personal stereo 9781501322815, 9781501322846, 9781501322839

Citation preview

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The Object Lessons series achieves something very close to magic: the books take ordinary—even banal—objects and animate them with a rich history of invention, political struggle, science, and popular mythology. Filled with fascinating details and conveyed in sharp, accessible prose, the books make the everyday world come to life. Be warned: once you’ve read a few of these, you’ll start walking around your house, picking up random objects, and musing aloud: ‘I wonder what the story is behind this thing?’ ” Steven Johnson, author of Where Good Ideas

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Come From and How We Got to Now ‘Object Lessons’ describes themselves as ‘short, beautiful books,’ and to that, I’ll say, amen. . . . If you read enough Object Lessons books, you’ll fill your head with plenty of trivia to amaze and annoy your friends and loved ones— caution recommended on pontificating on the objects surrounding you. More importantly, though . . . they inspire us to take a second look at parts of the everyday that we’ve taken for granted. These are not so much lessons about the objects themselves, but opportunities for self-reflection and storytelling. They remind us that we are surrounded by a wondrous world, as long as we care to look.” John Warner, Chicago Tribune

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In 1957 the French critic and semiotician Roland Barthes published Mythologies, a groundbreaking series of essays in which he analysed the popular culture of his day, from laundry detergent to the face of Greta Garbo, professional wrestling to the Citroën DS. This series of short books, Object Lessons, continues the tradition.” Melissa Harrison, Financial Times

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Though short, at roughly 25,000 words apiece, these books are anything but slight.” Marina Benjamin, New Statesman

The Object Lessons project, edited by game theory legend Ian Bogost and cultural studies academic Christopher Schaberg, commissions short essays and small, beautiful books about everyday objects from shipping containers to toast. The Atlantic hosts a collection of ‘mini object-lessons’. . . . More substantive is Bloomsbury’s collection of small, gorgeously designed books that delve into their subjects in much more depth.” Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing

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The joy of the series . . . lies in encountering the various turns through which each of the authors has been put by his or her object. The object predominates, sits squarely center stage, directs the action. The object decides the genre, the chronology, and the limits of the study. Accordingly, the author has to take her cue from the thing she chose or that chose her. The result is a wonderfully uneven series of books, each one a thing unto itself.”

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Julian Yates, Los Angeles Review of Books

. . . edifying and entertaining … perfect for slipping in a pocket and pulling out when life is on hold.” Sarah Murdoch, Toronto Star

. . . a sensibility somewhere between Roland Barthes and Wes Anderson.” Simon Reynolds, author of Retromania: Pop Culture’s

Addiction to Its Own Past

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A book series about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

Series Editors: Ian Bogost and Christopher Schaberg

Advisory Board: Sara Ahmed, Jane Bennett, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Johanna Drucker, Raiford Guins, Graham Harman, renée hoogland, Pam Houston, Eileen Joy, Douglas Kahn, Daniel Miller, Esther Milne, Timothy Morton, Kathleen Stewart, Nigel Thrift, Rob Walker, Michele White.

In association with  

Books in the series Remote Control by Caetlin Benson-Allott Golf Ball by Harry Brown Driver’s License by Meredith Castile Drone by Adam Rothstein Silence by John Biguenet Glass by John Garrison Phone Booth by Ariana Kelly Refrigerator by Jonathan Rees Waste by Brian Thill Hotel by Joanna Walsh Hood by Alison Kinney Dust by Michael Marder Shipping Container by Craig Martin Cigarette Lighter by Jack Pendarvis Bookshelf by Lydia Pyne Password by Martin Paul Eve Questionnaire by Evan Kindley Hair by Scott Lowe Bread by Scott Cutler Shershow Tree by Matthew Battles Earth by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Linda T. Elkins-Tanton Traffic by Paul Josephson Egg by Nicole Walker Sock by Kim Adrian Eye Chart by William Germano Whale Song by Margret Grebowicz Tumor by Anna Leahy Jet Lag by Christopher J. Lee Shopping Mall by Matthew Newton Personal Stereo by Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow Veil by Rafia Zakaria Burger by Carol J. Adams (forthcoming) High Heel by Summer Brennan (forthcoming) Luggage by Susan Harlan (forthcoming) Toilet by Matthew Alastair Pearson (forthcoming) Souvenir by Rolf Potts (forthcoming) Rust by Jean-Michel Rabaté (forthcoming) Blanket by Kara Thompson (forthcoming)

personal stereo REBECCA TUHUS-DUBROW

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc

N E W YO R K • LO N D O N • OX F O R D • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2017 © Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow, 2017 Whilst every effort has been made to locate copyright holders, the publishers would be grateful to hear from any person(s) not here acknowledged. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on  or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can  be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.   ISBN: PB: 978-1-5013-2281-5 ePub: 978-1-5013-2282-2   ePDF: 978-1-5013-2283-9 Series: Object Lessons Cover design: Alice Marwick Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

Contents

Introduction  1 1 Novelty 9 2 Norm 49 3 Nostalgia 89 Epilogue  111 Acknowledgments 113 Notes 115 Index 132

