by David Byrne
LPs had their own technical limitations. They hold about 20–24 minutes of music on a side, and the louder the music (especially the lower pitches), the deeper and wider are the grooves that get etched into the master disc. That meant these low or loud passages ended up using more physical space on the disc, and therefore there would be less total time available on the LP for the music. Big-bottomed music had to be either quieter or shorter to fit on discs. You could have plenty of low end on your record, but then the overall volume level would often have to be adjusted lower, and though folks could always hit the volume knob on their home player to compensate and make that record as loud as any other, low volume on radio and jukeboxes created a real disadvantage.
With classical music, the size and depth of the grooves would vary over the length of one LP. In the quiet passages, the grooves could be very skinny and tightly spaced, and more time and music could therefore be squeezed into a given space, which might then be offset by the wider grooves necessitated by louder, lower-pitched movements. Technicians, called mastering engineers, became adept at figuring out how best to squeeze the greatest amount of music onto a disc while maintaining the maximum possible volume and dynamic range. Cutting lathes, the machines that etched the grooves, automatically adjusted the groove size according to the sound being recorded, but the mastering engineers were the ones who decided how much could fit on a side and whether to lower the volume of the whole side or subtly alter the music a bit by selectively decreasing the volume of the lower pitches.
There are actually people out there who can identify classical recordings just by looking at the grooves on the LP. They can hold up a piece of vinyl and see that there is, for example, a quiet passage occurring about three minutes into the record, a loud crescendo at minute fifteen, and a medium-volume passage at the side ending at around twenty-two minutes—and from that they can guess what recording it is. Such a feat wouldn’t be so easy with pop music, which tends to be recorded (and composed) at a more constant volume. In live performance, pop music needs to be heard over a boisterous and often drunken audience, and quiet passages can get lost. With the advent of radio it quickly became apparent that extremely loud and extremely quiet passages were abrasive and distorted on the one hand or would get lost on the other, so a kind of standardized consistency of volume came to be favored. Volume became a make-or-break quality for records. Records that sounded louder jumped out of the radio or jukebox speakers and caught the attention of listeners, at least for a moment, but that was enough to stop the listener from turning the radio dial. I emphasized“sounded” because the sounds couldn’t actually be louder than those of their competition. Radio stations had legal power, and therefore volume limitations; they couldn’t actually play some songs louder than others. But there are psychoacoustic tricks that both musicians and record producers began to employ that could fool the ear into thinking a song was louder than the one that had preceded it. The use of compressors, limiters, and other devices to create apparent volume became more and more popular. On radio, these devices could—when applied to the entire broadcast output—make one radio station sound louder, and possibly more exciting, than its neighbor.
Other tricks for increasing apparent volume were musical. By skillfully adjusting the arrangement of the instruments in a recording, one can achieve some of the same effects as a compressor, but without the sometimes annoying, artificial, and intrusive (if it is audible) “squashing” effect. If fewer instruments are played along with the singer while he or she is singing, then the vocal can be heard clearly without having to be louder than everything else. Spreading instruments and arrangements over the pitch spectrum helps too. Instruments that play in the same pitch range compete with one another to be heard, so it is generally better to assign different frequency levels to each part if you want them to stand out. If everyone plays parts in the low end of their pitch range there’s a good chance everything will end up fairly muddled and indistinct, but if they spread the wealth, then the individual parts will appear more distinct and the whole thing will appear to be louder.
CASSETTES
In 1963 a Dutch company called Philips developed the cassette tape. Tapes were originally used only in dictation machines, given the quality of the recordings was not very high. But by 1970 that changed, and they began to be used for music. These little things were portable, you could play them in cars, and they didn’t scratch or wear out as quickly as the more fragile LPs. Philips also decided to license the format royalty free, and as a result other companies adopted it without having to give a piece of their income to Philips. By the mid-seventies these pocket-sized plastic things were everywhere. Cassettes could hold a little more music than LPs, but more importantly, the machines that played them could sometimes record as well. The general public was now back in the recording business, just like it had been in the early days. (Home-style reel-to-reel recorders had been available previously, but they were bulky and expensive.) People began to make tapes of themselves singing for Grandma, they copied their favorite songs from their LP collections, they recorded radio programs and music that they played or composed themselves. With two machines (or the soon not-uncommon double-deck cassette machine), you could copy cassettes, one at a time, and give the duplicates to friends.
Record companies tried to discourage “home taping,” as they called it. They worried that people would record hit singles off the radio and never have to buy their 45s again. They mounted a huge (and fairly ineffectual) propaganda campaign that mainly served to alienate the consumer and music fan from the companies that sold pre-recorded music. “Home Taping Is Killing Music” was their slogan. I myself occasionally bought pre-recorded audiocassettes, but mostly I still bought LPs. Like many of my friends, I’d make mixtapes that consisted of my favorite songs in various genres, for myself and others. Rather than lending out precious, fragile, and bulky LPs, we’d exchange cassettes of our favorite songs, each tape focusing on a specific genre, theme, artist, or mood. There was a lot of nerdy musical categorizing going on. Pocket-sized audio wonder cabinets. I found out about a lot of artists and whole styles of music through the cassettes given to me by my friends, and I ended up buying more LPs as a result.
