How to Wreck a Nice Beach
Page 1
PRAISE FOR HOW TO WRECK A NICE BEACH
Selected by the Village Voice as one of the 10 Best Books of 2010
Chosen by Amazon as the Entertainment Book of 2010
“Dave Tompkins’ How to Wreck a Nice Beach is the best work of social history I’ve read in years. He manages to braid together threads from a hundred directions—espionage, medical research, science fiction, hip-hop—so that the story is constantly swooping around unexpected corners. About a third of the way in, it begins to feel like a secret history of our time.”
—Luc Sante
“It’s unquestionably brilliant, not only one of the best music books of the year, but also one of the best music books ever written.”
—Los Angeles Times
“How to Wreck a Nice Beach is much more than a labor of love: It’s an intergalactic vision quest fueled by several thousand gallons of high-octane spiritual-intellectual lust.… [Tompkins’] biggest and most perilous adventure in How to Wreck a Nice Beach is the plunge deep into the throbbing radioactive heart of his own prose—a hallucinatory stew of Rimbaud, Tom Wolfe, Lester Bangs, and Bootsy Collins.”
—Sam Anderson, New York Magazine
“We should be thankful that Tompkins sacrificed a decade to this unique and beautifully wrought book, in tribute to the brief cultural moment when a tool of militarism, secrets and destruction found itself transformed by music-makers into a zap-gun of heroic space-age liberation.”
— Andrew Male, Mojo
“Work[s] the military-entertainment-complex angle with admirable energy, piling up flash-frozen anecdotes of pilots and DJs in voice-critical moments; showing, in its drooling over antique military-signaling equipment, a musician’s gear-lust; and striving incessantly to invoke sound: ‘It could sound like an articulate bag of dead leaves.’ Despite its dense payload of raw fact-bombs, the book remains, like the sound of the vocoder itself, suggestively ghostly.”
— The Guardian
“From the atomic bomb to the band Zapp, from The Gulag Archipelago to Detroit’s ghettos, Tompkins rewires the connections between war, science, and art to give us a glimpse of ‘evolved’ man, an analog crooner seductively and jarringly alien.”
— Oxford American
“With verve and humor, Dave Tompkins tells the remarkable story of the vocoder and its secret WWII offspring, which protected the very words of Roosevelt and Churchill as they flashed across the Atlantic. Nobody has ever related this before, and to have a technological tale related this well is a great gift to science and to history.”
— David Kahn, author of The Codebreakers and Hitler’s Spies
How to Wreck a Nice Beach
The Vocoder from World War II to Hip-Hop
The Machine Speaks
© 2010, 2011 Dave Tompkins
Stop Smiling Media
1371 N. Milwaukee Avenue
Chicago, IL 60622
Melville House Publishing
145 Plymouth Street
Brooklyn, NY 11201
www.stopsmilingbooks.com
www.mhpbooks.com
Editor: James Hughes
Cover Photograph by Michael Waring
Illustrations by Kevin Christy
The Library of Congress has cataloged the original hardcover edition as follows:
Tompkins, Dave.
How to wreck a nice beach :
the vocoder from World War II to hip-hop :
the machine speaks / Dave Tompkins.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-1-61219-093-8
1. Electronic music—History and criticism. 2. Vocoder. I. Title.
ML1380.T66 2010
621.382′24 — dc22
v3.1
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
AXIS OF EAVESDROPPERS
BOOK ONE
ONE
Nearly Enough like That which Gave Them Birth
TWO
Indestructible Speech
THREE
Vocoder Kommissar
FOUR
As It Is, on Mars
FIVE
Color Out of Space
SIX
The Sacred Thunder Croak
BOOK TWO
SEVEN
Interdiction
EIGHT
Vietnam, Verbot and Clear
NINE
Think He Said Her Name Was Voodoo-on-a-Stick
TEN
Cool, As Long As Nobody Hears It
ELEVEN
Eat a Planet and Go On to the Next One
TWELVE
Decompression
EPILOGUE
I Was Like
APPENDIX
Future Beat Alliance
Auto-Tune: It’s Not the End of the World
How to Recognize a Peachtree Freak: 99 Songs with Vocoder
Rammellzee: Death of a Monk
Electro Barry: Robot Redboard
Tubby Run the Skies
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ART BIBLIOGRAPHY
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: BEEN REAL
Great care was taken in the preparation of this book to secure the right to reproduce all of the images used from the photographer, artist or publisher. In a few cases, however, we simply could not locate the right person or company from who to seek permission. In those cases, we have done our best to provide proper attribution to the original artist or photographer (where known) and only used what we believe is necessary to complete this project. (illustration credit fm1.1)
IN MEMORY OF
Bo “Toad Lasers” Tompkins
THE KORG VC-10 VOCODER came with its own ensemble switch and accent bender. It was used by the author for How to Wreck a Nice Beach, as well as anyone who wanted a leaf blower to sing the chorus. (illustration credit fm1.2)
IN ONE WORD, MILITARISM WAS FUNK.