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INTRODUCTION

In 2009, the BBC News Magazine asked Scott Campbell, a 13-year-old boy, to temporarily trade his iPod for a Walkman and report his impressions. The occasion was the thirtieth anniversary of the Walkman’s launch, and Campbell obliged. His dad had told him it was big, Campbell wrote, “but I hadn’t realised he meant THAT big.” He went on to note that the device was heavy and cumbersome, and that when he wore it in public, he got strange looks and felt embarrassed. As for the sound, he noticed “hissy backtrack” and “warbly noises,” which he blamed on “the horrifically short battery life.” Although he found the experiment edifying, he was relieved to return to his iPod at the end of the week. “Did my dad,” Campbell wondered, “really ever think this was a credible piece of technology?”1 **** When I was Scott Campbell’s age, I thought my Walkman was an incredible piece of technology. When I think of it now, I think of joy. I would look forward to walks and long

bus rides as opportunities to slip into a dreamy realm. I’d press the “eject” button, popping the player’s door ajar, then carefully slide in a rectangular plastic cassette, which had two holes like eyes. When I pressed “play,” the brown ribbon would start its steady motion. And the foamcovered headphones would release melodies and voices into my ears. This was the 1990s. I scoured the racks at the Salvation Army for maximally random T-shirts, commemorating the family reunions of strangers or glorifying the sports teams of neighboring towns. My bolder friends dyed their hair fuchsia and turquoise. Cassettes in heavy rotation included albums by Nirvana, the Pixies, and Dinosaur Jr. And of course mix tapes, each with a meticulously curated sequence of my favorite songs, from REM’s “Superman” to Beat Happening’s “Indian Summer,” along with the odd Madonna or Michael Jackson hit. Sometimes the moments between songs were marked by a click or an awkwardly long pause, or even a stray fragment of a laugh. I came to anticipate these sounds, in the same way that, as one song neared its end, I would begin to hear the opening chords of the next in my head. Less fond, but still kind of endearing, are my memories of technological glitches. There was the dread that gripped me when the music started to slow, first almost imperceptibly, so I could cling to the hope that my fear was paranoia. But then the voices would stretch and deepen. Madonna would become a baritone. This meant my batteries were running out, and I would have to endure the rest of my journey without 2

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a soundtrack. When the ribbon got caught and mangled in the player, I had to try to extricate it, smooth it out, and stick my finger in one of the holes in the cassette to roll it back up. **** I don’t remember when I first got my Walkman, nor do I have any single memory of an initial revelatory listening experience. To me, it was part of the technological furniture of my youth, along with VCRs and fax machines. Little did I know that when the Walkman was introduced in 1979, the year after I was born, it elicited rapture but also alarm. I had no inkling that in the years that followed, it would be the subject of a monument in Austria and would help garner its creator an honorary knighthood from the Queen of England; but would also occasion calls for laws restricting its use, and denunciations of it (partly in jest—I think) as a “crime against humanity.”2 On reflection, you can see what the fuss was about. The Walkman—arguably the first mass personal device— introduced possibilities that we now take for granted, but that were largely unprecedented at the time. It gave people the power to enhance their experiences while tuning out their surroundings. It fueled the idea that we can and should always have access to our own personal choice of entertainment. It facilitated what we now call “multitasking,” with all the efficiencies and distractions that term implies. And it entrenched the notion of electronic gadgets as accessories. In the 2010s, the height of cool may be a pair of INTRODUCTION

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Warby Parker glasses and a cracked iPhone; in the 1980s, it was jelly shoes, a scrunchie, and a Walkman. In the twenty-first century, as Scott Campbell’s report attests, the Walkman seems hopelessly innocent, primitive, clunky. But back then it aroused fears of an atomized public sphere. “What if there were an accident, if somebody were hurt or in need of directions?” wrote one columnist. “The man with the Walkman was morally absent.” The columnist went on to lament that as a result of the Walkman, “we have become inured to these insults to our sense of community; our sense of community itself is diminished as a result.”3 Since the Walkman kicked off these trends, technological change has both amplified them and ushered in very different ones. Now, our devices can isolate us from the people around us, but they can also connect us to people farther away. Compared with the Walkman, their influence on our world has been much more sweeping, for good and for ill. The smartphone is a handmaiden to narcissists and activists, bullies and refugees, procrastinators and workaholics. You reach for it when you’re bored or lonely, stumped or horny. And it has inspired a new round of cultural hand-wringing— this time expressed mostly in pixels rather than ink. This book’s three parts—“Novelty,” “Norm,” and “Nostalgia”—follow the trajectory not only of the Walkman but also of virtually any popular technology that succumbs to obsolescence. I’ll tell the story (really, stories) of how the Walkman came to be, and try to explain why it was at once a marvel and a threat. Then I hope to provide a sense of the 4

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world in which the Walkman ruled, and how its prevalence was parsed and, often, bemoaned. (Though the Walkman was a global phenomenon, my focus has an admittedly AngloAmerican slant, by dint of my personal experience and the resources available to me.) I will also ask how examining its reception back then can help us put our attitudes today—our technophobia and our technostalgia—into context. In some quarters of academia, there are few worse sins than the fallacy of technological determinism, which portrays technology as an external force acting independently and ineluctably on society. I agree: people are not the puppets of their gadgets. But the gadgets do give us new powers, and in doing so exert some power over us, and it would be silly to pretend they don’t change our lives. Together, they and we rewrite the texture of social and public life. A note on terminology. Technically, “Walkman” refers only to the Sony brand, but the name started to be used generically not long after other companies began manufacturing knockoffs. In 1986, the word earned an entry in the Oxford English Dictionary. For the purposes of this book, I will use the word Walkman the way people generally understand it: to refer to small portable cassette players with headphones.4 The devices were sometimes called personal stereos, a term I’ll also use occasionally. Indeed, the book is titled Personal Stereo in part out of legal caution (since Walkman is a Sony trademark), but also because “personal stereo” is an apt description of what was new and distinctive about the machine. Portable music was INTRODUCTION