The mixtapes we made for ourselves were musical mirrors. The sadness, anger, or frustration you might be feeling at a given time could be encapsulated in the song selection. You made mixtapes that corresponded to emotional states, and they’d be available to pop into the deck when each feeling needed reinforcing or soothing. The mixtape was your friend, your psychiatrist, and your solace.
Mixtapes were a form of potlatch—the Native American custom by which a gift given requires that a reciprocal gift be received in the future. I’d make you a mixtape of my favorite songs—presumably ones you would like and might not already have or know about—and you’d be expected to make a similar tape for me of songs you think I’d like. The reciprocal giving wasn’t super time-sensitive, but you couldn’t forget. The gift of a mixtape was very personal. Often they were made for exactly one person, no one else. A radio program with one listener. Each song, carefully chosen, with love and humor, as if to say, “This is who I am, and by this tape you will know me better.” The song choice and sequence allowed the giver to say what one might be too shy to say outright. The songs contained on a mixtape from a lover were scrutinized carefully for clues and metaphors that might reveal the nuances and deeper meanings secreted in the emotional cargo. Other people’s music—ordered and collected in infinitely imaginative ways—became a new form of expression.
Record companies wanted to take all that away from us. I taped songs off the radio, just as the record companies feared I would. I carried a boombox on my first trip to Brazil, and every time something amazing came on the radio I taped it. Later I’d ask who those singers or bands were, and then I’d begin a search and eventually buy their LPs. I even licensed some of them for release on a record label I had for a while. If I hadn’t been able to tape those radio progr
ams, I would never found out who those artists were. I also recorded other kinds of radio programs on cassettes: gospel music, preachers, exorcists, radio talk-show hosts, and radio dramas. The piles of cassettes got a little out of control, but they were a constant source of inspiration and they became tools in my own music-making process.
Boomboxes had built-in mics, and, maybe more significantly, they had built-in compressors. A compressor is a bit of circuitry that squashes the sound and effectively acts as an automatic volume control, so that louder sounds are pushed down and quieter ones are brought up. For example, if you recorded one big piano chord on your boombox, the attack—the loud initial hit—would be smacked down, and, as the “tail” of the chord lingered, decayed, and got softer on playback, you would hear the circuitry trying to make it louder. Almost as if someone were working a volume knob in a frantic attempt to maintain a constant sound level. It’s a fairly unnatural effect when overused, but it’s also pretty cool, and can sometimes make amateur recordings sound weirdly exciting. For a while I used boomboxes as compositional tools—recording band rehearsals and improvisations, which I would later listen to and make note of the best parts, imagining how the good bits could be stitched together. The built-in compression had a huge influence on these decisions: by favoring some passages and making others sound terrible, it made invisible creative decisions.
Whole genres of music thrived as a result of cassettes. Punk bands that couldn’t get a record deal resorted to churning out copies of homemade tapes and selling them at shows or by mail order. These second-and-third generation copies lost some quality—the high frequencies would inevitably be reduced, and some dynamics would disappear as well, but no one seemed to care too much. This technology favored music that has been described as either “ethereal, ambient or noisy.”15 I remember getting self-copied cassettes of Daniel Johnston’s songs that must have been copied multiple times. The audio quality sucked, and it seemed like he had “overdubbed” vocals or instrumental parts on some songs while creating the recordings—all on cassette. It was an era of murky music. Quality was sliding down a slippery slope, but the freedom and empowerment that was enabled by the technology made up for it.
Cassettes had different, though related effects in other parts of the world. In India, the Gramophone Company virtually had a monopoly on the LP market. It recorded only specific styles of music (mainly ghazals—love songs— and some film songs), and they only worked with a handful or artists: Asha Bhosle, Lata Mangeshkar, and a few others. Their stranglehold on recorded music lasted until 1980, when the Indian government decided to allow cassettes to be imported. The effect was rapid and profound: smaller labels blossomed and other kinds of music and artists began to be heard. Soon 95 percent of all commercial recordings in India were being released on cassettes.
This wholesale adoption of cassettes was the pattern in a lot of other countries as well. I have “commercial” cassettes that I treasure from Bali, Sudan, Ethiopia, and elsewhere. Sadly the quality is often atrocious; the copying machines could have been misaligned, or the copies might have been made hastily by the store or kiosk owner. But a lot of music got disseminated that never would have been heard without the cheap and reproducible cassette.
Another side effect of the cassette deluge was that many musical forms that had been edited and shortened for disc recording could now return to something resembling their original form. Indian ragas last at least an hour, and though the side of a cassette tape is rarely that long, they can easily be quite a bit longer than the twenty-one minutes of the standard LP. Rai songs, the Algerian pop format, can go as long as the performer and audience feel like (or can afford), so cutting them down to the threeto four-minute songs that were suitable for disc and Western audiences killed the party before it could get started.
