively simple combinations of instruments (a synthesizer, a vocalist, a sampler) — what some might call its low production values — are brought together in ways that flesh out their potential. There is a motif that haunts much of freestyle, which spells out this deceptive simplicity. Virtually all freestyle songs feature a winding xylophone-sounding synth pattern that relentlessly repeats itself throughout the duration of the song. Repetition in this case is like wearing the same party dress to every occasion, as it is the only one you own. This winding pattern recalls someone sitting at a keyboard playing with one hand — the production of a line that should not be read as amateurish, but as a reduction of a musical phrase to its most necessary stops. It is usually one that you can air-piano or air-type to, depending on where you are in your workday. I understand this formal detail as part of what reflects freestyle as a “system of living”: one can make a song with scant materials, echoing methods of survival that must do the same. In this case, the method Social Text 102

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enables the making-do with a synthesizer versus having the resources to put together a full band. There are spiritual remnants also put to creative use in such details: the paring down of feelings of loss to their most direct articulations, lyrically and musically. Listening to the music thus teaches you to make do with little: it helps to flesh out a fantasy planted by a sidelong glance in social studies class, to make sense of a breakup when given little word of explanation, to find the direct words to explain your feelings when lost between two languages, or to make a scholarly argument with little backup. The consumption of freestyle by its broader fan base is far from what Will Straw once called the “cultivation of connoisseurship in rock culture.”8 Freestyle’s aficionado is not one who necessarily owns or thrills in the fetish of the rare record, undiscovered track, or drunkenly signedover instrument. It is an unapologetically greatest-hits-based fandom, less persnickety about its trivia and systems of knowledge. This greatest-hits culture allows for the recognition of authorship, the retention of those voices that would otherwise be quickly dismissed. In urban music scholarship, it is the genre’s producers who are named, remembered, and given work. Freestyle’s fandom, on the other hand, has generated an ex post facto authorship that places the vocalists center stage. The genre thus becomes redefined by many of the iconographic women singers who have sustained them through their more tumultuous years — as they are all that is identifiably left behind from past heartbreaks, homes, and older selves. Freestyle musicians allow their fans to be on a first-name basis: Trinere, Lil’ Suzy, Sandeé, Connie, Cynthia, Nocera, Teena Marie, Stevie B, Coro, Sa-Fire, Nayobe. This preservation might also have something to do with the recognizable names as found in familial and adopted familial networks. But like those nicknames that never go away (once gorda, forever gorda), this familiarity is part of what keeps freestyle’s singers obligated to genre. Fans have a way of relinquishing support when they can no longer see themselves in the figures they have long identified with. This version of the death drive prohibits the vocalists’ chance at career renewal and constrains their need for creative experimentation. Freestyle’s barely detectable bilingualism, its slightly accented though usually English-only lyrics, picks up those formative cues left behind by doo-wop, Latin Soul, and disco.9 Like these established genres, there seems to be the shared stubborn refusal of proper bilingualism. A striking feature is the nonuse of Spanish in the bulk of the freestyle archive, considering the Latina/o predominance of its creators. In my listening experience, Spanish usually emerges in the context of freestyle’s remixing. Spanishspoken testimonials or short, smuggled-in phrases (often dirtier or more heartfelt than English allows) make their way into DJ sets on local radio stations and mixtape compilations. 11 2

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Many will inscribe the New York – Miami – Los Angeles matrix as the well-worn route used by the genre. If, as I stated earlier, part of what is at stake in freestyle is the mingling of provisional worlds contoured by migration and arrival, it is crucial to account for other fan bases in such locations as Chicago, Philadelphia, Houston, and especially Long Island and the Bay Area. All of these active sites occupy vital places in freestyle’s larger musical horizons. To those who need some empirical grounds, I am able to offer only this: freestyle has and continues to trouble market sense. Because so many of its recordings circulate in the informal channels of cultural economy (bootlegs, mix tapes, and used-record stores), numbers cannot be provided here. To do so would be to leave, like the most recent census, the undocumented uncounted. In this case, the nonpurchased would go unheard. I stress freestyle’s geographical and affective promiscuousness because it gives us a glimpse of the goings-on in the transnational hubs of America. Its sound provides an alternative, inconvenient tag on top of what mainstream media channels once inaugurated as the “decade of the Hispanic” in the 1980s. It is a second-generation genre that rises to the challenge of what Angie Chabram-Dernersesian has posed as the “retaining [of] a viable memory of another type of political geography, one that is sustained through strategic multicultural and multiethnic linkages that often go unrecognized and that must be newly articulated in order to respond to contemporary social realities.”10 This “viable memory” began in the domain of the young, one shaped by those early experiences in public spaces outside of the home: on the dance floors of middle schools, at the mall, in youth centers, in headphones, in parents’ cars probably hijacked for the evening. It is not surprising then that freestyle has been pejoratively described. More often than not, its disparaging reception is beaten onto the artists themselves. For example, Mandalit del Barco once described freestyle as the “synth-heavy bubble-salsa of Lisa Lisa [and Cult Jam] and her big-haired descendants.”11 Here not only does big-haired align with “badhaired,” but also novelty is made of one of freestyle’s most foundational voices, Hell’s Kitchen’s own Lisa Velez.12 This making light of freestyle indicates the refusal of certain lines of descendants that make music and a general neglect of their influence. They are perceived as frivolous, inconsequential bumps in the masculinist lineage that has been perpetuated by much of music scholarship, especially the progressive line that jumps from disco to hip-hop. Turning this dismissal on its literal head, I believe that any study of freestyle and its players cannot be deployed to answer calls for inclusion. Which is to say, I’m not interested in wielding freestyle as a fillin beat to correct popular music criticism. Perhaps most important, I Social Text 102

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will not “use” freestyle at all, if by use we mean the way you would use another person to achieve suspect ends. Nor will I use freestyle to perform those smirky protocols of retro irony. As Karen Tongson has theorized, “the nod to the popular may be distinctly unpopular if it comes with tears of guiltless sincerity and (or) a ticklish naïveté.”13 Instead, I hear in freestyle’s vocalists — their sound, recorded selves, and reception —  another approach to popular musical scholarship. This approach rolls its eyes and gives you one of those up-yours smiles — one not quite polished by the privileges that age carries, but well on its way there. No Reason to Cry

When musicians explain how they came to be self-taught, you are given a peek into their past, a feel for their old living-room furniture. Typically anecdotal, specifics about their training reveal intricate systems of independent learning. Self-training requires an innate talent for improvisation: one has to assemble a motley combination of teaching aids, be they passed down from family members or other formative babysitters such as record players.14 Eventually, there might be an elementary schoolteacher who takes on a burgeoning musician. Nevertheless, it is an astonishing thing to imagine all those makeshift exercises when formal lessons were out of reach.15 From her childhood Bronx apartment, Judy Torres would turn up her alarm-clock radio and sing along with Styx’s lead singer, Dennis DeYoung. He provided the keys for her to “get vibrato.” She would lay belly-down on the floor so that she could feel her diaphragm working to produce that distinct vocal wave heard on “The Best of Times.” From the outset, her training bore its own “Out Here on My Own” feeling in both sound and substance.16 She cultivated a nascent melancholia and isolation, so common to teenagers and artists, by fleeing to the ballad form, particularly to the songs of the Bee Gees, whom she would rehearse with while sweeping the living room. Hearing the softy sounds of sentiment on infinite repeat, her mom would raise an eyebrow to ask, “What’s the matter with you? Why do you always sing sad stuff? Are you in love or something?”17 Torres would later become one of freestyle’s beloved figures, often called one of the genre’s queens, thanks to her classic hits “Come into My Arms” and “No Reason to Cry.”18 Torres made the “conscious decision” to become a singer when she was just ten years old and the sound track for The Wizard of Oz became her most formative primer. She listened to it over and over and over again after discovering a vocal mentor in Judy Garland. She would sing alongside Garland and act to the dialogue included on the record as a way of rehearsing for her family’s annual viewing of The Wizard of Oz on TV. Not privy to the possibility of recording, the 11 4

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young Torres assumed the movie was enacted live. This was part of why this family tradition, for Torres, was “an event.” One year, Torres made her mom aware of her future plans with Garland: “Mom, when I grow up you know I’m going to be a singer just like her, and I’m going to meet her and we’re going to sing together.” After her mom gave her daughter the news of her tragic death, Torres flashes back: “I was dev-a-sta-ted. I was so devastated that I couldn’t watch the rest of the movie that day.” Torres’s first comprehension of the procedures of recording happened at the same moment she experienced a deep loss. For Torres, the conscious decision to become a singer meant a decision to also become an officiant of resurrection. Although she appointed Garland as patron saint of singing, her legend was just one of her formative teachers. She also went through the school of Streisand. It was Barbra who became Torres’s ultimate taskmaster in recorded form (“It was like, can you hold the notes as long as Barbra? Can you sing as high as Barbra?”). Through her recordings, Streisand taught Torres how to hold a note for too long and would press her on even if she felt she had nothing left. There is something of this training identifiable in Torres’s voice; technically it bears Garland and Streisand and DeYoung. It is a big, beautiful show-tune voice with a tremendous gift of subtlety. It is a powerhouse sound that carries these legends but also, amazingly, has a touch of your cousin, too. In our interview, Torres confirmed what I had already discovered via my informal polling of freestyle’s vocalists, who all “retain a viable memory of another type of political geography” by being able to name those teachers who brought them to their vocal place. Many name figures such as Barbra Streisand, Liza Minnelli, and Diana Ross as their primary influences. Nayobe Gomez has a particular affection for Bette Midler.19 The referencing of these figures shows the world that, in fact, Latinas love show tunes too. It also thwarts the common misconception of the untrained Pygmalion-up-from-nowhere protégé: the idealized story line of a young woman completely isolated from other genres, vocal modes, historical sounds, and, many have argued, modernity. Many, if not most, critics have disciplined freestyle for its joke vocals. According to Michael Paoletta, it is “a genre not necessarily known for having the most powerful singers.”20 Producers are not only credited for any given song, but are credited with coaxing out a recordable voice. Lisette Melendez “wasn’t the best singer of all time,” but something magical happened under the “primary guidance” of producer Carlos Berrios. 21 Sadly, even when they are wrongly slighted for their nonmusicality, these singers have not been allowed to own their amateurishness. For example, Jon Pareles wrote his 1987 article titled “Clones of Madonna” to make sense of the ubiquity of “hot” music on the radio (one of the early names for freestyle). According to him, this alarming presence on the waves had Social Text 102

