by David Byrne
This music floats free of all worldly reference. Most other pop genres retain some link to simulated live performance, or at least to the instruments used in one, but a song put together with finger snaps, super-compressed or auto-tuned vocals, squiggly synths, and an impossibly fat and unidentifiable bass sound doesn’t resemble any existing live band at all. In my opinion, this isn’t a bad thing. A new musical avenue has opened up, one that maybe had its roots with Kraftwerk and other electronic acts, but which has now morphed into something very different. It’s music that, by design, affects the body. It’s very sensuous and physical, even though the sounds themselves don’t relate to any music that has ever been physically produced. You can’t play air guitar or mimic playing an instrument to a contemporary hip-hop record; even the sounds that signify “drums” don’t sound like a drum kit.
These artists therefore have a difficult decision to make when they’re expected to perform. Nothing on their record was played by anything that sounds like a “real” instrument, so the performance becomes a kind of karaoke spectacle with most of the sounds pre-recorded—or sometimes artist and band deconstruct the recording in order to “play” its component parts in a way that resembles, visually at least, a traditional band. This sounds like I’m being critical, but actually playing and performing to samples and pre-recorded tracks can free the artist to create something more theatrical. The R. Kelly Light It Up tour pushed a traditional R&B concert into the realm of surreal theater. The music in these shows can be viewed as a soundtrack for a spectacle, a gathering, a show of camaraderie, visual bombast, and effects. Grace Jones and Pet Shop Boys did this years ago. They were mainly dance-club bands and visual icons, not live acts, and they were both very arty about it. Now this kind of karaoke spectacle has gone mainstream. Even if the lead vocal is live, the audience often doesn’t care whether there is a band or not—the band is often just there to dress the set. I will admit that there is an inevitable excitement ceiling when it comes to these karaoke spectaculars, at least as far as the music goes, since there is never the possibility of the music rising beyond its pre-existing programmed level (and I don’t mean volume). But if the social and the visual elements are good enough—and using this technology they are freer to become so—then it can be a reasonable trade-off.
Hip-hop artists have also revived the mixtape (or maybe it never went away). Sampled beats and digital recording have allowed mixtape artists to create seamless sequences of songs, dialogue, beats, and assorted weirdness in ways that were never really possible using cassette recorders. Most of these are “released” as CDs, though the name harkens back to the cassette era. But I have a feeling that the era of the CD mixtape is also coming to an end. I have digital mixes that are one continuous hour-long piece of music, but now, in a technical sense, there’s really no limit. The artificial length that Sony imposed on CDs no longer applies. You could make a downloadable album that’s ten hours long, or one that’s only ten minutes. Jem Finer recently created a piece of music that runs for a thousand years. Marketing and promotion aren’t very cost effective for one song at a time, so temporarily at least we still market and acquire songs in clumps (an hour or less is typical), as we have for decades. But there’s no reason that will remain the standard indefinitely.
Looking at the short end of the musical-length spectrum, ringtones haven’t yet been recognized as a valid form of standalone musical creativity, and they may never be. But shortness shouldn’t matter anymore. One could argue that the Mac start-up sound is a musical composition, as is the short, mysterious, ascending five-second bumper that signaled the end of each scene in the TV series Lost. Doorbells, whooshes, email alerts, and car horns are all valid forms of composition. Our musical landscape is indeed broadening, as length doesn’t matter anymore: short, long, and in-between all coexist.
PRIVATE MUSIC
The iPod, like the Walkman cassette player before it,C allows us to listen to our music wherever we want. Previously, recording technology had unlinked music from the concert hall, the café, and the saloon, but now music can always be carried with us. Michael Bull, who has written frequently about the impact of the Walkman and the iPod, points out that we often use these devices to “aestheticize urban space.”4 We carry our own soundtrack with us wherever we go, and the world around us is overlaid with our music. Our whole life becomes a movie, and we can alter the score for it over and over again: one minute it’s a tragedy and the next it’s an action film. Energetic, dreamy, or ominous and dark: everyone has their own private movie going on in their heads, and no two are the same. That said, the twentieth-century philosopher Theodor Adorno, ever the complainer, called this situation “accompanied solitude,” a situation where we might be alone, but we have the ability via music to create the illusion that we are not.5 In his somewhat Marxist way, he viewed music as an opiate, especially popular music. (I’ve met some serious Wagner fans, and I’d be wary of limiting the accusation that music is an addictive palliative solely to pop.) Adorno saw the jukebox as a machine that drew “suckers” into pubs with the promise of joy and happiness. But, like a drug, instead of bringing real happiness, the music heard on jukeboxes only creates more desire for itself. He might be right, but he might also have been someone who never had a good time in a honky-tonk.
Private listening could be viewed as the height of narcissism—these devices usually exclude everyone else from the experience of enjoying music. In Brave New World, Aldous Huxley imagined a drug called soma that blissed everyone out. It was like taking a holiday, and you could regulate the length of the holiday by the dosage. Has technology turned music into a soma-like drug? Is it like a pill you take that is guaranteed to generate a desired emotion—bliss, anger, tranquility?