— H.G. WELLS
“The SIGSALY Guam Terminal, codename NEPTUNE, with vocoder walls and turntables (left), photographed in 1945. Logistics concerning the atomic bomb missions and plans for the invasion of Japan were discussed over this secret radiotelephone link. (Courtesy National Archives/ NSAz/ Mahlon Doyle)”/ (illustration credit fm2.1)
AXIS OF EAVESDROPPERS
I have been bugged all my life.
— Vyacheslav “Iron Arse” Molotov, Soviet Minister of Foreign Affairs, 1955
Theoretical security was not absolute like the records.
— Ralph Miller, Bell Labs
We are clear.
It’s quiet inside the Black National Theater, just above 125th Street in Harlem. Afrika Bambaataa is sitting on a defeated couch, flipping through a brochure published by the National Security Agency. He wears black sweats and fluorescent green running shoes, and there’s a trainer’s towel around his neck. The Thunderdome spikes, leather cape, and Martian sun dimmers have been left at home. He seems to be giving his myth the day off, looking more like a gym coach with allergies than the retired gang warlord who once borrowed his mom’s records, stuck a speaker in the window and blew out the neighborhood.
Our conversation arrived at the NSA through the normal discursive channels: an old record Bam made that doesn’t exist, an admiration for a British vampire soap opera, a childhood memory of sneaking to the front row to watch Sly Stone “make his instruments talk.” Yet when discussing the NSA, he drops his voice into a cautious strep basso. If anything can modulate the way we speak, it’s the notion of some federal protuberance listening in.
The brochure in his hands is pink and its title is not for the sore of throat. The Start of the Digital Revolution: SIGSALY Secure Digital Voice Communications in World
War II. Bambaataa grunts and jots this down on a borrowed scrap of paper. On the cover is a dual turntable console photographed behind a nameless door in the basement of the Pentagon. Surrounding the turntables are banks of winking electronics, as if the walls are putting us on, spoofing a future that’s one set of pointy ears from campy. Taken in 1944, the photo, along with the future, would not be declassified until 1976. Bambaataa is curious, having spent 1976 DJing some of the better parties in New York. By 1981, he was making people dance to German records that spoke Japanese in voices programmed by Texas Instruments.
The Pentagon turntables are now sitting at the bottom of the Chesapeake Bay. These machines were designed by Bell Labs but created by funk, back when funk meant fear, German transmitters and codebreakers under headphones. The turntables played 16-inch records of thermal noise in reverse, a randomized shush, backwards masked inside out. Produced by the Muzak Corporation, the vinyl was deployed for the army’s “Secret Telephony” voice security system, a technology that was treated with the same crypto fuss as the Manhattan Project. Installed across the globe from 1943 to 1945, these fifty-five-ton phone scramblers would be used for D-Day, the Allied invasion of Germany, the bombing of Hiroshima, and the “dismemberment of the surrender instrument”—allowing Roosevelt, Truman, Churchill and Eisenhower to discuss the world’s fate with voices they barely recognized, voices not human but polite artificial replicas of speech rendered from digital pulses 20 milliseconds in length.
Directory of personnel authorized to use SIGSALY, referred to here as X-Ray.” (illustration credit fm.2)
The wall of knobs assigned this task was the vocoder, a massive walk-in closet of cryptology invented by Bell Labs in 1928. The vocoder divided the voice into its constituent frequencies, spread across ten channels, and transmitted them through band pass filters. At the receiving end, this information would be synthesized into an electronic impression of human speech: a machine’s idea of the voice as imagined by phonetic engineers. Not speech, they qualified, but a “spectral description of it.”