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several uniform conventions, one of which was “a chirpy, girlish vocal dispensing come-ons or back-offs. Those voices . . . are a little flat, a little raw, and they might have a tinge of a Bronx or Spanish accent; they sound like streetwise city teenagers.”22 There are myriad ways that the “bad” in “bad singer” has been interpreted. Lack of proper training is one of the primary assumptions behind such errant voices. To which one wants to reply: have you ever tried to sing along to Dennis DeYoung? There is some ageism in the assumption that all teenagers get an innocent and puppy-love-filled experience. There is a racialization and gendering of these voices that pulls them over for being at once too much and not enough. In one of the insightful exceptions to such treatment, Jon Caramanica reflected on Lisa Lisa’s performance at the 2006 Madison Square Garden reunion show: “She demonstrated what sometimes got lost amid the genre’s thick digital texture: Excellent singers lurked here, without the benefit of a trad soul music legacy to nurture them.”23 Caramanica suggests that to acknowledge an excellent voice also requires an acknowledgment of the industry’s terms of its delivery. Barbara Bradby has much to offer about such terms, especially when they are determined by what she has instructively called the “vocal division of labor” in dance music. Bradby wisely asks us to “look at the category of ‘female vocalist’ itself, as it has emerged in relationship to ‘producer music’ and which seems to have been a highly ambiguous development for women.”24 In freestyle music, specifically, and dance music, generally, of the late 1980s and early 1990s, the woman vocalist was not usually cast as the lead singer — with all the romantic front-man accoutrements — typically found in rock-and-roll groups. As Bradby points out, this fronting position has historically been gendered and racialized given the scant numbers of women of color as lead singers, especially in rock groups. 25 The women in dance music often work freelance and are usually listed under the title “featured vocalist” for a variety of producers. Ostensibly this allows women performers to work across styles and with a variety of producers, but it has left many without stable contracts and proper credits on released albums. Part of the fallout of newer forms of producer music is the easy erasure of women’s contributions on dance-music tracks — vocals are understood as a secondary adornment to the male producer’s mastery over the technology — a considerable feat given the high probability that a record’s sales could be directly attributed to the woman’s vocal contribution.26 After all, think of how the 1990s might have felt had Jocelyn Brown’s “I Got the Power” not been featured as one of the decade’s perpetual refrains. 27

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Bad Girls

Freestyle’s vocalists might not list their precursors in actual song — in those literal shout-out ways that might happen in hip-hop — but they are made present through their sound. Listen to Cynthia right after France Joli, Judy Torres after Garland, Nayobe after Bette Midler, and notice the uncanny sonic resemblance to their formative mentors. Not content to just copy their precursors, however, the women of freestyle have adapted these voices into the genre and are currently extending them elsewhere. But what else, in addition to and alongside these voices, is adapted and extended? I would like to consider the question by way of a specific performer. Interestingly, in a variety of separate interviews spanning a range of freestyle vocalists from Cynthia, to Lisette Melendez, to Nayobe, there seems to be the invariable citation of Donna Summer as being particularly important; sometimes she is directly named as an influence, other times she is referenced through a cover homage. 28 The recurrence of Summer figures her as a major part of the formative ground that nurtured a performer like Lisa Lisa before she, or any of her “big-haired descendants,” came of age. There is also a necessary tether between freestyle and disco, both because of the technology that made both styles of music possible and because of the role disco played in freestyle’s making. I will spend some time in disco’s dwellings, not only because I am partly invested in the continued recovery of this music as a philosophical space of possibility, but also because its recurrent aesthetics are too easily thought of as played out or decayed from overuse. 29 Picking up on the automated beats that emerged out of dance clubs in the late 1970s, I understand freestyle’s sound and generation as working partly for disco’s redress — as a music that does not contain disco’s influence within a specific time and place. Musically, freestyle carries over a few of disco’s own “systems of living” and is a kind of extension of disco’s variant spheres. It does so formally through its own modulation of disco’s automated dance beats, the production of songs often too long for radio play in their entirety, the synthesization of its orchestral maneuvers, the (sometimes) slow or often extended epic intro, and as a music that is suited, but not necessarily for, dancing. The voices featured in disco are also transgenerational and pedagogical in function, as its music was one of the many channels the parents of freestyle musicians were tuned into as their kids came of age. Through both songs and following, disco and freestyle share testimonies about love and labor, a spectrum of heterogeneous publics, a strong maintenance of the “diva” figure regardless of gender, and the voices these figures carried. However, the voice that gets carried over from disco to freestyle is notice-

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ably shaped by the tragic and devastating effects faced in the aftermath of its heyday. Freestyle’s voice and sound is a serious and angular one, no doubt shaped by the devastation of queer communities and those of color due to AIDS, the loss of the dance club as a space of unchecked excess, the decline of resources for the working poor, the shutdown of openings in the pop cultural sphere. For many within freestyle, immigration, both immediate and distant, was less about the arrival and more about the arrived. Given all of these dynamics, there is thus a sense of detachment, or one could say shrewd cadence, identifiable in freestyle’s voice. The persistent citation of Donna Summer provides a generative context for how these various social, material, and spiritual jolts became subsumed within freestyle’s production. The training of the voices of freestyle has as much to do with Donna Summer as with the altering of recording technology. Summer has been a central figure for modulating the vocal and bodily space of women vocalists in contemporary dance music, and she was one of the first vocalists within dance music to find a way to work out a different relationship with recording technology — and, by default, she enabled alternative relationships to reception. For example, the disco hit “Love to Love You Baby” (1974), produced by Giorgio Moroder, gained notoriety partly for Summer’s infamous orgasmic moaning on the track. In the words of Tim Lawrence, the song “offered a radically alternative recording of sexuality: that of female pleasure and fantasy.”30 However, the song went on to receive another kind of distinction after the head of Casablanca Records, Neil Bogart, requested a long version of it. A seventeen-minute extended track was released, and its production is said to mark a pivotal moment in the history of dance music. As Peter Shapiro writes, Moroder “applied the motorik autobahn aesthetic to the human body, and the resulting cyborg permanently changed the character of music.”31 Shapiro explains that in order to create the long version, Moroder extended Summer’s orgasm by “using a new bass line as a tidal bridge between segments, creating waves that surged, climaxed, and crashed every four minutes or so.” At the same time that a woman’s performance of erotic pleasure was aired in such a public and widely disseminated manner, the technique that could render said woman as disposable from the studio was developed. Summer was literally cut out of the equation once her vocal job was determined over. Her moans were put at the service of another context. Moroder, the producer-at-the-controls, imposed a different time arc upon Summer’s performance of pleasure at the request of his label’s chief executive.32 Along with the ways in which music was consumed, “Love to Love You Baby” also marks how dance music made its big step into studio-based recording. The song also marks the beginning of what would later become the trend of “faceless bands” in producer-centric dance music. In terms of women’s audible voices, “face11 8

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less” assumes their interchangeability. In this sense, Summer occupies a watershed moment in recorded music — and, incidentally, a moment that she would like to shake loose from her legacy. 33 Perhaps it is because of these kinds of transformations of the vocalist’s role in commercially successful dance music that Summer understandably entrenched herself in deep concerns over genre. For example, in 1979, she had to threaten abandonment of her long-term label, Casablanca, before being allowed to depart from the commercially successful, albeit formulaic, barrage of dance-music tracks. When she proposed to expand the range of her repertoire to include rock and R&B, Summer was met with refusal from her financially strapped producer. Citing her own “diva” figures with whom she identified, Summer has remarked on that struggle: “I felt like Marie Antoinette or Joan of Arc — great women of their time who had to deal with ridicule and misunderstanding.”34 Although she eventually got to include some rock-oriented dance tracks on Bad Girls, her relationship with Casablanca continued to be problematic, as she was not properly compensated for her contributions. Summer left the company and, as a final kiss-off, brought a ten-million-dollar lawsuit against them. 35 As Summer’s story demonstrates, in the case of disco, the twinned function of the extended studio track and its inevitable flattening of genre carries over a set of historical roles for women vocalists in the recording industry. This is not to say that these musicians have not back-talked — or responded with up-yours smiles — to these roles from time immemorial. In fact, the back talk is heard, among other things, through their actual singing, as seen in Nayobe Gomez’s performance mentioned previously. Part of the way I see Summer’s response to these conditions is in her fight over artistic self-definition and self-determination. As an accompaniment to these struggles, much of the content of her songs was testimonials about women and work — and women working. After all, two of her great hits, “Bad Girls” and “She Works Hard for the Money,” were songs that drew explicit relationships between women’s work, capital, and sex. Summer, her voice, her posture in the music industry, and the content of her songs all rustle the hushed history of certain production quarters of freestyle, which are replete with casting-couch rumors galore. Part of these rumors undoubtedly stems from the historical need to explain how the freestyle market became “flooded” by so many young women. Many of these recordings were fronted by teenage girl vocalists, usually solicited with fame but no fortune. I once asked a highly reputable Latin music producer and musician on the New York scene for his thoughts about the musicality of freestyle. To this he quickly responded that many of the women vocalists got to record after “you know” with producers who were typically twice their age. In short, these leery masses of unnamed producers were looking to produce a Latin feel of a somewhat different variety. Social Text 102

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While I refuse any moralistic reading and fact-checking of the foregoing, I will suggest a connection between Summer’s extended orgasm, my earlier discussion on women working with a variety of producers, and their rumored tussling with multiple sexual partners. This sort of narrative that explains women’s space within the cultural sphere, recorded or otherwise, has a palpable history. Susan McClary has the following to offer: “In the Renaissance, for instance, women who sang in public or who tried to publish their poetry were regarded as courtesans and were pressured to grant sexual favors in exchange for being permitted to participate in cultural production.”36 In other words, they always worked hard for the money. Like Summer’s performance on “Love to Love You Baby,” freestyle artists were often circulated (whether as embodied rumor and/or recorded object) without their consent. Sadly, their fans circulate them as well, sharing their songs without paying for them — depriving freestyle’s vocalists of money that is very much needed at home. Perhaps Summer’s vocal legacy also helps retain the memory and make public the music industry’s contracts that shackled many of freestyle’s young artists to a strict and marketable definition of the genre; in some cases, many were quite literally held hostage to their record companies’ version of it. The contract disputes of some of these young women further resonate with another patriarchal model of control. For example, take a case involving Lisette Melendez, the voice behind “Together Forever,” a song many labels were afraid to take on, as it was “too dark” or “too strong” for radio play. Melendez, who is renowned for recording the most guttural freestyle jam to date, once described herself as having “filed for divorce” from the Fever label for undisclosed reasons. As a form of punishment, the label released an old work-in-progress without her approval.37 Such mass circulation of mediocre recordings, together with the making and breaking of these official and unofficial contracts, are the reasons often given for the genre’s “downfall” —  claims that were also made to explain the decline of disco music. Freestyle’s vocalists are yet another fugitive part of the music industry’s captive population, one that continually attempts to free itself from artistic immobility, static notions of genre, the stoppage of time, the (often) predictable desire of its audience, and the (now) age-inappropriate makeup. By way of so many citations of her, I read Summer and her vocal craft as having litigated a space for freestyle’s “systems of living.” And I don’t mean this in a metaphorical way. In a 2003 interview, Summer was asked by Tavis Smiley for a few retrospective words on the power of disco music, to which Summer replied: “It created its own place . . . its own space.”38 Summer’s retroactive construction of place and space here echoes a historical necessity of just that — the music made possible sites where alternative modes of contact, consumption, interpretation, and overall ways of being could be danced, sung, and lived. 12 0