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not new; the transistor radio, introduced in the 1950s, was a huge sensation. Teenagers would listen to it, together or alone, and it even had a single earphone. But the Walkman was the first device that was both personal—intended for an individual listener—and stereophonic, which cocooned listeners in sound. These characteristics are what made the Walkman experience so transporting. **** Nostalgia is the mood in which I write this book, and I suspect that a good number of the readers I am fortunate enough to attract will share it. But I do not wish to be the jerk who, exalting the past and resenting the present, manages to combine the two deeply unappealing traits of smugness and bitterness. I want to be skeptical of my nostalgia, to tease out the reasons for it that are strictly personal from the more rational observations about the Walkman’s merits. There are certainly some specific features of the personal stereo that justify wistfulness, and I’ll explore those in more detail in the third section of the book. But I am cognizant that some of my nostalgia has little to do with the device itself. I wax sentimental for my Walkman, Super Mario Bros., The Cure, and The Wonder Years, because I encountered them when I was young, a time that was not necessarily better but more intense. I can still feel the bliss of resting my head on the shoulder of my eighth-grade boyfriend in the darkened movie theater as we watched Wayne’s World. But the pain, while also acute, tends to fade; it no longer 6

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stings to remember how that boyfriend unceremoniously dumped me three weeks later. Past suffering, recalled with the philosophical equanimity of age, can even bring a kind of pleasure: maybe I learned from it, maybe it sweetened the good times, and in any case it was mine. But I think there’s another, even more basic cause of nostalgia not only for youth but for the past in general— especially for those of us who are predisposed to anxiety, or who live in anxiety-provoking times. The essential source of anxiety is uncertainty. The past, whatever its shortcomings, has the virtue of having already happened. And we survived it.

INTRODUCTION

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1  NOVELTY

Before we get to the emergence of the Walkman, and its influence on 1980s America, we need to go back to a very different time and place: postwar Japan. When the Second World War ended in 1945, the country was in chaos and in ruins. Air raids had killed almost 400,000 civilians, and about 10 million city-dwellers had fled to the countryside. And this was before the nuclear bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Near Tokyo, railway cars were rusting on the tracks, and abandoned buses lay by the side of the road. There was virtually no traffic, save for the vehicles of the US military. A visiting American journalist described the people as looking “ragged and distraught.” Owing to food shortages, parents were reportedly feeding their smallest children rice one grain at a time.1 Amid this bleakness, however, some described a strange mood of euphoria—the feeling of having been reprieved from an execution. They were glad to be rid of the militaristic leaders who dragged the nation into catastrophe. As reconstruction began, many Japanese people were

determined to put the war behind them and make up for lost time as soon as possible.2 Among them were two particularly driven men: Masaru Ibuka and Akio Morita.

Tokyo Telecommunications Research Institute Every iconic company has its origin story. The scrappier the beginnings—the steeper the climb to fawning profiles in the Harvard Business Review—the better the story. On that score, it would be hard to outdo Sony. In 1945, when Sony was what we would now call a startup, its offices were far less luxurious than a garage or a dorm room. The staff of eight crammed into a former telephone operator’s room on the third floor of a bombed-out department store in downtown Tokyo. Later, in January of 1947, they relocated to the southern fringe of the city, where they set up shop in a wooden shack with a leaking roof. On occasion, they resorted to opening umbrellas over their desks. In the postapocalyptic cityscape of postwar Tokyo, these offices ranked as decent real estate.3 Ibuka and Morita had met in September of 1944, when both were members of a team attempting to develop a heatseeking missile for the war effort. Despite the difference in their ages—Morita was twenty-three and Ibuka was thirtysix—they had quickly developed a warm friendship.4

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Morita was the scion of a venerable Japanese family, which had been in the sake-brewing business for three centuries. He grew up in a large house in the bustling city of Nagoya, with his parents, three siblings, and sundry relatives and servants. His privilege stemmed not only from his family’s wealth, but also from his favored position as the eldest son. This status could also prove a burden, however. Starting at around age ten, he was obliged to attend long, tedious meetings in preparation for taking over the family business. He didn’t much care for even the aspects of his role that could have been seen as perks: one of his duties was to test the sake. “I never developed a taste for anything alcoholic despite this,” he later recalled, “or maybe because of it.”5 As a boy, Morita was more interested in tinkering with radios and phonographs, a popular pastime in prewar Japan. His obsession with electronics was so consuming that he nearly flunked out of school, before resolving to study harder in high school and university. When war broke out, he had no interest in fighting, and secured a position in the Imperial Navy that allowed him to continue studying physics. Ibuka came from a humbler background. He was born in Nikko, a town in northern Japan, surrounded by mountains and dotted with natural hot springs. His father, who died when Ibuka was three, worked at a copper refinery. In second grade, Ibuka learned “the excitement of putting things together,” he later said, from the gift of an Erector Set.6 As a young man, Ibuka showed promise, attending a top university in Tokyo. There he studied mechanical engineering, NOVELTY

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and like Morita, obsessively tinkered, building an electric phonograph and designing a loudspeaker system. In 1933, at an exhibition in Paris, he won a prize for an invention he called “running neon,” which manipulated sound waves to send light as far as a mile and a half from its source. During the war, he managed a company that manufactured supplies for the navy.7 When the war ended, Ibuka decided to start a new company in Tokyo. In a document known as “The Founding Prospectus,” he laid out a vision that combined his love of engineering with a patriotic idealism. Among other lofty aims, he specified the following aspirations: to establish “an ideal factory” where “engineers with sincere motivation can exercise their technological skills to the highest level . . . to elevate the nation’s culture through dynamic technological and manufacturing activities,” and to “promptly apply highly advanced technologies which were developed in various sectors during the war to common households.”8 To Ibuka, the success of his company was inextricable from the recovery of his nation. Morita had come to Tokyo at about the same time to teach physics. He heard about the new venture, initially called Tokyo Tsushin Kenkyusho, or Tokyo Telecommunications Research Institute, and tracked Ibuka down, hoping to participate in some capacity. The name was later changed to Sony, derived from sonus, the Latin word for sound. It was also a play on the English word “sonny,” slang for cute young boys that was popular in Japan at the time. Morita, who 12