ACOUSTIC ASSOCIATIONS
Some of us sing to ourselves or even just whistle when we think no one is listening, and often there is music “playing” in our heads. A region of the brain seems to be devoted primarily to sonic memory, and that includes not just ringtones, dog growls, and ambulance sirens, but also snippets of songs, mainly recordings, that we’ve heard as well. These sonic fragments function as nodes in a network of related memories that stretch beyond their acoustic triggers. Everyone has had a song “transport” them to a vivid memory of an early romance or some other formative experience. Songs are like smells that way; they dredge up worlds, very specific places and moments. Other sounds do this, too: intense rain, the voice of a well-known actor, a knife on a cutting board, a distant train.
Are mobile music devices and the musically cluttered world we inhabit starting to substitute for our interior voices? Do we, little-by-little, stop singing and whistling because professionals are now singing and playing for us, right into our ears? A slew of musical associations bounce around in our heads, linking to recurring memories and feelings which, after a while, facilitate the creation and reinforcement of specific neural pathways. These pathways help us make sense of those experiences. They make us who we are. Is that space now inhibited by the inundation of the music and sounds of others? Are the voices in our heads, the inaudible chatter that we use to sort out who and where we are, being replaced by the voices of professionals? Well, I haven’t stopped singing to myself, so maybe not.
THAT WHICH CANNOT BE PRESERVED
I listen to music only at very specific times. When I go out to hear it live, most obviously. When I’m cooking or doing the dishes I put on music, and sometimes other people are present. When I’m jogging or cycling to and from work down New York’s West Side bike path, or if I’m in a rented car on the rare occasions I have to drive somewhere, I listen alone. And when I’m writing and recording music, I listen to what I’m working on. But that’s it. That relatively short list defines, to a large extent, where and how I hear music. I find music somewhat intrusive in restaurants or bars. Maybe due to my involvement with it, I feel I have to either listen intently or tune it out. Mostly I tune it out; I often don’t even notice if a Talking Heads song is playing i
n most public places. Sadly, most music then becomes (for me) an annoying sonic layer that just adds to the background noise. It might sound like I’m a picky eater, but I actually do listen to a lot of music.
As music becomes less of a thing—a cylinder, a cassette, a disc—and more ephemeral, perhaps we will start to assign an increasing value to live performances again. After years of hoarding LPs and CDs, I have to admit I’m now getting rid of them. I occasionally pop a CD into a player, but I’ve pretty much completely converted to listening to MP3s either on my computer or, gulp, my phone! For me, music is becoming dematerialized, a state that is more truthful to its nature, I suspect. Technology has brought us full circle.
I go to at least one live performance a week, sometimes with friends, sometimes alone. There are other people there. Often there is beer, too. After more than a hundred years, we’re heading back to where we started. A century of technological innovation and the digitization of music has inadvertently had the effect of emphasizing its social function. Not only do we still give friends copies of music that excites us, but increasingly we have come to value the social aspect of a live performance more than we used to. Music technology in some ways appears to have been on a trajectory in which the end result is that it will destroy and devalue itself. It will succeed completely when it self-destructs. The technology is useful and convenient, but it has, in the end, reduced its own value and increased the value of the things it has never been able capture or reproduce.
Technology has altered the way music sounds, how it’s composed, and how we experience it. It has also flooded the world with music. The world is awash with (mostly) recorded sounds. We used to have to pay for music or make it ourselves; playing, hearing, and experiencing it was exceptional, a rare and special experience. Now hearing it is ubiquitous, and silence is the rarity that we pay for and savor.
CHAPTER FIVE
In the Recording Studio
By the time I entered the music business, multitrack recording was commonplace; at least sixteen tracks were available to record on, and often there were twenty-four. Recording took place in a special soundproof studio with super-thick doors (often covered with carpeting), lots of wood (often arrayed at odd angles), and the entire place built around a massive console that looked like the deck of the starship Enterprise. Obviously, or so it seemed, mastering this control panel would be far beyond the abilities of mere musicians. The recording engineers and producers relegated us to another soundproof room in which we played, and then to plush couches situated in the back of the control room, where we could hear how we sounded. It was all pretty intimidating. As I write this, that era is coming to an end.
When I was in high school, I heard pop records that I knew had been made by overdubbing instruments on top of existing band tracks. The strings on “Sound of Silence” and many other pop tunes were added after the guitars and vocals had been recorded—sometimes, as with that song, without the band’s knowledge! Sound effects were added to recordings, quiet instruments could magically compete with loud ones (due to the ability to now control the relative volume of each instrument), and impossible sonic effects could be achieved, like a singer harmonizing with himself. In the realm of experimental music, composers were cutting up tapes on which sounds had previously been recorded, tossing them in the air, and then reassembling them. They were mixing electronic and acoustic instruments and speeding up and slowing down the recordings, creating otherworldly effects. I knew this was how the records I was listening to had been put together, and I wanted to do it too. Not with the idea of being a pop star or having a musical career, but for the sheer excitement of it.