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All Cried Out

One of freestyle’s most enduring and endearing qualities is its Bedouinlike ability to construct a familiar everyplace and no-place. Freestyle is no joke in the ways it taps you into an intensely local register and era. “Oh, it sounds like . . . ” can be followed by “ . . . when my mom used to get ready in our old Bronx apartment” or “ . . . bumper to bumper on U.S. 1” or “ . . . totally La Escuelita that time when” or “ . . . Thursday nights at Circus” or “ . . . Long Island. 10 p.m.” I’ll conclude by filling in the ellipses with: “ . . . the back of a Dade County public school bus circa 1987,” a site where I had been taught to put on eyeliner between hydraulic bumps. This is more than a “sounds like.” It’s an actual event where the Nuyoriqueña vocalist Cynthia and her song “Change on Me” was the sound track breaking out from the tinny speakers during a particularly hot version of Miami’s three o’clock hour. While my thighs began producing that classic school-bus sweat on green vinyl seats, I noticed my friend Janette was by my side looking bored. Her presence on the bus in itself was unusual. As it turns out, she was there that day because her senior-high boyfriend decided to open up his 1986 IROC Camaro to an eighth grader. Janette’s stop arrived at the same time that the chorus of “Change on Me” seemed to be in its hundredth repeat. Cynthia’s voice sounded lucid, furrowed, a bit distorted, and a bit distracted. It was the sonic safeguarding of intimate details that we cannot and should not want to know. Her tone — a deep convention of freestyle and teenhood — was protected by a disaffected cover, one that could keep an interior safe. As Cynthia’s chorus played, Janette got up with her head held high and shoulders flexed back. She walked out of the bus — righteously — well aware of the blood stain on the back of her tight, white pants. I don’t intend to turn Janette’s walk into a cinematic retelling solely for anecdotal sake — or reproduce a horrifying moment for a ninth-grade girl. As one often does when writing, I checked out the ethics of my use of Janette’s walk with my comrades. Christine Balance provided me with the most persuasive reassurance. In her view, these are the kind of cinematic flashbacks we have to reproduce for ourselves, since “it’s not like John Hughes is gonna do it” (may he rest in peace). My recall echoes the long, epic beginnings and endings of freestyle’s songs. These extended spaces pragmatically give a DJ some wiggle room to mix in the next song or sample. Equally pragmatic is the space that it sets up for a kind of reminiscence, for making the epic out of the everyday. For many young Latinas, their survival depends on making the epic out of the everyday, or its small pleasures, or worse, its daily violences, get lost to competing forces that erase them. Let’s first consider the particulars of this everyday for Janette. There is

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her body marked as overdeveloped in one hostile form or another, whenever she walks down the hall of our school; there is the betrayal of her boyfriend; there is the soap opera she can only replay in her deep insides, given her superstrict Cuban parents. I’d like to think that Cynthia’s voice has something to do with Janette’s ability to get through her day: a voice that provided a sound track and a set of bad-ass armaments in a moment that Janette needed them most, a voice that helped her to keep it together, keep walking, keep her secrets in check even when they wanted to come out. Many of us had to endure these daily dramas simply to get home. Janette, as she holds a loving place in my now displaced but always local memory, has shown me how freestyle’s vocalists have done their own kind of training of us. To say that they have given us a set of critical practices is to propose that the goings-on of recording studios might not be legible but are nonetheless heard. These critical practices include the import of sound into gesture or, as Nayobe teaches us, gesture into sound. When Torres relays her work with the giants, she pushes us to seek out unfamiliar and unexpected models who can give us our voice. Summer shows us how to write rebellion into production. And Cynthia gives us a way to make it through the transition from here to there. In Janette’s walk was not only Cynthia’s sung lament, but the rumbles of her cohort and those who got her there: Nayobe. Judy. Donna. Notes I’d like to thank Shane Vogel, who for too many years has read this project with a supple heart. The influence of Christine Bacareza Balance accompanies every page. Gratitude to Karen Tongson for her serious nonseriousness. Ricardo Bracho’s inspiring fanship offered vital reassurance. Aplauso to Tim Lawrence for showing us all how to make it matter. And finally, abrazos to Diana Paulin for dancing in her seat that day. 1. Personal conversation with the author, 16 February 2005. 2. Peter Shapiro, “Freestyle,” from Modulations—A History of Electronic Music: Throbbing Words on Sound (New York: Caipirinha, 2000), 104; personal interview with Judy Torres, 19 November 2008. All quotes from Torres are taken from this interview. 3. See Ivan Diller, interview with Nayobe, Fever Records, www.feverrecords .com/nayobebio.shtml (accessed 5 July 2005). Krush Groove (1985), Michael Schultz, dir., Crystalite Productions; DVD by Warner Home Video. 4. Although women vocalists go missing from this narrative, it must be mentioned that the virtuoso percussionist Sheila E. is given her own story line as the moral and wiser force in the picture. 5. Nayobe’s move here should be read alongside the longer traditions of muecas (of “making faces”). See Gloria Anzaldúa, Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color (San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1990). 6. Teja is a little tail worn at the nape of the neck of an otherwise short hairstyle. 122

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7. For a more expansive look at freestyle music, see “Latin Freestyle: With Her Black Liquid Eyeliner in Her Hand,” in Alexandra T. Vazquez, “Instrumental Migrations: The Transnational Movements of Cuban Music” (PhD diss., New York University, 2006), 175 – 227. 8. In Barbara Bradby, “Sampling Sexuality: Gender, Technology, and the Body in Dance Music,” Popular Music 12 (1993): 162. See also Will Straw, “Sizing Up Record Collections: Gender and Connoisseurship in Rock Music Culture,” in Sexing the Groove: Popular Music and Gender, ed. Sheila Whiteley (New York: Routledge, 1997), 5. 9. For a solid overview of this genealogy, see Raquel Z. Rivera, New York Ricans from the Hip Hop Zone (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 88 – 93. 10. Angie Chabram-Dernersesian, “ ‘Chicana! Rican? No, Chicana Riqueña!’ Refashioning the Cultural Connection,” in Between Woman and Nation: Nationalisms, Transnational Feminisms, and the State, ed. Caren Kaplan, Norma Alarcón, and Minoo Moallem (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 276. 11. Mandalit del Barco, “Raps Latino Sabor,” in Droppin’ Science: Critical Essays on Rap Music and Hip Hop Culture, ed. William Eric Perkins (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996), 63 – 84. 12. Lisa Lisa is Lisa Velez, a Nuyorican from the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood in Manhattan. She was one of the first successful Latina vocalists in dance music, especially through her work with Cult Jam. Her notable hits are “I Wonder If I Take You Home,” “All Cried Out,” and “Can You Feel the Beat.” 13. Karen Tongson, “The Light That Never Goes Out: Butch Intimacies and Sub-Urban Sociabilities in ‘Lesser Los Angeles,’ ” in A Companion to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender and Queer Studies, ed. George E. Haggerty and Molly McGarry (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), 356. 14. Michael Chanan (among many others) has observed the potential of recordings versus written musical notation in blues records as a vital formative part to the voices of Billie Holiday and Mahalia Jackson. These recordings taught them “not only songs, but also a way of singing.” Repeated Takes: A Short History of Recording and Its Effects on Music (New York: Verso, 1995), 47. 15. See Paul F. Berliner, “Love at First Sound: Early Musical Development,” in Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 21 – 35. 16. “Out Here on My Own” is a ballad sung by Irene Cara in the 1980 movie Fame. Cara is a material pivot between disco and freestyle. 17. Torres interview, 19 November 2008. 18. Torres is also a force in the genre’s upkeep due to her popular freestyle show on 103.5 FM in New York City. But she confesses that during her off time, she listens to show tunes and Sammy Davis Jr. 19. Nayobe states: “I really do love Donna Summer, Diana Ross, Teena Marie. Especially Teena Marie. Between Teena Marie’s sassiness, Bette Midler’s charisma on stage. I love her too, believe it or not.” Diller, interview with Nayobe. 20. Michael Paoletta, “Judy Torres: Faithfully,” Billboard, 7 January 2006. 21. Michael Paoletta, “Lisette Melendez: Greatest Hits,” Billboard, 13 January 2001. 22. Jon Pareles, “Clones of Madonna,” New York Times, 9 April 1987. 23. Jon Caramanica, “One More Endless Night,” Village Voice, 10 – 16 May 2006. See also Cristina Verán’s wonderful intervention, Cristina Verán, “Let the Music Play (Again),” Village Voice, 11 April 2006, www.villagevoice.com/2006-04-11/ music/let-the-music-play-again/1. Social Text 102

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24. Bradby, “Sampling Sexuality.” The argument here slightly depends upon a white and heteronormative definition of rock-and-roll. Millie Jackson, Tina Turner, and Grace Jones are but a few examples among the many exceptions to this. 25. The resonances of this “vocal division of labor” are not only found within the music industry, but also sound as counterpoints to the larger deindustrializing shifts in the workplace that occurred in the late 1970s and early 1980s: the music as made and consumed by the last hired and first fired. 26. Bradby, “Sampling Sexuality,” 168 – 69. A contemporary producer who does much to productively subvert this trend is Little Louie Vega, especially on his stellar album Nuyorican Soul. 27. Though it must be noted that the body that voiced this refrain was absented or covered up by the catch-all group Snap! That group’s “The Power” sampled this vocal gem from Brown’s “Love’s Gonna Get You.” 28. See, for example, Cynthia’s official MySpace page, profile.myspace.com/ index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendID=49165742 (accessed 16 December 2008). Born and raised in Spanish Harlem, Cynthia “sought inspiration from Donna Summer” and has her own rendition of Summer’s “Heaven Knows.” Also Peter A. Colon, “Lisette Melendez: From the Barrio and Beyond,” Groove Magazine 1 (1999): 34; and Diller, interview with Nayobe. 29. For the scholarly recovery of disco, see especially Tim Lawrence, Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture (1970 – 1979) (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), and Peter Shapiro, Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco (New York: Faber and Faber, 2005). 30. Lawrence, Love Saves the Day, 173. Lawrence also points out that Jesse Jackson condemned the song for its deviant content. 31. Shapiro, Turn the Beat Around, 101 32. Ibid. 33. “Donna Summer’s Disco Journey,” Tavis Smiley Show, National Public Radio, original broadcast, 21 October 2003. 34. Donna Summer, quoted in Lawrence, Love Saves the Day, 386. 35. Ibid., 387. 36. Susan McClary, “The Undoing of Opera: Toward a Feminist Criticism of Music,” foreword to Opera: The Undoing of Women, by Catherine Clément, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), xvi. 37. Colon, “Lisette Melendez,” 34. 38. “Donna Summer’s Disco Journey,” Tavis Smiley Show.