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coined the name, liked its associations, and also liked that it was a word in no language, but was easy to remember. With Ibuka’s help, Morita wrangled permission from his father to join the fledgling company instead of taking over the family sake-brewing business. This was no small matter. In Morita’s words, “It was almost as though an adoption were taking place.”9 At the Morita household, over bread with butter, jam, and tea—luxuries at that time—Ibuka made his case, arguing that Morita was indispensable to the business. To his surprise, the elder Morita gave his blessing, and subsequently even became a major investor and source of financial support.10 Ibuka later told Morita, “I thought it would be harder to get you.”11 Still, these early days were not easy. Japan lacked the most basic materials—the company’s engineers scavenged in the streets for motorcycle springs to repurpose as screwdrivers— and communication with the outside world was minimal. At first, as the company searched for a product to make its name, it stayed afloat by upgrading radios.12 In 1950, after much trial and error, the small company produced a tape recorder, the first available in Japan. Although they initially struggled to sell it—it was big and expensive and few people saw the need for one—sales took off when they figured out how to market it: to the courts, to compensate for a postwar shortage of stenographers, and to schools for language instruction. This success was followed by a transistor radio in 1955 (Sony’s researcher Leo Esaki later won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on NOVELTY

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Figure 1.1  Akio Morita (left) and Masaru Ibuka (right), 1961 © Sony Corporation. Reprinted with permission of Sony Corporation.

this project), and a miniature, “pocketable” version of the transistor in 1957. The release of the transistor radio happened to coincide with a craze for rock and roll. By 1959, millions of transistors were blaring into the ears of American teenagers. Sony and Japan were well on their way to becoming major players in the emerging postwar global economy (Figure 1.1).

Trapping sound By the time Sony entered the sound business, technology had already transformed the way people listened to music. It can be hard to remember that at one time, the phrase “live music” would have been redundant nonsense. Like “snail mail” and “land line,” the term was eventually necessitated by technological advances. 14

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The late nineteenth century saw the emergence of the telephone, the radio, and the phonograph (some versions of which were called the gramophone). One disorienting effect of these new sound technologies was to untether the visual from the aural. In 1923, an English music critic noted that some people “cannot bear to hear a remarkably life-like human voice issuing from a box. They desire the physical presence. For want of it, the gramophone distresses them.”13 As musicologist Mark Katz has pointed out, this reaction makes sense, for hearing voices without seeing their source had long been a symptom of insanity. Many listeners, accustomed to looking at musicians when hearing music, and unsure of what to do while listening to records, just stared at their phonographs.14 But some people preferred this separation of sight from sound. In 1931, an editorial in Disques magazine raved: “Alone with the phonograph, all the unpleasant externals are removed: the interpreter has been disposed of; the audience has been disposed of; the uncomfortable concert hall has been disposed of. You are alone with the composer and his music. Surely no more ideal circumstances could be imagined.”15 As this description suggests, another change was that music was no longer inherently social. It could still be communal—people still attended concerts, and families would gather around the phonograph at home to listen together. But for the first time, you could listen to music alone without producing it yourself. NOVELTY

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Such an activity initially seemed bizarre. In 1923, in a much-quoted passage, one commentator contemplated the prospect of walking in on a friend listening to music by himself: You would think it odd, would you not? You would endeavour to dissemble your surprise; you would look twice to see whether some other person were not hidden in some corner of the room, and if you found no such one would painfully blush, as if you had discovered your friend sniffing cocaine, emptying a bottle of whisky, or plaiting straws in his hair.16 What was more, records diminished the ceremonial element that had been so important to music. Originally, this had taken the form of rituals such as drumming at a harvest festival or choral singing in church. The public concert, which spread through Europe in the eighteenth century, was a bit different in that the music itself was the main point. But it spawned its own rituals, such as applause and encores.17 Music was typically an event, something you experienced with other people. With the phonograph and the radio, music was no longer necessarily a way of honoring a special occasion, nor was its performance necessarily a special occasion in its own right. It became possible to listen not only alone, but also on command. Increasingly often, music receded from the focal point to the background, especially after the popularization of the long-playing record in the 1950s. You could listen to Elvis while mending trousers. 16

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A lot was gained—more democratic access to music, and more enjoyment during humdrum activities. But something was also lost. In Walter Benjamin’s famous terminology, what was lost was an aura: “Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.”18 Finally, music became an object and a commodity. You could buy and sell not just the transient experience of music, or the instrument for creating it, but the music itself, trapped in the black, ridged plate and waiting to be released. As the critic Evan Eisenberg has put it, music became a thing.19

The Walkman’s fathers By the late 1970s, Sony was a mighty international corporate force. It had branched out into VCRs and videocassettes, home audio equipment and television. In 1968, the company introduced the Trinitron, a television whose richly saturated color earned an Emmy for technical achievement. By this time, audio cassette players had become common, although vinyl still reigned. Headphones, which appeared in the late nineteenth century, were originally used only by professionals such as telephone operators and military pilots. In 1958, John Koss, a musician and entrepreneur, developed a “private listening system” that allowed people to hear records on stereo headphones. By the late 1970s, some music lovers NOVELTY