The vocoder was sensitive, high maintenance and seven feet tall, an overheated room full of capacitors, vacuum tubes and transformers. Some engineers dubbed this system “the Green Hornet.” Others called it “Special Customer.” Bell Labs referred to it as Project X-61753, or “X-Ray,” as if it was ordered from the back of a comic book with a pair of rubber Mad Doctor Hands. The U.S. Signal Corps called it SIGSALY, taken from children’s “nonsense syllables” and used for strategizing Allied bombing campaigns. The New York Times, not knowing what to call it, went with “Machine that Tears Speech to Pieces,” and then later, like most everybody else, decided on “the robot.”
To a DJ like Bambaataa, the vocoder is “deep crazy supernatural bugged-out funk stuff,” perhaps the only crypto-technology to serve the Pentagon and the roller rink. What guarded Winston Churchill’s phone against Teutonic math nerds would one day become the perky teabot that chimed in on Michael Jackson’s “P.Y.T.” During World War II, the vocoder reduced the voice to something cold and tactical, tinny and dry like soup cans in a sandbox, dehumanizing the larynx, so to speak, for some of man’s more dehumanizing moments: Hiroshima, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Soviet gulags, Vietnam. Churchill had it, FDR refused it, Hitler needed it. Kennedy was frustrated by the vocoder. Mamie Eisenhower used it to tell her husband to come home. Nixon had one in his limo. Reagan, on his plane. Stalin, on his disintegrating mind.
The Seventies would finally catch the vocoder in its double life: secret masking agent for the military and studio tool for the musician. The machine that subtracted the character from the voices of Army echelons would ultimately generate characters in itself—the one-man chorus of be all you can be. Never mind the robots: what’s more human than wanting to be something else, altogether? Ever since the first bored kid threw his voice into an electric fan, toked on a birthday balloon or thanked his mother in a pronounced burp, voice mutation has provided an infinite source of kicks. In 1971, that first kick was delivered to the ribs of anyone who saw Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. In its big-screen debut, the vocoder sang Beethoven’s Ninth to Dresden firebombings while rehabilitating a murderer who wore eyeballs for cufflinks. It was quite an association.
Soon the vocoder began showing up on records, reciting Edgar Allan Poe and making sheep bleats. If a string section could be replaced by the synthesizer, then why not the voice? The vocoder thanked you very much in Japanese. It allowed Bee Gees to be Beatles. It just called to say it loved you. It allowed people to give themselves names like Zeus B. Held, Gay Cat Park and Ramsey 2C-3D. It could sound like an articulate bag of dead leaves. A croak, a last willed gasp. A sink clog trying to find the words. Or the InSinkErator itself, with its wiggly, butterknife smile. In Neil Young’s case, it was a father trying to empathize with his son who suffered from cerebral palsy. Or it could’ve just been a bad idea—as I’ve been told, something that punished the atmosphere.
Brooklyn’s Cut Master DC (far left), the Man Who Scratched Records With Basketballs. Photographed at the New Music Seminar, Manhattan, circa 1989, along with Just-Ice, Grandmaster Caz, King Sun, Steady B and the late Dave Funkenklein (center). (Courtesy Chris LaSalle and Dave Funkenklein) (illustration credit fm.3)
Afrika Bambaataa on 8/17/82 in Chicago, IL. (Photo by Paul Natkin/WireImage)
Project Future Ray-Gun-Omics (released in 1984, Capitol Records)
Ramsey 2C-3D, Fly Guy And The Unemployed (1983, Tears Of Fire). “D.C. is into space/D.C. don’t care about the human race.” This disco recession 12 inch from California suggested that Reagan’s policies were out to lunch.
Shadowing the World War II model, the vocoder would have its own Axis powers: Kraftwerk (Germany), Giorgio Moroder and Italo-Disco (Italy), and Bambaataa’s Roland SVC-350 Vocoder (Made in Japan). In 1976, when SIGSALY was sufficiently dated to be declassified and allowed in public, the vocoder was already well out in the open, nodding along in Kraftwerk’s daydream stretch of imagination called “Autobahn.” Before the Age of Scratching Records with Basketballs, Bambaataa and his Zulu Nation DJs would use more gathered German intelligence (Kraftwerk’s “Trans-Europe Express”) to make people dance, buy synthesizers, steal ideas, make more records, and dress like the Count of Monte Cristo. Countless electro and disco 12-inch singles owe their dance floors to the Machine that Tore Speech to Pieces. In the early Eighties, a romance better remembered than relived, the vocoder was the main machine of electro hip-hop, the black voice removed from itself, dispossessed by Reaganomics, recession and urban renewal, and escaping to outer space, where there was more room to do the Webbo, where the weight was taken but the odds of being heard were no less favorable.