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Buzz and Rumble Global Pop Music and Utopian Impulse Jayna Brown

Thinking about utopia is relevant in our times. It is particularly urgent in our globalized historical moment in which dystopia is all around us. Recalibrated forms of disempowerment and systems of oppression stabilize regimes of unprecedented wealth. Unfettered privatization, eroded infrastructures, and decades-long wars have created landscapes of both dire suffering and gated privilege. What Zygmunt Bauman called the “century of camps” has flourished in this millennium.1 Brown women’s bodies are affixed to machines in export-processing zones; transnationally owned private prisons provide the warehoused with high-tech forms of “death in life.” Internally displaced persons and refugee camps hold millions of people in suspended “no places,” penned in by violence. 2 In the last thirty years, certain regions in Africa have become bloody war zones, violent battlegrounds with no clear sense of enemy or ally. In this era of what Bauman has called “globalizing wars and globalization induced wars,” constant battles and wars have created their own culture and economy.3 One young fighter from the civil wars in Liberia describes the culture he grew up in as the “Kalashnikov lifestyle,” after the common and inexpensive Russian-designed automatic assault rifle. “The Kalashnikov lifestyle is our business advantage,” he boasts.4 The sound of gunfire is constant; it is the sound track of the everyday. “This is music,” another young National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL) fighter exults. “We love the music. . . . They play fantastically. . . . [The sound of death] is the sound of music to us.”5 Gruesome forms of dystopia blossom in the demolished regions, so that the sounds of death become the sounds of music in the young boys’ ears.

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Wars bleed into each other across national boundaries. Initially established as a utopian promised land for former North American slaves, Liberia has been in a perpetual state of war since the 1980s.6 Liberia’s conflict spilled into neighboring Sierra Leone, another territory formed as a kind of “utopian” community for freed slaves. But nothing is comparable to what is known as the Second Congo War, which involved seven African countries and ran officially from 1998 until 2003. Waves of violence continue; in 2008, they were concentrated in the eastern region of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DR Congo). The war is known for particularly brutal practices: soldiers have perfected forms of extreme sexual violence as well as acts of dismemberment (noses, fingers, lips, and limbs removed by machete). The results of war also take the most banal forms; disease and malnutrition claim the highest numbers. In Kinshasa, Congo, in the 1990s a type of music called konono was turned into a form of music exclusively for funerals. The rasping and insistent rhythms and the harsh, blown-out sound of an electrically amplified likembe; the singing voices, emitted through megaphones, becoming both sharp and muffled; these all reflect the extreme and dehumanizing environment. The dissonant landscape inspired what Achille Mbembe has called “the willingness to blur the distinction between sound and noise, to join art to the world of screams.”7 This was music for death in a region where a language of torture was the common tongue. But these were also songs of love: “During a funeral, we play a lot of songs that are love related,” musician Mawangu Mingiedi explains, “because the departed one needs to be consoled.”8 The space of music still holds utopian possibility in the territories of extreme pain. The punctuating sounds of death described by the child soldier are answered by reclamatory notes of love and consolation, which marvelously refuse to be silenced. This essay is about global popular music and dance, forged in oppressive and violent terrains, and these expressive forms’ relation to utopian fantasy and material possibility. I am evoking the heavily freighted term utopia in service of my wider inquiry into the ways in which other worlds and states of being have been envisioned or practiced in social theory, speculative fiction, and expressive cultures. I am interested in the ways music and dance, sound and the body, might be sites from which to take up the utopian as a mode of critical analysis. Here I am looking at musical and dance movements coming out of Africa: the first is the form developed in Kinshasa, loosely called konono, included on a compilation called Congotronics released by the Belgian label Crammed Disc; the second is a form of contemporary dance music called kuduro (or kudoro) coming out of the poor suburbs of Luanda, Angola, and brought to British and American attention by the Portuguese group Buraka Som Sistema and the British/ Sri Lankan musician M.I.A. I also consider the latter groups, as their work 126

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is part of a new moment in musical and dance-movement formations. Considering these movements evokes discussion of the politics of cultural utopia generated in and around the symbolic Africa. Konono came out of Zairean president Mobutu Sese Seko’s authenticité campaign, an authoritarian design to reclaim Congo based on rejection of Western influence and an enforced return to authentic African cultural forms; konono was given European recognition through the mediation of Belgian music producer Vincent Kenis. Kuduro developed in Angola, long the site of imperial proxy wars between the United States and Russia, and it became an important influence on global pop music coming out of Europe. I argue that these forms, heavily mediated by technology, circulating relatively independently of market regimes, mixing styles and forms from across the global South and Europe, cannot be contained by the particular utopian desires deployed and commodified in the marketing of world beat or world music, desires connected to the legacies of colonial narrative. In such a narrative, the natives’ mellifluous purity and generosity act as a gentle reproach, an appeal to the moral conscience of Westerners. The terms of contact, made possible by the beneficence of a curatorial and conservationist West, create the possibility of “oceanic unification” and Western absolution. Another fantasy evolves out of this constellation, that of the brave and rebellious consumer. I argue that despite these overdetermined forms of dreaming, we can look past, or through, manipulations of utopian desire — be it marketing strategy or an artists’ own investment — and recognize the utopian in new moments of global connection and diasporic formation. Much can be said about the off-label uses of technology and of the body as a site for constantly renewable joy. Parsing from the utopian fantasies of world-beat liberalism, I am exploring the concept of a utopian impulse in black expressive forms that is as momentary, ephemeral, and elusive as it is physically, historically, and politically placed. Considering these forms in the historical contexts of Mobutu’s Congo and civil war–torn Angola leads us to think about social utopias, conceptualizations of ideal worlds that offer complete programs for alternate social systems, often tethered to nationalist projects. These are useful and powerful dreamscapes that harness the needs and desires of the populace, but they are limited in scope as they often remain purely compensatory reforms, which, as Phillip Wegner has noted, while “projecting ‘solutions’ in the future to problems of the present risk reducing the dialectical complexity of the historical process.”9 Anti-utopian criticism insists that social utopias restrict individual freedom and inevitably lead to totalitarian regimes, as an anti-utopian perspective considers humankind essentially incapable of changing without violent domination. Many utopian programs have become authoritarian projects of social engineering, as did the regime of Mobutu Sese Seko in Congo.10 Authenticité was the word of Social Text 102

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law and traditional forms of music were enforced. Yet, as I argue, as music melded with electronic equipment and repurposed forms of technology, its buzz and rumble refused authoritarian control and claimed a much wider space than Mobutu’s nationalist agenda. The buzz and the rumble is the sound of the new space the music creates, the space people create out of necessity for their sanity. It is shaped by the horrific circumstances of post-Mobutu Congo, but the buzz and rumble is the power that rides through these circumstances; improvising on the refuse of destruction, it is both of the moment and transcendent. We can challenge criticism by remembering that utopia, in its true meaning, remains always unfinished and never fully attainable. We cannot realize utopian totalities, for they will be the consequence of historically situated processes, and we are unable to imagine past our current paradigm. Utopian realization remains, to use utopian philosopher Ernst Bloch’s term, “Not-Yet.” We cannot fully know the details of what a state of newness would be like because it is just beyond the horizon.11 The usefulness of critical social and fictional utopias is to offer the “education of desire,” to see beyond personal and private gratification (the evidence of capitalist hegemony’s successful harnessing of people’s felt yearnings) to moments and periods of collective fulfillment, or at least to recognize them as always possible. This is to understand utopia as a process, an ongoing activity, a continual reaching forward that can help spur revolutionary action. It suggests the bringing in of an entirely new paradigm, unreachable from here.12 Critics have called utopian thought naive, escapist, and dangerous. In the face of strong anti-utopian argument, I insist that struggles against oppression would not exist if there were not some shared sense that other states of being were possible, where collective lives of abundance and happiness could be realized. No one can see a better world of alternate realities in full, but people feel the desire for it, anticipated in daily forms of interchange, and in their expressions of sadness, love, or sublime joy. As Fredric Jameson writes, “One cannot imagine any fundamental change in our social existence which has not first thrown off Utopian visions like so many sparks from a comet.”13 In this essay I take up Bloch’s concept of anticipatory illumination, a utopian propensity or proclivity that infuses daily life and cultural practices, manifesting in forms including play, literature, music, and dance.14 What animates collective and communal artistic creation is a utopian “energiea,” as Jameson calls it,15 an urge or a pulse that energizes social movements, art, and literature, showing up as what Tom Moylan calls “recoverable traces of radical longing in various cultural forms.”16 Utopian impulse does not rely on the idea of an essential, universal human nature or on the return of suppressed unconscious urges. It does not require a return 128

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to a state in the past or a revivification of a primordial or precognitive condition. We can conceive of a utopian impulse as a collective response situated in specific historical conjunctures of oppression and resilience.17 It suggests a kind of ineffable connection, a collective space free of possessive individualism, a condition of release from the liberal claim to autonomous, private ownership as defining the human. The weave of cooperating bodies and voices points to a place where blackness is not defined by its exchange value, where black people call to and with each other with waves not simply shaped by their history as property. It is not transcendent but intimately embedded in a shared history and the refusal to be contained by it. In an oft-cited passage of The Black Atlantic, Paul Gilroy insists that we recognize the utopian possibility of expressive arts: “The invocation of utopia references what, following Seyla Benhabib’s lead, I propose to call the politics of transfiguration . . . [which] exists on a lower frequency where it is played, danced and acted, as well as sung and sung about, because words, even words stretched by melisma and supplemented or mutated by the screams . . . will never be enough to communicate its unsayable claims.”18 I would add that the lower registers evoked by Gilroy should be conceived of as not only sonic, but also fundamentally corporeal, in the experience of the flesh. The search for sonic virtuosity has often divorced itself from the body, all but forgetting the ears. Too often the aural is prioritized over the corporeal. I argue that in analyses of music and sound we should not forget the sensate. Sound is not separate from the body, but intimately formed out of it, just as the voice is automatically a connection to the body. The voice proves a place where the physical is intimately part of the aural. I stress the importance of music’s connection to physical response, the utopian articulations of the body we find enacted in dance. It is our bodies as much as our souls that we seek to reclaim, or recover, despite the impossibility of restoration. Thinking through ways to affirm what Mbembe has called the “protean capabilities of the human bond through music and the very body that was supposedly possessed by another” brings me to what I call bodily utopias, the rehabitation of the body as a site of joy and exultation.19 It is important to think in terms of bodily utopian possibility, for the most potent dystopian states are corporeal. The state can be the repeated rape and mutilation of thousands of women in the war zones of central and northeastern Africa. These states can be based in forms of sensory deprivation and in the withholding of physical contact, such as in the touchless torture of detainees at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay, and in the supercarceral states of mechanized isolation in modern prisons of the United States, in which inmates sometimes go untouched for years. Lack of affection greatly contributes to the sicknesses afflicting children Social Text 102

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without caretakers in war zones. Touch is essential to the concept of the repossession of bodily freedoms. World Beat/Global Pop