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used these bulky appurtenances to listen privately at home, but the practice was not especially widespread. As for portable music, transistor radios had been popular since the 1950s, when Sony and other companies had begun selling them. The transistor gave teenagers and their music “unprecedented mobility,” writes Michael Schiffer in his history of the portable radio. It became “a metaphor for freedom and independence. . . .The tiny transistor radio had become the symbol of a generation.”20 The radios typically came with jacks for a single earphone (sometimes called an ear plug). But the sound they provided was tinny and monaural. In the 1970s, the latest iteration of mobile music was the boom box—portable stereo cassette players and radios—but these were loud, heavy, and widely resented. Also by this time, Ibuka and Morita had staked out very different, complementary roles in the company. Ibuka had officially stepped down as Chairman of the Board of Directors in 1976, but remained deeply involved in Sony’s operations as Honorary Chairman. He was known to be idealistic, sometimes naïve. As a rule, he conceived the visions for new products, and then the engineers, who revered him, worked relentlessly to make them a reality. In Morita’s words, Sony was in essence “a company of compatriots gathered together for the sole purpose of realizing Masaru Ibuka’s dreams.”21 While capable of great kindness, Ibuka could also be tactless, which his admirers construed as of a piece with his innocence and indifference to convention. Typical behavior, for example, was the time he sat impatiently through a formal 18

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dinner in Rome and then left early, just as brandy and coffee were being served. Making matters worse, the dinner was in his honor.22 Morita, by this time the Chairman and CEO, was known for his social grace and business savvy, enjoying the confidence of a first son of an aristocratic family. Unusually outspoken by Japanese standards, he was Sony’s public face and a prominent member of the global elite, befriending the likes of Henry Kissinger and Leonard Bernstein. He traveled more or less constantly, and to better understand the US market, he moved his family to New York for several years, where they lived on Fifth Avenue across from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.23 One day in Tokyo, according to Morita’s autobiography, Ibuka came into Morita’s office looking unhappy. He was holding one of Sony’s portable tape recorders and a pair of headphones. “I like to listen to music, but I don’t want to disturb others,” he said. “I can’t sit there by my stereo all day. This is my solution—I take the music with me. But it’s too heavy.”24 When Morita heard this complaint, something clicked. He had noticed that young people in particular seemed loath to go for long without their music. One day his daughter, Naoko, returned home from a trip and ran upstairs to put a cassette in her stereo before she had even greeted her mother. Morita ordered Sony engineers to rework a small tape recorder they already had, called the Pressman, which was intended for journalists. He instructed them to remove the recording circuit and the speaker, and replace them with a NOVELTY

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stereo amplifier. He also told them to get to work on creating a pair of lightweight headphones.25 At least, that’s one account of the Walkman’s origins. Quite a few have circulated over the years. Another has it that in February of 1979, Ibuka put out a request to Sony engineers for a portable cassette player that he could bring for entertainment on long flights. Sony’s Tape Recorder Division modified the Pressman, as described above, in four days, and presented it to Ibuka along with a selection of classical music. Everyone was impressed and surprised by the quality of the sound. After Ibuka returned from his trip, he shared the device with Morita, who was equally pleased with it—so pleased that, although it had been improvised as a personal toy for Ibuka, Morita became convinced that Sony should bring it to market.26 According to yet another account, a team within Sony presented a prototype to Morita at a new product meeting along with other ideas.27 But then, a different story has it that an engineer named Toshio Asai assembled a makeshift personal stereo to entertain himself while moving around Sony’s business machines department.28 Several other news reports claimed that Morita concocted it as a way to escape his children’s noise.29 Morita indicated to P. Ranganath Nayak and John M. Ketteringham, for their book Breakthroughs!, that he quietly encouraged the proliferation of the Walkman’s origin stories. “A journalist would say, ‘You developed the Walkman for playing tennis.’ I would say, ‘Yes, that’s right.’ A journalist 20

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would say, ‘You developed Walkman for playing golf.’ I would say, ‘Yes.’ Such an interesting story is good for the promotion.”30 Breakthroughs! provides what might be the most comprehensive and reliable account, since the authors thoroughly interviewed numerous Sony employees. According to the book, one division at Sony had been trying to make the Pressman stereophonic, but when they managed to do so, they had no room for the recording mechanism. The team members were tape recorder engineers, “and the device they had just made could not record. So in their eyes, it really didn’t work.” Another team at Sony was working on lightweight headphones. And it fell to Ibuka, who made it a habit to drop in on different teams throughout the company, to draw the connection between the two. He shared the idea with Morita. They assembled a prototype, fell in love with it, and eagerly pushed the product forward.31 Whatever its genesis, there is consensus that most of Sony’s employees were distinctly unenthusiastic about the idea. The reasons for this are worth dwelling on for a moment. The main reason was that Sony employees doubted that anyone would want a tape player with no recording function. Understanding their misgivings requires some historical context about the tape recorder. It had not originally been intended to play music; it was first used, in Germany in the 1930s, for military purposes, as well as for business dictation, broadcasting radio programs, and so on. Until the 1950s, tape recorders—most of which were large, stationary reel-to-reel machines—were used primarily by NOVELTY