As the vocoder disbanded and digitized conversations in Washington, commercially available models were all over the radio, rapping ills and blight while generating the cosmically Keytarded fantasies needed to cope with it all. The vocoder would be used in songs about safety, Raisin Bran, taxes, and black holes. Pods and poverty. A dance called “the Toilet Bowl.” Christmas in Miami and deep throats in Dallas. Nuclear war, biters in the city, and the Muslim soul. Saving the children and freaking the freaks. The ups and downs of robot relations.
The alienation of the African-American experience.
Though the military had originally wanted the vocoder to sound human, the Germans didn’t (calling it a “retro-transformer” as early as 1951) and somehow Afrika Bambaataa ended up with the keys to the robot. He calls the vocoder “that Joker.” “I couldn’t wait to get on that Joker,” he says. “We used to bring it to parties and funk ’em up with it. Stop the turntables and I talk on that Joker. People were hearing the robot voice from the records, but the records weren’t playing. They didn’t know what was going on.”
A man who wanted to use the vocoder to destroy all Pac-Man machines once said to me, “People gotta like what’s going on even if they don’t know what’s going on.” And they did and they didn’t.
Of all the Wor
ld War II cryptology experts I interviewed, none was aware of the vocoder’s activities in the clubs, rinks and parks of New York City. (“It was just analyzing breakdowns of speech energy,” said the Pentagon.) Of all the hip-hop civilians I interviewed, none was aware of the vocoder’s service in any war, nor were they surprised by it.
And none were aware that vocoder technology now inhabits our cell phones as a microscopic speck of silicone, allowing our laryngeal clones to sound more human, condensing the signal for more bandwidth at the expense of intelligibility in a shrinking world. The vocoder was originally invented for speech compression, to reduce bandwidth costs on undersea phone cables—the ultimate long-distance package. Now compression is back. The voices from the tower are not our own, but digital simulacra, imperfect to be real. Conversations are minutes gobbled, and songs are ringtones chirping a T-Pain hook. Auto-Tune, the pitch-correcting software popularized by the robotox of Cher and inflicted on the twenty-first century, is often misheard as a vocoder, giving the latter currency through a revival of misunderstanding. Not as a technology, but a meme. In other words, it was what it isn’t.
When I mentioned this to Bambaataa, he nodded and said, “Yeahhh.” If conspiracy is your baggage, this is not unlike the way he says “Yeahhh” at the beginning of “Planet Rock,” a song he recorded with the Soulsonic Force in 1982, the same year Time magazine replaced its Man of the Year with a computer. Stocking dance floors for the past twenty-eight years, “Planet Rock” is the first hip-hop song to say “shucks,” vacuuming the sibilance, universally recognized as the white noise of secrecy. Over at Bell Labs, “shh” is called unvoiced fricatives, or “unvoiced hiss energy,” pulmonary turbulence modulated by tongue, teeth and lips.
“That’s bugged,” says Bam, who often speaks in terms of sound effects, as if waiting for the right word to show up. It may be a while, so “bugged” will do. Though much of Bam’s memory belongs to a record collection that defies mini-storage, you can always count on “bugged,” a hip-hop jargonaut that has survived for over two decades, its etymology based on the act of going out of one’s head through one’s eyes while attended by invisible (and apparently very busy) insects under one’s skin. When eyes “bug out” from their sockets, doctors call it globe luxation. Despite its provenance in pre-Industrial sanitariums, bugging out frequented military argot during the Korean War, referring to US soldiers in a state of bullet-hastened egress. (Retreat was less a matter of going crazy than coming to one’s senses.) Yet losing one’s mind never goes out of style, and hip-hop, ever reinventing the tongue, would replace “mad” with “bugged,” converting the former into a quantitative adverb, as if rightfully assuming everyone is insane.