Listening to the music from Kinshasa collected in the two volumes of Congotronics and to kuduro music from Luanda created by such sound mixers as Rei Helder, Dj Nays, Costuleta, and DJ Znobia, as well as the mixings and samplings of Europe-based Buraka Som Sistema and M.I.A., I am interested in the shifting terms of mediation between global pop and its older official cousin, world beat or world music. There is a difference, as technology shifts us away from dependence on centralized music industries. What I am looking for is a way to think about music from disparate sites, not delimited by nation-state boundaries, and the possibilities for translocal formations of social connectivity. The original category of world music formed around a core utopian trope, the “first encounter” between Europeans and “discovered” peoples.20 The under­ lying wish here was that the moment would transcend all social and political relations and offer Europe an exoneration that did not require any systemic change. The category of world beat was created as a marketing term in the early 1990s, but the conceptual ground preceded the term, developing within the fields of anthropology and musicology. 21 The generative interest in and marketing of world-beat music shares a narrative trajectory with utopian literature. This narrative is familiar in the literary, and historical, imagination; adventurers, missionaries, or naturalists happen upon an ideal society of primitives, a utopia whose inhabitants lead lives of leisure and abundance. The cultural practices of the natives, their music and dance, are key expressions of their state of pure being. In world-beat music, the practice of encounter continues with exploratory musicians, record collectors, and other tourists seeking inspiration. In their systematic studies and earnest classifications, anthropologists and ethnomusicologists sought to preserve forms of music by endangered populations, to freeze-dry musical traditions in an ethnographic present. Preservation had to be done not out of human curiosity but as a “moral imperative.” As in Edward Curtis’s A Dying Race, in which the photographer collected thousands of photographs of Northern American Indian tribes, the call was to represent people, as Philip Bohlman puts it, “unable to represent themselves.”22 The indigenous have been situated as representatives of the past and the holders of the future, the transcendent solution to the fracturing politics of race and global inequality. The world-musical search for an ideal space from which to conduct a redeemed sociality is usually concluded in the romance of a pristine landscape: on an island, in a forest or a jungle, or on a windy plane. Any mediation, technologi13 0

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cal or human, must be camouflaged, hidden in the bush. The process of recording must be made to appear as simply capturing, the real work of the studio kept quiet. Among other forms, as Philip Bohlman has noted, folk songs “created a space in which one cross section of the world’s music would bring human beings . . . together.”23 The entitled violence of Western imperialism and colonialism could be placed in the past and resolved. Social hierarchies could be euphemistically called “differences” and, in the space of music, dissolve into a state of utopian unity. The idea of music as a universal and timeless sphere comes out of a utopian longing. Folk and world music can be as easily adopted by a language of the “oceanic.” David Schwarz writes, “The all-around pleasure of listening to music is one of many ‘oceanic’ fantasies. . . . Although these fantasies are quite different from one another in obvious ways, they share a common feature: the boundary separating the body from the external world seems dissolved or crossed in some way.”24 This state of the oceanic dissolve is what people are buying as listeners and participants in the kind of calland-response demonstration format of some live world-music appearances. The recording offers a solid fetish to hold the desire for this state. The field of ethnomusicology has changed, and many musicians, anthropologists, musicologists, label owners, and music buffs have an awareness and critique of the political implications of such journeys of discovery and absolution from imperialist violence. Ethical guidelines have been etched and apologies made. Yet there remains a curious preserve. In terms of time, the fantasy of the first encounter is a foundational process in the construction of world music and remains a site of intense utopian fantasy. 25 There remains a belief that at the heart of any encounter is a moment powerful enough to transcend even its own politics of inequality. In terms of space, and less laden with troublesome history, is the concept of contact zones, spaces within the music where forms, symbolic of the bodies they represent, crisscross each other, their touch producing new forms of personal fulfillment. 26 But this concept can be just as misleading as the first, as it takes social inequalities, the material conditions of the music’s creation, as purely aesthetic “differences.” I am not arguing that we resurrect the idea of appropriation, because expressive forms — music, song, dance — cannot be owned. The term exploitation is also inaccurate, as it dismisses the possibility that the musicians have some negotiating power in the terms of exchange. What I argue is that every exchange and encounter is embedded in a history and a politics and cannot claim, on the grounds of compensatory recognition, to be a transcendent form of utopian vision. We must make a distinction between a utopia of personal gratification and that which is glimpsed, felt, or created collectively within the material relations of its creation. Social Text 102

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While I critique the embedded inequalities in the production of what gets called world-beat music, I wonder, when thinking about emancipatory practices of disenfranchised people migrating and immigrating across the globe, what fields of possibility transnationally produced and circulating music may open up. These possibilities are not invested in claiming individual national identity; I am thinking of people to whom the nation-state formation has never offered, and does not offer, its warm embrace. These populations exist as surplus labor or as completely “redundant,” outside of civic polities: in prisons, refugee camps, and slums surrounding major metropolises. 27 I am interested in how new forms of migration are reshaping black expressive cultures, expanding how we think about diaspora. As I argue, these forms are increasingly mediated by technology at the same time as they are less defined by Western curatorial mediation. Within the new recording technologies, proliferation and manipulation are part of the sound itself. Mixes and remixes are shared uncontrollably, as they are regularly uploaded to Web and blog pages. The record, or the tape, no longer has the power of preservation. Footage of real-time participation with the music is recorded and uploaded, music “videos” are cheaply made, no longer reliant on big studio time and money. Manipulation and “inauthenticity” is what makes this new moment increasingly defined by a state of play, a spinning off from, if not free of, the market. Collectivity is made and histories shared by the movement of expressive forms between both spatial and virtual sites. In our historical moment, the concept of diaspora has expanded, truly letting go of a center or site of return. These new formations take flight in the music of the singer/ rapper Maya Arulpragasam (M.I.A.). Her album Kala tracks the formation of new diasporas, the new routes of migration between Africa, India, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, and Europe. Her album signals not just the oneway movement of refugees, asylum seekers, and economic migrants from Africa and Asia to Europe, but the cross-migratory relationships created between displaced Africans and Asians as the result of globalizing capital and global wars. The movement is not just “bush to block”; it is about the porousness between underdeveloped and overdeveloped worlds, the presence and effects of modern technologies in the global South. This seems to me the direction that global popular music can take us. In this world, Sri Lanka and the Congo are neighboring states. Postmillennial global pop music is produced out of a world now linked in complex Webworks: satellites, cell phones, and other communication electronics reach into previously isolated sites. Cell phones are part of life in the remotest villages. Young Angolans use cell-phone sounds to produce kuduro music. Other forms of global “ghetto tech” flourish, and with them vibrant forms of dance affirming the resilience of collective bodies, however maimed and disabled by poverty and war. Through inexpensive 132

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modes of production, Internet downloads and file sharing, new music is much less reliant on older systems of curation. These forms scoff at the term world music, as their intercontinental exchanges now have much less need for European interlocutors. Considering the broad field of access, and the enthusiastically antinationalist embrace of technology in musical production by disaffected brown people, it is difficult not to be excited at the music’s and musicians’ expanding presence. With the potential of new digital technologies, new forms of intimacy, contact, interaction, and cocreation are possible. 28 This is not to share entirely the utopian vision of new-media scholars who have claimed that new forms of communication and circulation of information can shape a brave new world, where true egalitarianism and global democracy are assured. On the other side of the channel from the Scylla of world-beat primitivism sits the Charybdis of technophiliac utopianism in which all social barriers are torn down by a populist digital insurgency. There are limits to these claims of freedom through and from mediation; as the Belgian record label made the work of the konono artists available to the West, so M.I.A. also worked as a mediator, “putting people on the map, who never seen a map.” Without producer Vincent Kenis, or M.I.A., I would never have known to access the music and videos on YouTube. What can keep us from the dream world of false utopias, those that transcend the body and all earthly politics, is that musics demand we reach to understand them in their own historical conjunctures. My interest is always in the breakages and ruptures from which the music and dance come. These are the convulsive politics of place, the histories of political struggle and conflict and the sounds of those contradictions. It includes colonialism, revolutions, postrevolutions, and civil and global wars shaping the context out of which these songs and movements are created. Rumble in the Jungle

The forests of the Congo are not just home to the mythical pristine forest of a sprite-like pygmy folk, whose music inspired generations of world musicians. 29 They are also filled by generations of spirits who died very modern and unsung deaths. They include the millions who died violently during King Leopold’s reign and those fleeing the turbulence following independence. In the late 1990s, the wars spreading from Uganda and Rwanda led to horrific bloodbaths. Neoliberalist policy turned areas with rich natural resources into enclaves ruled by commercial interests and factions of local governments; the United States and Europe perpetuate the violence with the sale of small arms and other forms of support for parliamentary groups they depend on to protect their interests. Social Text 102

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Kinshasa had long been deteriorating under the dictatorship of Mobutu Sese Seko, and the once flourishing music industry had shut down: musicians including Tabu Ley and Papa Wemba immigrated to Paris. Mobutu banned any foreign music from coming into the country and allowed only “authentically” Congolese music to be played. Impoverished refugees and migrants from rural areas established ethnic communities outside of Kinshasa. It was the music coming out of these communities that interested the Belgian musician Vincent Kenis. Musician Mawangu Mingiedi founded Konono No. 1, the first of the electro-African traditional music groups, in the 1970s, with people from the Bazombo lands of the Congo/Angola border who had migrated to Kinshasa. The music’s defining sound is a raspy distortion that both overwhelms with dissonance and mesmerizes. It is created through improvised instruments, including sardine cans and hubcaps, hooked up to equally improvised amplification equipment. The main instrument is the likembe. Mingiedi explains their music: “That’s what we call masikilu. . . . It used to be played with drums and a trumpet made out of an elephant’s tusk. I took that sound and modified it by using the likembe, the thumb piano. It was made out of bamboo back then.”30 Mingiedi explains the blasted electronic technique that began to form in their sound: “I also used to play a lot with electronics, radios and whatnot. Then one day it just hit me. I decided to convert the bamboo to metal so I could make a better sound from the likembe.”31 The form of music grew out of Mobutu Sese Seko’s authenticité campaign, instituted in 1971. Under authenticité, traditional musicians from the rural areas were encouraged and paid to teach authentic forms of African music to younger musicians. These groups, such as Zaiko Langa Langa, incorporated these resuscitated musical practices into their sound. Mingiedi explains how these younger musicians copied his sounds: “People who are used to playing electric guitars, they would copy my songs, modify a little bit, and then they would exploit it. They did that for many, many, many years.” But this sound grew alongside, not out of, the influential music culture of Congo. Until the 1980s, Kinshasa was a major center of musical production in Africa. In the late 1940s, Greek immigrants and traders set up recording studios in Kinshasa. Radio stations were also started, in French for Belgian colonizers and in Lingala for Kinshasan Africans. The first recordings to make it to the Congo were from Latin America and particularly Cuba; Congolese music remained heavily influenced by Cuban son music, and the sound of Kinshasa became known as rumba. The guitar was a main instrument; a group of emigrants called coastmen had brought the guitar to Congo in the 1800s. Playing a selection of European and African instruments, musicians including Kabasele, Iziedi, Roitelet, and the soon13 4