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professionals. (Recall that Sony’s first success was selling tape recorders to schools and courts.) Even as the devices entered the consumer market, playing music was seen as only one of their uses. In 1953, the Dutch electronics company Philips marketed them to consumers as a way to record family events and children’s babbling.32 The early 1960s saw the advent of the compact cassette, and by the late 1970s, the sound quality had decidedly improved. Still, the recording function was considered integral to the machine, and the notion of a tape recorder that did not record was as absurd as a phone that could place calls but not receive them. The other reason for the skepticism was somewhat related. The device entailed no real technological innovation. All of the pieces were already there; the Sony teams had merely refined them and put them together. Contrary to the way technological progress more typically happens—think of the consolidated capabilities of the smartphone—this device actually removed a function rather than adding one. As the authors of Breakthroughs! point out, it seemed to be a worse product, not a better one.33 Morita, however, sensed that people would want to buy this product, even if they didn’t know it yet. He claimed that he did no market research; “The public does not know what is possible, but we do,” he wrote. Like many entrepreneurs, he sought to create new desires rather than meeting existing ones.34 Another point of agreement is that Morita hated the name Walkman. It was chosen by some younger Sony employees, 22

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while Morita was traveling, as a twist on Pressman. When Morita returned, he ordered them to change it to something that made more sense, such as Walking Stereo, but they said it was too late. The packaging already bore the label and the advertising was set to be released. They tried other names abroad, calling it Stowaway in England, Soundabout in the United States, and Freestyle in Sweden. But then Morita realized that word of the new product had spread from Japan, and customers in other countries had begun inquiring about the Walkman. He decided to standardize the name, and in February of 1981, Sony released the second model as the Walkman in all markets.35 This awkward coinage encapsulated something about that stage of globalization, dominated by the US but also by emerging powers, notably Japan, which were climbing to the top of the global economy. Like Sony, Walkman had associations in English, but was a unique word, and easily pronounceable in a variety of languages. Perhaps the best tribute was that before long it began to be used, in the manner of Kleenex and Tupperware, to refer to other brands that were quickly manufactured in imitation. Notably, Morita adapted the first iteration of the device to be more social. In his telling, “I rushed home with the first Walkman and was trying it out with different music when I noticed that my experiment was annoying my wife, who felt shut out.”36 So he went back to the engineers and requested a couple of revisions: the next version had two headphone jacks, so two people could listen together, as well NOVELTY

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as a “hot line,” or button-activated microphone, that enabled them to talk to each other over the music.37 This was the version that ended up going on sale in 1979. These features were later removed, when it turned out that most people preferred to listen alone.

The case of Andreas Pavel There’s yet another account of the personal stereo’s origin, and this one was the basis of an epic court battle. Andreas Pavel (Figure 1.2) was born in Germany in January 1945, shortly before Sony was founded. Berlin, where his family lived, was not in much better shape than Tokyo. The city was under heavy bombardment. His mother fled to Brandenburg, about thirty miles away, to give birth to him.38 Pavel’s father, a successful businessman, was vice president of the Federation of German Industries. He came into contact with the wealthy Brazilian manager of an industrial group, who invited the senior Pavel to come to São Paulo to work for him. When Andreas was six, the family, including his two older brothers, emigrated to Brazil, taking a 36-hour flight on a propeller airplane. “It was very magical,” Pavel told me. “I thought we would live in the trees, with the apes.” After leaving for university in Berlin, he returned to São Paulo in 1967. Brazil was not immune to the exhilaration of the late 1960s, but as of 1964, the country was living under a military dictatorship. While Pavel was working at 24

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Figure 1.2  Andreas Pavel, 1976. Reprinted with permission of Andreas Pavel.

an educational television station, the dictatorship clamped down on the press and on dissidents. Friends of Pavel’s were tortured and killed. “You had to hide your ideas,” he says. Meanwhile, in 1968, Pavel’s mother, who had separated from his father, had a magnificent house built in a neighborhood called Cidade Jardim (Garden City) crawling with lush vegetation. Pavel claimed a second-floor room, which opened out onto a terrace with views of the São Paulo skyline. The room also had an arched ceiling, where Pavel suspended Bose loudspeakers for optimal acoustics. “It became a mecca of sound in São Paulo,” Pavel recalls. His friends, the São Paulo intelligentsia, would come over on Friday and Saturday nights, smoke weed, and listen to music NOVELTY

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of all genres—jazz, samba, gamelan, and so on—until 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning. After many such nights, in 1972, Pavel went on a trip to Europe with his girlfriend, Maristela. They had grown accustomed—perhaps addicted—to the high-fidelity music, and were reluctant to go without it. Pavel decided that they needed a way to reproduce that experience on their travels. He resolved to devise a portable hi-fi music player. At the time, this was not a straightforward task. There were some relatively small tape recorders on the market, but they were not designed for listening to music with headphones. Some had headphone jacks, but these were meant mainly for monitoring recordings. None were sold with accompanying headphones. Pavel, like Morita and Ibuka, had a longtime familiarity with audio equipment. He found a portable Sony tape recorder, the TC-124, which weighed five pounds and had two jacks for plugging in loudspeakers. Then he had to find the right headphones. After extensive experimentation, he settled on the Pioneer SE-L20: high-quality, lightweight headphones with low impedance, meaning that they required little battery power to produce high volume. He then used a special cable to connect the headphone cord to the two speaker jacks. In essence, he converted the two loudspeaker jacks into a single headphone jack. At the other end, the cable had a splitter to accommodate two pairs of headphones, so he and his girlfriend could listen together. 26