Wider and more ecumenical dissemination of cassettes wasn’t always for the better. In Java, cassette recordings of local gamelan ensembles circulated widely. Before the advent of cassettes, every village had its own unique gamelan ensemble with its own instruments, each with their own idiosyncrasies. There were variations in the playing and arrangements as well. But as cassettes of popular ensembles circulated, the styles became more homogenized. Similar patterns began to show up everywhere, and even the tuning of the gongs began to conform to those heard on the cassettes.16
There is always a tradeoff. As music gets disseminated, and distinct regional voices find a way to be more widely heard, certain bands and singers (who might be more creative, or possibly have just been marketed by a bigger company) begin to dominate, and peculiar regional styles—what writer Greil Marcus, echoing Harry Smith, called the “old weird America”—eventually end up getting squashed, neglected, abandoned, and often forgotten. This dissemination/homogenization process runs in all directions simultaneously; it’s not just top-down repression of individuality and peculiarity. A recording by some previously obscure backwoods or southside singer can find its way into the ear of a wide public, and an Elvis, Luiz Gonzaga, Woody Guthrie, or James Brown, can suddenly have a massive audience—what was once a local style suddenly exerts a huge influence. Pop music can be thrown off its axis by some previously unknown and talented rapper from the projects. And then the homogenization process begins again. There’s a natural ebb and flow to these things, and it can be tricky to assign a value judgment based on a particular frozen moment in the never-ending cycle of change.
IN THE CLUB
Around 1976, 12” dance and DJ singles emerged. Because the grooves on these oversized singles could be wider, and because they were spinning as fast as a 45, they were louder than LPs that spun at 33RPM. I remember in the late seventies hearing how the low end (the sound of the kick drum and bass) could be brought forward on this format and made louder. Discos had speakers that could accommodate those frequencies, and they became a world of throbbing, pulsing low end—an experience that had to wait for the CD and digital recording to be experienced outside the club environment.
Low frequencies are felt as much as they are heard. We feel that bass in our chest and gut; the music physically moves our bodies. Beyond any audible and neurological apprehension of music, in the disco environment it was pummeling and massaging us physically. These frequencies are sensuous, sexy, and also a little dirty and dangerous.
At the same time that disco sound systems featured big bottoms, they also featured arrays of tweeters—tiny speakers that could project over the heads of the dancers the extreme high frequencies present in a recording. While being massaged by the bass, these speakers were simultaneously filling the air with the sound of high hats flying around like a million needles. I suspect there was a drug connection as well; those high frequencies in particular sounded sparkly fresh if you were on amyl nitrate or cocaine. Naturally enough, the mixers in recording studios began to accommodate that drug-altered hearing as well, and for a while in the eighties, a lot of records had piercing highend in their mixes. Ouch. Some artists worked exclusively in this style, and their music was made primarily to be heard over club-speaker systems. You’d hear an amazing song in a club, but it just didn’t sound the same at home. Jamaican sound systems did the same thing. The huge sound of the bass and the high-frequency chucks of the guitars and hi-hats left a gaping sonic hole in the middle of the music—a hole perfectly suited for toasters and MCs to sing and rap over.
DJs in discos gravitated to 12” discs not just for the increased volume and louder low end that the format could accommodate, but also as a medium that could combine those features with what were then called “extended mixes.” A club mix of a song would not only be more earth shaking sonically, but it was generally lengthened, and would contain breaks—sections where the vocal and often much of the “song” disappeared, leaving only the groove. A DJ could “extend” these breaks even further by playing the same record on two turntables. They could switch from one turntable to the other, making an instrumental break in the song segue into the same section on the other copy, and th
en do the same in reverse, repeating the process over and over, creating a break that was as long as he, she, the dancers, or an MC wanted. As with early jazz, people beyond the actual musicians, like the dancers, were influencing the music.
Jamaicans were among the first to exploit these possibilities. When the technology moved to Manhattan and the Bronx and was supplemented by some breakdancers and an MC, you had early hip-hop. The beats changed when they got to New York, but the principle was the same: repurpose a medium that was originally created for listening to music, or for DJs to play in clubs, and then use it as a medium to make new music. Music eats its young and gives birth to a new hybrid creature. I doubt there is a single hip-hop artist whose beats still originate from a DJ manipulating vinyl by hand, but the organizing principal hasn’t changed much in thirty years.
Rock musicians and their fans didn’t initially appreciate these developments. The reasons largely have to do with race and homophobia—many of the most popular dance clubs were black, gay, or both. Part of the disdain might have also stemmed from the idea that this new kind of music wasn’t being made by traditional musicians. Drummers and guitar players weren’t seen playing in these clubs, even though they were often audibly present on the original records being spun. That complaint could be accurate and justified, though I don’t really think most of these grumbling rock fans were that interested in or emotionally sympathetic to the employment situation of drummers and guitarists.