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to-be-quite-powerful Franco flowered in and around two major bands, OK Jazz and African Jazz. These groups influenced the music from other parts of Africa. But, by the 1990s, many of Congo’s surviving musicians had immigrated to France, and their music had changed. Under authenticité, Mobutu ended all foreign control of Zairean businesses, including the major musical recording and distribution companies, and handed them over to a select group of Zaireans.32 This began the erosion of the economic infrastructure that would spell the end of a prolific popular music industry in Congo. With a politics of cultural recovery, Mobutu successfully harnessed the powerful utopian longings of a brutally colonized people. The movement meant to reclaim territory: Mobutu changed the name of the country to Zaire and ordered the names of streets, villages, and buildings changed from their former colonial names to more authentically African names. It also meant to reclaim an African identity: people were to shed all influences of their colonial oppressors; women could no longer wear pants and men were required to wear a long shirt called an abacost designed by Mobutu himself. 33 Zaireans were also required to change their names. Mobutu renamed himself Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga. The legendary popular musicians all changed their names, partly for selfpreservation: Rochereau (Pascal Tabou) became Tabu Ley, Docteur Nico (Nicolas Kasanda) became Kasanda, Franco (Francois Engbondu) became Luambo Makiadi. This conscious Africanization spoke to people’s desire to celebrate independence from Belgian dominance and oppression, and the first four years of Zaire were exultant. “[It was] a very interesting moment in the history of Zaire,” says president of Tabilulu Productions Lubangi Muniania, in describing the experience of growing up under authenticité: People came from villages. People like Grandparents and came [sic] and we spent time with them teaching us about the traditional life. Which a lot of us did not know. Myself I did not know. I remember that time. I was growing up like a little kid in Europe. Really. Growing up speaking French. Did not have anything to do with the village. So they came. Taught us who we were. We changed our names like for me from Walter Henri Gabin to Lubangi Muniania which had a meaning. 34

The program of authenticité was also part of a diaspora-wide blackconsciousness movement. African American funk, soul, and R&B music found its way into Congolese sound. The boxing match in 1974 between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman in Kinshasa’s Mai 20 Stadium inspired enthusiasm and calls for a renewed Pan-African identity. A three-day musical event was planned to precede what Ali called the “rumble in the jungle,” and what Zaireans Social Text 102

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preferred to call super-combat du siecle. An astounding group of musicians from across the diaspora performed. 35 As Gary Stewart asserts, this was the zenith of authenticité, and the mid-1970s saw the increased brutality of Mobutu’s dictatorship. Mobutu exploited the utopian desires of the nation’s people for profit, looting the country and foreign-aid contributions for over eight billion dollars. Although Vincent Kenis had visited Kinshasa in the 1980s and heard Mingiedi and the other konono musicians, it was not until 2005 that he was able to record them and release Konono No. 1. Its sequel, Congotronics 2: Buzz ’n’ Rumble from the Urb ’n’ Jungle, followed in 2006. Kenis’s involvement in recording the musicians on the two collections is complex. 36 Differentiating himself from other producers, he refuses the role of curator: “One of the reasons why I don’t like a lot of world music, because I can hear, and I can feel that there is a misunderstanding between what the musicians want and what the producer pretends to be standing for. ‘I know the market. I know what people like. I know he should change this music to do this or that.’ I don’t like this role.” Reflecting on the recording process for the albums, he says, “It was just music, sounds, trying to make it work through speakers which is what production should be about, and not a power game between black and white, which I really dislike.”37 It is important to Kenis to communicate this fact that he was able to transcend power relations in his musical exchange, declaring that the forms of “encounter” he and his subjects enacted were mutually respectful. A key way he does this is by making a point of avoiding the studio. “In the studio, sound mixing is a process of negotiation for control over the electronic manipulation of style,” writes Louise Meintjes, in her ethnography of South African music production. 38 The studio functions as fetish, a rarified space, privileged as the site of creation. According to Kenis, the studio is isolated and insulated and strips the music of what is essential, what Kenis explained he found in the live performances of the groups in Kinshasa. Kenis insisted on recording in Kinshasa, and not in Europe, claiming in fatherly tones that the musicians were unable to retain their artistic integrity before a Western audience. When the artists performed before a Dutch audience, he explains: “They are aliens, and they start acting like aliens. And they lose a part of the music that is very strong, and very reflective, and very progressive. They want to show off because they’re like Martians. I felt that in the recording and in the concerts that they did in Kinshasa there was some kind of continuity, some kind of driving force that I didn’t find so much in Europe.” The music must not be mixed in a studio, and so Kenis worked out of his hotel room. After the music was recorded, musicians came to his room for the remixing process. “The logical thing to do was to bring some of the musicians into the hotel room, and ask them, ‘What do you want? How do you feel the balance 13 6

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should be? How loud should this instrument be? What do you think about the sound of this and that?’ And it was really amazing. Because there was no cultural filter between us anymore,” he says. 39 In looking for a moment free of all cultural filter, Kenis is held by history, by the hope for an absolve, the fantasy of egalitarian creation. Here is the hoped-for moment, when music rises above power relations and equality is achieved. Kenis’s hotel room becomes a utopian space, one in which he and the musicians can transcend all social barriers. But this space is far from neutral; it is a symbolically loaded site for such cultural interchange. What can be more intimate than the room of a hotel: the suspended site of the tourist, the foreign journalist, the lovers’ tryst? Most important, it is private, closed off and hidden from meddling industry politics. The act of mediation, between Kenis, the technology, and the musicians, is free of all other participants. The most powerful moments of transcendence happen for Kenis when he can share technologies with the musicians. The culture barrier lifts for Kenis when he lets one of the musicians mix on the computer: I was so excited by this, because as I told you there was no more cultural barrier. I said, “Okay, this is a graphic equalizer, and you just move it around until you like it.” This guy doesn’t read, doesn’t write, but he had no problem using the computer at all. So we were bypassing all this ideological shit that stands in the way when a rich, white man wants to play games with a poor African. You know? I really enjoyed this. That’s one of the reasons why I wanted to mix the album in Kinshasa.

The computer here becomes the great unifier, the democratic equalizer. Kenis is conscious of having the musicians feel and decide what sounds right, yet, by bringing equipment and suggesting uses for it, he is also as responsible for shaping the sound as any other producer. Yet somehow as Kenis shares his technological equipment, his equalizers enable the musicians and Kenis to bypass “all this ideological shit.” The exchange is around the distortion, the manipulation of first the distinctive sounds of the musicians’ amplification and then their use of Kenis’s equalizing machine. The implication is that technology unifies. The meeting of souls is around technological mediation. This is the magic moment where the cultural filter dissipates, not around the verisimilitude of authentic traditional music, but around future landscapes glimpsed through technological means. At least Kenis is interested in the music coming out of Kinshasa in the here and now, not with preserving tradition. But world music still often looks to the past for its haven, and musicians perform authenticity. In a recent report from the 2007 World Music Exposition (WOMEX) in Seville, Spain, the Kasai Allstars, one of the groups recorded by Kenis, is described as a “symbol of ethnic unity.” According to Kenis, he brought Social Text 102

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these musicians together from different and oppositional ethnic groups from Kasai, and after he left they stayed together. Music dissolved even internecine conflict, and timeless tradition is resurrected as a unifying force. The reporter explains: “One tradition that the Kasai ethnic groups all seem to share is the festival of the new moon where all the musicians come together to perform for the customary chief. The Kasai Allstars re-created this occasion onstage, ultimately coaxing the big chief with his furs and body paint to rise from his throne and dance with graceful understated moves.” The band’s spokesman adds to this explanation (in translation): “Traditional music is our life, our histories found in our songs, the stories of peoples, towns dynasties and chiefs, passed down from father to son, for centuries.” The WOMEX reporter adds: “Kasai Allstars doing their part to keep the old ways alive . . . based on the mesmerizing music” have become the “Congotronics torch bearers.”40 But where has the buzz gone from the version that Kasai Allstars are staging in Seville? Where is the drastic electric hum, the sound of Kinshasa, the sound of the present that Kenis sought to capture? It is gone from the version appearing in the world-music variety show. Represent the World Town

“Somalia, Angola, Ghana, Ghana, Ghana, India, Sri Lanka, Burma, Bamboo Banga,” M.I.A. chants on “Bamboo Banga,” from her album Kala. Here we enjoy the empire striking, not so much striking back but in recognition that the terms on which empire rested, as well as resistance to it, are destabilized; our crisis of opportunity is the porousness of global geographical and virtual borders. While Africa and South Asia meet on the album in sonic form, often transmitted through virtual/digital space, the music recognizes the grounded realities shaping peoples’ lives in the global South. War is the lingua franca, paramilitary groups splintered into factions whose interests center on areas of rich resource: where diamonds are mined and oil drilled; where drugs are made; and where women, as cheap and/or sexual labor, are rounded up for import — situations capitalized on by global small-arms sales. “Do you know the cost of AKs up in Africa? 20 dollars ain’t shit to you but that’s how much they are,” M.I.A. sings. Her voice swims in a post – nation-state set of battles, shaped by and devoid of nationalist fervor, registering new waves of illegal and extralegal migration. “If you can catch me at the border, I got visas in my name,” she says; and, if asked, she could easily “make them all day.” The perspective of the album is quotidian dystopias of dispossession, lethal migratory travels, and an exultation of underground economies, black markets, and piracy. “Hands up, guns out, represent the world town” is the chant of thousands. Disenfranchisement is a kind of access to the world.41 13 8

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Politically, M.I.A.’s music looks to third-world revolutionary movements, like that of her father, and to the identifications made between guerrillas fighting for their independence. But in her music, made in the first decade of this century, there is a gap between the utopian desires around which the wars began and what the wars are now, a gap filled with ambivalence about the institutionalization of violence. Filled with gunfire, bombs, and random explosions of electrified sound, her music may defiantly claim the right to fight, but it also recognizes that war cultures are what have formed out of many of the African and Asian revolutionary movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s. And now it is not at all clear what people are fighting for. Maya’s call-out for “third world democracy” on her second album, Kala, is a poignant, if hazy, gaze at the utopian horizon. M.I.A.’s music and message on her first and second albums are shaped by what is left behind from these earlier black utopias. Much of her sound seems to ask: what does a generation do with the legacy of their parents’ revolutionary politics? How do we form protest or art in the aftermath of third-world independence movements, politics that have balkanized into irresolvable internecine battles and beached up as gory bloodbaths? M.I.A. does not abandon a politics of freedom fighting, but the battles lose their righteous moorings and become the inescapable terms of existence. The utopian pulse is not nostalgic for a lost revolutionary purity of purpose. Nor is it looking to somewhere in the future or to some plan that may bring peace and prosperity. The music on this album registers the profound ethical ambiguity accompanying modern wars. It does not have the self-righteousness of justified violence, but it also does not escape that ethos. It allows in the voice of child soldiers, with their Kalashnikov lifestyles. It gestures to deeper dystopias, in which children, often after the murder of their parents, are recruited into the paramilitaries with the use of methamphetamines and gunpowder, and grow to enjoy the bonding rituals of violence. But within the music’s ambivalence and ambiguity lingers a romanticized notion of violence. It is as if M.I.A. cannot accept the true scope of that violence in its entirety, without threatening allegiance to the idea of freedom fighting her father lives by. M.I.A. is a product of this past decade’s technological landscape. Her music is made of beats and prerecorded samples, mixes created completely on the computer. Her music was produced independently and made popular through DJ play in underground clubs and through Internet access and file sharing rather than by any major-label recognition. And, above all, her music is dance music. The shrieks and clonks and horns are the anarchic sounds of turbulent movement, of irrepressible play. Dance music ensures that listening is never passive consumption. It demands participation, cocreation; it must be practiced. It demands we stay in the present; there is nowhere else to go. The power of this music and movement is not generated Social Text 102

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out of forgetfulness or nostalgia. It is generated through play. Wherever there is bliss, ecstasy, or joy, there is a pulse of the utopian energeia. “Tsunami Télécommande”