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When he had jerry-rigged his contraption, Pavel deliberately waited for the right moment before trying it out. The couple was in the mountains in St. Moritz, an alpine resort town in Switzerland. One evening, Pavel put the cassette of Push Push, a 1971 instrumental album by jazz flutist Herbie Mann, into his player. He put the player under his coat. They went out into the woods, where snow was falling. “It was a wonderful quiet environment, the quiet that you only get from snow,” he recalls. He placed one set of headphones on Maristela’s ears, the other set on his own. Then he put his hand in his coat and pushed the button.39 “What started put us in a state of ecstasy,” Pavel says. “We started feeling as if we were floating through the trees. It was unreal. . . . Life became a film. A 3D film. Suddenly I’m inside a film.” He notes that the particular song they heard was apt: It was a cover of Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On?” Later that evening they bumped into an acquaintance, who gave them a strange look because they were wearing headphones, a virtually unknown practice at the time. “I just took the headphones and put them on his head, and my girlfriend’s on his wife’s head,” Pavel says. “They were flabbergasted.” At the time, Pavel says, he had no intention of trying to commercialize his toy. It was for his own amusement and that of his friends. He wore his enchanting apparatus all the time, and took pleasure in sharing it. Pavel often rode buses in Europe. Sometimes he would be tapping his foot. “One or two people looked and soon NOVELTY

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the whole bus was looking in my direction. What is this guy doing?” If he noticed a pretty girl looking with interest, he would approach wordlessly and take his second pair of headphones and place them on her ears. “And she would bloom up and smile.” One amusing side effect was that people would talk loudly, as if they were at a party. “ ‘Oh, that is great music.’ She would not be aware that everybody around her was in complete silence.” The device gave him more than just the joy of the music. “It felt a little bit like I had the world at my feet,” he says. “This was a magical device. When Sony sold it to everyone I lost my key.”

Invention or evolution? In 1975, Pavel first started to flirt with the idea of patenting the device. But he was doubtful that such a thing would qualify as an invention. His doubts anticipated those of the Sony engineers. After all, he had basically spliced together two existing parts. He had innovated no new technology. When he investigated, however, he began to think that on the contrary, what he had done was actually the epitome of a true invention. In fact, precisely because the technology had already existed but nobody had yet marketed this particular amalgam, the idea was by definition “non-obvious,” in patent lingo. From today’s vantage, it’s hard to believe that it was not obvious. The pieces were there. Portable music had been 28

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popular for decades. How strange or surprising could this next incarnation have been? Pavel argues that it was very much both. His main evidence is his recollections of reactions to the device. When he shared it with people—even audio shop employees, who were familiar with high-fidelity sound and the latest innovations—they were astonished, he says. When he broached the idea with a lawyer in Milan, the lawyer was skeptical. But once he heard the prototype, he said, “But this is incredible. You should apply for a patent.” What was new, Pavel argues, was the concept of a soundtrack for daily life. This the transistor radio could not provide. First of all, the sound quality was very poor. Second, it was not stereo. “One ear is less than half of two ears,” as Pavel puts it. His prototype, by reaching a new threshold of quality and by immersing the listener in sound, produced an experience that was different not only in degree but also in kind. At that time, a strong association had developed between the size of stereo equipment and sound quality. High-fidelity sound reproduction took the form of stationary systems with large stereo loudspeakers that you set up in your den. There were plenty of miniature devices—pocket radios and tape recorders—but these products were not intended to provide high-quality sound. The idea that a small device could be hi-fi was counterintuitive. But Pavel discovered that if you used the right headphones, you didn’t need a fancy sound system. He found that perceived sound quality depended largely on NOVELTY

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the playback transducers—that is, speakers or headphones. And headphones offered an advantage in that they efficiently delivered the sound into the ears instead of dispersing it into the air. As Pavel wrote to me, “This replacement of the loudspeaker by headphones as the main if not only listening means allows the whole system to develop exactly into those two directions that were always thought to be incompatible: high fidelity and miniaturization—headphones allow for a simultaneous quantum leap in both directions!” Pavel filed a patent in Italy in 1977, followed by patents in the United States, the United Kingdom, West Germany, and Japan over the next year. They were granted in all of those countries except Japan. He called his invention the Stereobelt, and designed it to be clipped to a belt. (Sketches of the setup were later described in the press as resembling an “electronic chastity belt”40 and “a cross between a diving belt and an instrument of torture.”41) He also included multiple headphone jacks as well as a microphone to allow listeners to communicate, and a mechanism to admit sounds from the surrounding environment if they chose. A model-maker in Italy produced a nonfunctioning mockup of the device (Figure 1.3). The US patent, with thorough prescience, enumerated the activities this invention would accompany: “walking, sitting, running, dancing, skiing, mountain climbing, camping, cooking, lawn moving [sic], working at a machine or at a desk, and riding, driving or being transported by a vehicle like a train, bus, motorcycle, bicycle, boat, airplane, hangglider, etc.” (In an earlier draft of his patent, he likened 30

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Figure 1.3  Stereobelt mockup. Reprinted with permission of Andreas Pavel.

his invention to an electronic drug, but was advised by his lawyer to delete that description.) If Ibuka was at heart an engineer and Morita a businessmen, Pavel was an intellectual and an aesthete. In 1977, he drafted a kind of manifesto (never published) called “The Coming Audio Revolution,” an impressionistic celebration of the possibilities his system would unleash: “to add movement to music, and music to any situation that we come across—that would be more than just portable hifi. it would be an inexhaustible source of new pleasures and experiences. it would be a new medium, like cinema or tv.”42 NOVELTY