I began to mess with my father’s modified tape recorder, recording layer upon layer of guitar feedback and other “experimental” odds and ends. Inspired by John Cage, the Beatles, and others, I cut the tape into short fragments and reassembled it at random—some sections inevitably ending up backward. (That sounded pretty cool to me as well.) Happy accidents were welcome. The possibilities of recording as a medium in its own right were immediately apparent, but my early experiments were pretty unlistenable. Later, in art school, inspired by Philip Glass, Terry Riley, and Steve Reich, I layered multiple staccato guitar parts, played at different speeds, to make a soundtrack for a student film. It was terrifically atmospheric, but it didn’t work so well as stand-alone music. That was when I first realized that whether music “works” or not has a lot to do with context.
Years later, with Talking Heads, we recorded demos of some of our songs. These weren’t meant for public consumption but to “demonstrate” the songs to others—people in the music business, most likely. Some recordings were made at the home studio of a friend who had an affordable piece of gear, the Tascam prosumer 4-track recorder. Tascam and a few other companies made equipment that was almost good enough to make commercial records on, but was mainly aimed at the “prosumer” (half professional, half regular consumer) market, the aspiring recording engineer and his or her musician friends; other Talking Heads demos were recorded at big professional studios, but not via multitrack—we recorded mostly live to stereo. One was recorded at a studio on Long Island where bubblegum hits had been made. Two others were paid for by record companies, partly so they could hear us over and over without having to visit grotty clubs every time. These recordings sounded tinny and thin and gave no sense of what the band sounded like live. There is an art to capturing the sound of a band, and it seemed at the time that neither we nor the guys who made those recordings possessed that particular skill. Even those professionals in their big studios didn’t seem to know how to do it, and we thought those skills came with the job!
This was a real mystery. One could see why musicians and recording engineers would be inclined to get magical and mystical about studios where epochal recordings were made. It was if glorifying the aura of those places was a way of admitting that skill is not enough, that some invisible mojo was present in the woodwork at Sun Studio or Motown Studio, and it was that ineffable essence that made the records made in those places so good.
When we eventually made our first proper record, Talking Heads: 77, it was by and large a miserable experience. Nothing really sounded like it did in our heads, or like we were used to hearing ourselves on stage, although that might say as much about our heads, our expectations, or our sound as we imagined it as it does about how the recordings turned out. Or it could just have been bad mojo. Everybody knows the weird sensation of hearing your own voice played back for the first time. Well, imagine a whole band hearing themselves played back for nearly the first time. It sounded weirdly enervating, jarring at best. Then add to that the experience of working with a producer who we felt didn’t “get” what we were about. He had produced some disco hits (we liked that) and had a current one with a disco version of the Star Wars theme (we thought this was kind of tacky). We loved and appreciated commercial pop recordings, but we were also the children of the Velvet Underground, the Stooges, Beefheart, and all sorts of other fringe characters. That part of our schizophrenic make-up wasn’t, we felt, acknowledged or understood by this guy, so sometimes it was tough staying optimistic about the project from day to day. It was probably tough for the producer and his team, too. Our experience in a real recording studio, making a real record, certainly didn’t turn out to be the big exciting and satisfying thing I’d imagined in high school.
In those days, the drummer would be set up in a booth a little larger than a handicapped toilet stall, with a glass window for viewing, and the bass player’s amp would be miked up and surrounded by sound-absorbent panels. In this way, the band would be completely sonically deconstructed. We had to wear headphones just to hear each other. The producer would then try mightily to recreate the sound of the live band by feeding the signals from the various mics back into those headphones. Taken apart and put back together by a stranger—no wonder it felt uncomfortable!
To their credit, the producer and his team did try to bring out the accessibilit
y inherent in our somewhat minimalist, stripped-down sound. So while the other singles on the CBGB jukebox were guitar-centric, ours had StaxVolt-type horns. The record was fairly well received, but I didn’t think it captured the band very well.
DECONSTRUCT AND ISOLATE
That phrase sums up the philosophy of a lot of music recording back in the late seventies. The goal was to get as pristine a sound as possible, and even before multitrack recording became ubiquitous, it was typical to try to remove or avoid all ambient sounds—not only the sounds of birds, traffic, and conversations in other rooms, but all of the room ambience as well. Studios were often padded with sound-absorbent materials so that there was almost no reverberation. The sonic character of the space was sucked out, because it wasn’t considered to be part of the music. Without this ambience, it was explained, the sound would be more malleable after the recording had been made. You’d keep your options open as long as possible, in other words. Dead, characterless sound was held up as the ideal, and often still is. In this philosophy, the naturally occurring echo and reverb that normally added a little warmth to performances would be removed and then added back in when the recording was being mixed. Sometimes this echo and reverb, the stuff that would be used to recreate the missing ambience, could be treated as an effect, too—one could “overdo” the reverb for a distant spacey sound or add short delays, as was typical of the vocals in early Elvis recordings. But the rest of the time, adding echo and reverb meant trying to artificially recreate something that had been purposefully and expensively eliminated. Seems like kind of a crazy system, but it was all about keeping control throughout as much of the process as possible.