M.I.A.’s album has a range of influences, but one notable form is the movement called kuduro. M.I.A. was first introduced to the sound by Buraka Som Sistema, three young musicians from Lisbon who had incorporated into their own music the rhythms they had first heard coming from the section of Lisbon settled by immigrant communities from Portugal’s former colonies. It had traveled there in the 1980s and 1990s from the suburbs of Luanda. Made in a nation shaped by thirty years of war for independence, followed by another thirty years of civil war, the music from Luanda is assaulting, harsh, broken, and relentless, a hot mechanical, bloodless, dystopian sound, echoing like the sound of warfare. First created by young Angolans by combining ringtones on their cell phones, it is the sound of a black planet: a mix of 1990s European electronica, English drum and bass, Brazilian baile funk and samba, African drum styles, Mexican banda and cumbia, black American hip-hop, soul, Cuban and Puerto Rican reggaeton, Dominican bachata, and sometimes Jamaican dub. The dances incorporate breaking, popping and locking, vogueing, capoeira, and various dance styles from western Africa. “Kuduro was never world music,” DJ Riot of Sistema explains. “It wasn’t born on congas and bongos, as some traditional folk-music. It was kids making straight-up dance-music from, like, ’96. Playing this new music, this new African music, that feels straight-up political in itself.” Rather than attempting faithful re-creation, Sistema created their own version of kuduro. Like M.I.A., their own music has its own decentering intentions. “If you listen to [our] record, it’s like a trip around the world,” says DJ Riot. “It starts in Angola, then goes to Portugal, then goes to Brazil. These countries are all very connected: the Portuguese once took Angolan slaves to Brazil. As well as that, we drew on dubstep from the UK, and went off to Sri Lanka a bit with M.I.A. It’s an album about the world without United States at its centre.”42 A different kind of kuduro comes out of the African clubs in Lisbon, as it is produced and played on state-of-the-art turntable technology rather than the scrappy systems and cell phones of Luanda, and as the dance moves indoors, off the dusty banlieu courtyard. But Sistema became identified as the group to bring the movement legitimating recognition. “Do you feel as if you’ve become kuduro ambassadors to the world?” an interviewer asks DJ Riot of Sistema. “I’m gonna be honest: I think that’s a little bit unavoidable, because we’re bringing the rhythm outside of Portugal, outside of Angola,” DJ Riot replies. “But that’s a very heavy expression: 14 0

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kuduro ambassador. I know what you mean when you say that, but we don’t feel like it. For us, for Portuguese guys, the reality is totally different: kuduro is just another influence for us, we’re just using the rhythms, and if you listen to [the Sistema album] Black Diamond you can hear loads of other influences. For some guy in Angola, the way he feels about kuduro might be completely different.”43 DJ Riot’s recognition does not deny the unequal relations of power between Portugal and its former colony. But his ambivalence about being dubbed “ambassadors” allows for a new sense of mediation, one that does not attempt to broker an authentic version of kuduro outside of Angola. For at least two generations of Angolans, war is a permanent state of being. The wars of independence from Portugal raged from 1961 to 1974, as three factions battled the Portuguese. After independence, civil wars were funded and armed by the United States, the Soviet Union, Cuba, and South Africa; each supported separate political parties.44 What is still at stake is land rich with oil and diamonds. But this land is as full of landmines. Watching the videos from the Luandan suburbs, the first thing to notice is the number of dancers who are amputees, scores of young men and women, boys and girls who have lost their limbs.45 Their bodies are war-torn, and kuduro is a specific celebration of the broken body. They integrate their hospital prosthetics, a part of the physical discussion with their world of war. Those with other disabilities dance also, and their particular forms of movement are integrated into the dance itself. It is a lexicon of twisted limbs, distinguished by sudden drops to the ground, bended feet to the face; in one move, a prosthetic foot becomes a cell phone, lifted to the ear. “Tsunami Télécommande” is the title of a song uploaded to YouTube in 2008 by a duo calling themselves Les Princes. A static image of “Les Princes Du Kuduro” accompanies the song, a pile of skulls sitting in the forefront, the Web site address “planetkuduro.com” superimposed over it. This graphically depicts what I find in the music: the troubling weave of technology and death, part of what I am elsewhere calling the alter-human condition. “Tsunami” is the title of a popular mix repeatedly sampled and riffed upon, as it is here. This could be the tsunami across East Asia that took with it more than 150,000 people, or the flood in Haiti, just months after 9/11, which took 3,000 people. These are traumas quickly forgotten in the West, but remaining in the collective bodily memory, a télécommande for the global South. The sound is an abrasive, grating, repetitive, and invasively metallizing beat; the rhythm carries shrieks and clonks and nervous tics, the anarchic sounds of turbulent movement, of irrepressible play in the midst of this death, created between bodies suspended in a wounded state, held in the half-life of poverty and war. As I argue elsewhere, the music and the movement embody what Social Text 102

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I am provisionally calling an alter-human condition. I distinguish this state of being from that shaped by the techno optimism of Western trans­ humanism, a science-fiction condition not far from fact in which the hyperdeveloped world imagines equally hyperdeveloped bodies, those in rich territories capable of extending their life spans and their reproductive lives. These bodies profit from the wars held elsewhere and from wars conducted by remote, radar and robot, night- and distance-enhanced vision. Technology is an extension of their bodies, leaving the flesh intact. The alter-human condition calls into question just how far the promises of liberal humanism reach, which bodies it hails as whole or worth healing. These were the bodies where the cold war ran hot, these young bodies the proxy battle sites. Yet Les Princes, Os Lambas, Dj Znobia, and others have succeeded in extending themselves into netted airspace. Through inexpensive modes of production, homemade video, Web sites, Internet downloads, and file sharing, the music and dance of kuduro spreads and mutates uncontrollably through the nervous system of an electronic net. But it is ephemeral; by the time this is published, the form may well have died, been repurposed to serve particular agendas, or resisted ossification by mutating into something else entirely. Another example illustrates a more resilient, playful embodiment of kuduro. “Os Marteleiros,” by DJ Rei Helder, is video footage from Luanda uploaded in 2006, played with a segment of Helder’s dance music.46 In the footage, Helder and groups of young men from the neighborhood improvise together across a recreational park. The dance is shaped by humor, and the relationships between the all-male dancers are neither combative nor adversarial. It is marked by a decided lack of competition. These boys are not fighting; in fact they are involved in distinctly antisoldiering activity. These are collective male bodies in alternative relation to each other. There are certain movements of feigned violence, but they are not sustained and are accompanied by laughter. Most notably, the experience of disability is shared between them and gestured to in the dances. In this and other earlier video clips from Luanda, physical spaces are repurposed by the dancers: vacant lots, streets, empty bathrooms, hallways, bedrooms, the ruinous structures of poor cities — perhaps demanding that we consider occupation from an alternate view. This interaction with environment is lost in the footage from Lisbon, as is the heterogeneity of the dancing male bodies. As the late Lindon Barrett argued, a fully liberatory state is enacted when the body is not defined by its use value, when it moves together with others in contrast with what is simply necessary or useful — “Freedom [should be] understood as the ability to play” — and such play holds within it glimpses of what life could feel like, just beyond the horizon.47 Utopian 14 2

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theorists have a range of debates over what a life of leisure and abundance would be like, and if it would be possible at all. Surely humans would devolve into a stupor of hedonistic indulgence and dissipation followed by ennui, naysayers insist. Pleasure is only understood in relation to pain, as compensation of lack, others add. But I adopt the argument that fulfillment is not synonymous with consumption, and it is through play that we are able to touch the idea of life free of such an economy. Coda

I am not alone in searching for ways to affirm alternate forms of human contact not based in violence. There is the conviction that we can create, as Lindon Barrett put it, “a state of leisure and ease,” where freedom is not abstract nor an absurdity. I shared with Lindon the conviction that violent struggle is not a fundamental condition for social transformation. For him, violence was not intrinsic to a dialectic of revolution. His radical belief was in the powerful praxis of bliss, play, and pleasure. He found emanation of the condition of freedom, this utopian pulse, as created collectively in the club, spaces shaped by dance and music, but with the implications much broader than escapism or self-gratification. These relationships of cooperation are forged in spite of, or from within, coercive and violent material relations. Lindon was murdered in July 2008, days before I was to show him this essay. I continue to share his stubborn optimism and dedicate this essay to him in that spirit. Notes 1. Zygmunt Bauman, “A Century of Camps?” in Life in Fragments: Essays in Postmodern Morality (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 192 – 205. 2. See Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15 (2003): 22. 3. Zygmunt Bauman, “Wars of the Globalization Era,” European Journal of Social Theory 4 (2001): 14 4. Interview with a National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL) fighter, Cotonu, Benin, 29 July 1994. Quoted in William Reno, Warlord Politics and African States (Boulder, CO: Lynne Reinner, 1998), 15. 5. Quoted in Liberia — The Cannibals’ War, a film by Mark Stucke, Journeyman Pictures, 1 August 1996, reference no. 229, www.journeyman.tv/?lid=9809. Available on YouTube, www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmrkTi3EHqk (accessed 21 September 2009). 6. As in other African countries, a dictatorship flourished in Liberia during the cold war, fed by U.S. cold-war policies and private interests. Charles Taylor, leader of the NPFL, came out of this environment of violence and brutality and ruled over two civil wars, from 1989 until his exile in 2003. 7. Achille Mbembe, “Variations on the Beautiful in Congolese Worlds of Sound,” in Beautiful/Ugly, ed. Sarah Nuttall (Durham, NC: Duke University press, 2006), 74.

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8. Banning Eyre, “The Congotronics Story,” interview with Vincent Kenis and Mawangu Mingiedi, October 2005, www.afropop.org/multi/feature/ID/596/ The+Congotronics+Story. 9. Phillip E. Wegner, “Horizons, Figures, and Machines: The Dialectic of Utopia in the Work of Fredric Jameson,” Utopian Studies 9, no. 2 (1998): 61. 10. Ernst Bloch’s critique of Marxism should be considered here. He argued that the fascists were successful because they very effectively manipulated the needs and yearnings of differing populations and offered them immediate relief, while the Left was occupied with offering only negative assessments of capitalist ideology. 11. I refer here to Bloch’s concept of the “Not-Yet Conscious . . . which is carried by a rising class.” Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 15. 12. Josh Kun, Audiotopias: Music, Race, and America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 22. Kun has developed the useful concept of audiotopia. He argues that because studies of music focus on performance and composition, the power of private listening practices is often ignored. I appreciate his emphasis on the manipulation of hard copies — CDs, vinyl, and recordings — but there are important differences in my conception of musical utopian ground. I wonder what is at stake in separating private listening practices from performance and other forms of collective participation. The caution here is to avoid letting individual consumption stand as some sort of insurgency in itself. Too often a corporate model consumerism stands in for sociopolitical engagement. 13. Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London: Verso, 2005), xii. 14. Ernst Bloch, “The Artistic Illusion as the Visible Anticipatory Illumination,” in The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays, trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 146. “Vor-Schein” is translated as “anticipatory illumination” from Bloch’s original German-language essay, “Kunstlerscher Schein als sichtbarer Vor-Schein,” Das Prinzip Huffnung (Frankfurt am Main, 1959), 242. 15. Fredric Jameson, “Islands and Trenches: Naturalization and the Production of Utopian Discourse,” Diacritics 7, no. 2 (1977): 6. 16. Tom Moylan, “Introduction: Jameson and Utopia,” special issue on Fredric Jameson, Utopian Studies 9, no. 2 (1998): 5. 17. Bloch, Principle of Hope, 209. As Ruth Levitas explains in The Concept of Utopia (New York: Allan, 1990), “Bloch denied the existence of a fixed nature. ‘There is no fixed generic essence of man . . . rather the entire history is evidence of a progressive transformation of human nature’ ”(104). 18. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 37. 19. Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 22. 20. See Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492 – 1797 (London: Routledge, 1996), and Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1997). 21. See Timothy D. Taylor, Global Pop: World Musics, World Markets (London: Routledge, 1997), 5. 22. Philip V. Bohlman, World Music: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 27. For more trenchant criticism of ethnography, see Fatima Tobing Rony, The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), and Shari Huhndorf, Going Native: The Indian in the American Imagination (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001). 14 4

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23. Bohlman, World Music, 38. 24. David Schwarz, Listening Subjects: Music, Psychoanalysis, Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 7. 25. See Bohlman, World Music, 1 – 2. 26. See Kun, Audiotopia, 23. Kun takes the concept of “contact zones” from Mary Pratt; see Imperial Eyes: “ ‘contact zones’ [are] social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination, like colonialism, slavery or their aftermaths as they are lived out across the globe today” (4). 27. Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (London: Verso, 2006). 28. I ignore here the dialogues around the digital divide, choosing instead to look at the way the world is littered with communication and information devices and the ways black people are inventing new forms of computer literacy. As Alexander Weheliye argues: “Recent debates about the ‘digital divide,’ while surely drawing much needed attention to certain politicoeconomic inequities, cannot but reinforce the idea that Afro-diasporic populations are inherently Luddite and therefore situated outside the bounds of Western modernity.” Alexander Weheliye, Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afromodernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 2. 29. These Mbuti pygmy tribes were most famously written of by Colin Turnbull in The Forest People (New York: Touchstone, 1987). I am referring here to their chanting techniques, particularly the recording done in the forest by Simha Arom and Genevieve Taurelle, The Music of Ba Benzélé Pygmies (Basel: BärenreiterMusicaphon, 1966). See Stephen Feld, “Pygmy Pop: A Genealogy of Schizophonic Mimesis,” Yearbook for Traditional Music 28 (1996): 6; “A Sweet Lullaby for World Music,” in Globalization, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 145 – 72. 30. Mingiedi, quoted in Eyre, “Congotronics Story.” 31. Ibid. 32. See Gary Stewart, Rumba on the River: A History of the Popular Music of the Two Congos (London: Verso, 2002), 198. 33. Ibid., 171. 34. “Hidden Meanings in Congo Music,” Afropop Worldwide, www.afropop .org/multi/feature/ID/598 (accessed 21 September 2009). 35. See Stewart, Rumba on the River, 207. 36. Kenis first heard the Konono sound in 1980, on a friend’s recording, and later from the archives of Bernard Quersin. Conditions were different when Kenis returned to Zaire in 1989, looking for traditional music, hoping to find Mingiedi, who was touring the villages. (Musicians like Tabu Ley had moved to France and shaped their new sound, soukous, for West African and European audiences.) Kenis didn’t meet Konono until 2000, when he went back to record other musicians. 37. Kenis, quoted in Eyre, “Congotronics Story.” 38. Louise Meintjes, Sound of Africa! Making Music Zulu in a South African Studio (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 8. 39. Kenis, quoted in Eyre, “Congotronics Story.” 40. “Afropop Worldwide Travels to Seville, Spain, for WOMEX 2007” (audio file), Afropop Worldwide, www.afropop.org/radio/radio_program/ID/694/Afro pop%20Worldwide%20Travels%20to%20Seville%20Spain%20for%20WOMEX %202007 (accessed 21 September 2009). 41. Lyrics from M.I.A., “Bamboo Banga,” Kala (London: XL Recordings, 2007); “20 Dollar,” ibid.; “Paper Planes,” ibid.; “World Town,” ibid. 42. Anthony Carew, “Interview: DJ Riot of Buraka Som Sistema,” About Social Text 102

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.com: Alternative Music, 25 November 2008, altmusic.about.com/od/interviews/a/ burakasomsistema.htm. This interview is an audio file; click on “Listen online” to access, beginning 25 minutes and 45 seconds in. 43. Ibid. 44. The three organizations are: Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola — MPLA), the National Front for the Liberation of Angola (Frente Nacional de Libertação de Angola — FNLA), and the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola — UNITA). The Soviet Union and Cuba supported the socialist MPLA, while the FNLA turned to the United States, as would UNITA. For a full history of Angola, see Patrick Chabal et al., A History of Postcolonial Lusophone Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002); Patrick Chabal and Nuno Vidal, eds., Angola, the Weight of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007); Edward George, The Cuban Intervention in Angola, 1965 – 1991: From Che Guevara to Cuito Cuanavale (London: Routledge, 2006). 45. Videos featuring amputee dancers include Kuduro, “Qui na Mata,” www .youtube.com/watch?v=DfwO6oDMFm0 (accessed 21 September 2009); Costuletas’s party hit “Tchiriri,” www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfA7N2SISCM (accessed 21 September 2009); Dj Nays and Costuleta’s “Mama Kudi,” www.you tube.com/watch?v=c94a_BAy47k (accessed 21 September 2009); and MC Andre­ zinho, “Novo sucesso,” www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNUDeq7xAqM (accessed 21 September 2009). Much more needs to be analyzed about the relationship between gender, masculinity, and injury in postwar African nations. 46. Rei Helder, “Os Marteleiros,” www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsMxbS86a4E (accessed 21 September 2009). See also canalangola.net. 47. George Kateb, “Utopia and the Good Life,” in Utopias and Utopian Thought, ed. Frank Manuel (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966), 246.

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About the cover art  Eight tall microphone stands hover over two large blocks of ice in Paul Kos’s

Sound of Ice Melting (1970). From one perspective, the placement of microphones crowding around the ice to document and record “the way [it] behaves” might seem like a comment on the rise of celebrity culture or the absurd consumption of mass culture. From another perspective, the Zen-like simplicity of the ice melting on its own time highlights the duration and ephemeral nature of life as well as the poetry of the commonplace. On another level, the installation serves as an early instance of sound art, incorporating the readymade and performance art in order to create a soundscape that explores the synchronous relationship between materials, events, and the viewer’s active participation. One of the leading artists of the Bay Area conceptual movement, Kos has been producing and exhibiting humorous and provocative art for over thirty years. Recently Sound of Ice Melting was reinstalled in The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860–1989 (2009) at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Kos is currently the Dodd Chair at the Lamar Dodd School of Art, University of Georgia, Athens. For more information about him and his art, please see the exhibition catalog for Everything Matters: Paul Kos, A Retrospective, a 2003 exhibit at the Berkeley Art Museum, University of California. 101  Vicente L. Rafael, “Translation, American English, and the National Insecurities

of Empire”; Eng-Beng Lim, “Performing the Global University”; Ananya Jahanara Kabir, “Cartographic Irresolution and the Line of Control”; Robin Bernstein, “Dances with Things: Material Culture and the Performance of Race”; “Merry Christmas from Athens” [photograph]; Rania Astrinaki “ ‘(Un)hooding’ a Rebellion: The December 2008 Events in Athens” 100  Brent Hayes Edwards and Anna McCarthy, “Introduction”; Susette Min, “Aesthetics”;

Ann Pellegrini and Jasbir Puar, “Affect”; Ed Cohen and Julie Livingston, “AIDS”; Ana María Dopico, “(Theorizing the) Americas”; Tavia Nyong’o, “Art”; Micki McGee, “Body”; David L. Eng and Teemu Ruskola, “China”; Nikhil Pal Singh, “Cold War”; Brent Hayes Edwards, Anna McCarthy, and Randy Martin, “Collective”; Michael Ralph, “Commodity”; Patrick Deer, “Culture”; Michael Ralph, “Diaspora”; Shireen R. K. Patell, “Disciplinarity”; Neferti X. M. Tadiar, “Empire”; Ashley Dawson, “Environment”; Livia Tenzer, “Feminism”; Anna McCarthy, “Film and Mass Culture”; Tariq Jazeel, “Governmentality”; Michael Ralph, “HipHop”; Stefano Harney, “Ideology”; Rick Maxwell, “Labor and Class”; David Kazanjian, “Marxism”; Brian Larkin, “National Allegory”; Tavia Nyong’o, “Performance”; Brent Hayes Edwards, “Poetry”; Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, “Policy and Planning”; Yolanda MartínezSan Miguel, “Postcolonialism”; Jorge Alberto Perez, “Sugar Cane Press (North Amazon Basin, Peru)” [photograph]; Andrew Ross, “Production”; John Brenkman, “Prospectus”; Gustavus Stadler, “Queer and Disorderly”; José Esteban Muñoz, “The Queer Social Text”; Roopali Mukherjee, “Racial Politics (in the United States)”; María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo and David Sartorius, “Revolution”; Brent Hayes Edwards, “Social Text”; Alondra Nelson, “Social Text”; Tavia Nyong’o, “Social Text”; Heather Gautney, “State”; Phillip Brian Harper, “Theory”; Randy Martin, “University”; Eng-Beng Lim, “University”; Allen Feldman, “War”; “The Social Text Collective: 1979 to 2009” 99  Eva Cherniavsky, “Neocitizenship and Critique”; John Patrick Leary, “TV Urgente: Urban

Exclusion, Civil Society, and the Politics of Television in Venezuela”; Laikwan Pang, “The Labor Factor in the Creative Economy: A Marxist Reading”; Ellen Moodie, “Seventeen Years, Seventeen Murders: Biospectacularity and the Production of Post–Cold War Knowledge in El Salvador”; Dohra Ahmad, “Not Yet Beyond the Veil: Muslim Women in American Popular Literature”; “Rose the Hippopotamus, Central Park Zoo” [postcard]; Brent Hayes Edwards, “Editorial Note”; Mark Kalbus, “A Short Introduction to Adorno’s Mediation between Kultur and Culture”; Theodor W. Adorno, “Kultur and Culture”; Theodor W. Adorno, “Questions on Intellectual Emigration”; Anna McCarthy, “States” [photograph]; John Andrews, “Depression Today, or New Maladies of the Economy” 98  Minkah Makalani, “Introduction: Diaspora and the Localities of Race”; Jacqueline Nassy Brown, “The Racial State of the Everyday and the Making of Ethnic Statistics in Britain”; Adrian Burgos Jr., “Left Out: Afro-Latinos, Black Baseball, and the Revision of Baseball’s Racial History”; Jemima Pierre, “Beyond Heritage Tourism: Race and the Politics of AfricanDiasporic Interactions”; Tina M. Campt, “Family Matters: Diaspora, Difference, and the Visual Archive”; Frank Guridy, “Feeling Diaspora in Harlem and Havana”