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The conceptual leap was, in his view, the crucial part. The closest precedent was the car stereo, which also created a cinematic effect. But the Stereobelt would dramatically expand the opportunities to indulge in this experience. He approached a number of companies, including Philips and Yamaha, about his vision. Nobody expressed any interest— and some ridiculed the idea. “They wouldn’t dream of taking it seriously,” Pavel says. In 1979, Pavel was in Milan and saw a Brazilian friend who had been traveling in Asia. On his trip, the friend had seen someone wearing headphones. He told Pavel, “I think that guy had the thing you had always described to me . . . he had stereo headphones.” Pavel said, “Really? The stereo sound? But from a pocket unit? ‘Yes, yes.’ I said, Oh fuck . . . there is no place for my unit anymore. So I was a little depressed.” Then he learned about the “hot line,” which struck him as similar to his mechanism for allowing communication. Pavel approached Sony, and was able to get royalties, amounting to about $100,000, from the sales of one model— the one with the hot line, before it was discontinued—sold in West Germany and the UK. But he persisted in seeking what he saw as his fair share: royalties for all models. For a moment, let’s fast-forward, so to speak. Pavel went deeply into debt pursuing his case, traveling to Japan more than a dozen times. In 1990, he brought the case to a new court in London created specifically for inventors. Pavel was the first person to take advantage of this court. By this time, more than 50 million Walkmans had been sold worldwide, 32

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including more than 4 million in Britain.43 A victory would have made Pavel a rich man. Sony retained the world’s largest law firm, Baker & McKenzie, while Pavel was represented by Keith Beresford, a local patent attorney. Pavel’s appearance, with his “square-cut beard and spectacles,” was likened to that of an “Amish village elder.” The case engendered inevitable comparisons to David and Goliath.44 Every day, Pavel and Beresford and friends would prepare papers and show up in court at 9:00 a.m. They tried to show that Sony might have knowingly copied Pavel’s idea, but the trial’s key question was the validity of the patent—that is, whether the personal stereo constituted a genuine invention. Pavel’s team submitted evidence—in the form of academic studies, statements from Sony officials, and media coverage— to demonstrate that it was a “recognised breakthrough.” Sony’s lawyers, meanwhile, argued that the idea was a minor advance that had also occurred to others. They claimed that the basic setup had been used for ski instruction as early as 1976. Police and soldiers, they said, were using such equipment by 1977.45 After each hearing, according to one press report, Pavel and “his mostly bearded associates, donned personal stereos and swept past reporters.” One friend told the press that she and Pavel “sometimes skipped down the street at night listening to their personal stereos and gazing at the stars to ease the pressure of the trial.”46 In 1993, the court sided with Sony. The judge determined that the personal stereo represented not an invention but an “evolution.”47 NOVELTY

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After this ruling, Sony had Pavel’s assets frozen in an effort to recoup legal fees, which came to more than a million pounds.48 In 1996, he lost an appeal. At this point, the fight had eaten up a decade and a half of Pavel’s life and all of his financial resources. The British public was irritated that he had received legal aid. In the press, he was mocked as a loser and a mooch. The British papers ran headlines such as “Walkman Battle Costs Taxpayers Pounds 500,000” and “Eccentric Left Penniless in Quest to Be Recognised as a Seer of the Audio Revolution.”49 But then, almost three decades after his brainchild was conceived, Pavel’s fortunes brightened. In 2004, Sony offered him a settlement for a confidential sum if he agreed to stop suing them. Now, the headlines in the same papers sounded like this: “Pioneer of Personal Stereo Wins Millions in Sony Case.”50 Why? Sony confirmed the existence of the settlement in an email but declined to comment on the details. Pavel has his theories. For one thing, he persisted in threatening to sue them in other countries. He believes he had a strong case, and that he only lost in the UK because of various circumstantial quirks. And he claims he found firms that agreed to finance his litigation in exchange for a percentage of the potential winnings. Pavel took the settlement as vindication that he was the true inventor of the personal stereo. Was the personal stereo really novel and “non-obvious”? The question is ultimately a subjective one. Other accounts, however, do lend weight to the claim that it was far less 34

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obvious than we might assume today. The authors of Breakthroughs!, for instance, quote a Sony employee as saying, “No one dreamed that a headphone would ever come in a package with a tape recorder.” The authors write, “To people today, the relationship between a cassette player and a set of headphones is self-evident. But to people at Sony, and at virtually every consumer electronics company, that connection was invisible in 1978.”51 Michael Schiffer, the author of the history of the portable radio, discusses the concept of a “cultural imperative.”52 The idea of a technological feat takes shape in science fiction, in movies, and so on—aviation and space travel are two obvious examples—and the fantasy becomes an actual scientific goal, with dedicated resources and constituencies, ultimately realized. The Walkman seems to have embodied the opposite of that phenomenon. The technology was essentially there, but almost nobody made the connection, and when someone did, most people thought it was a bad idea. Pavel, now seventy-two, divides his time between São Paulo and Milan, where he lives with his family. He is raising funds for a new invention, one that he says will revolutionize telephony. Over the course of numerous Skype and email conversations, I got the sense that, despite the settlement, he feels a bit cheated, still sorry that he was not the one to bring the personal stereo to the masses. At the same time, he evinces deep pride in having dreamed it up. Often technology brings us increased efficiency and convenience. But the personal stereo did more. “It NOVELTY

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emotionalized your life,” says Pavel. “It actually put magic into your life.”

Enter the Walkman When the Walkman made its debut in July of 1979, it was an almost immediate hit. People were astounded by the quality of the sound coming from such a small device. Most people had never heard music so intimately before: with virtually no space between the sound waves and their ears. And they were enthralled by the notion of being able to easily carry a private personal sound system with them wherever they went. The original Walkman, called the TPS-L2, was a 5¼-by3½-inch rectangle, just over an inch thick. Its metal surface was blue and silver. On its back was a compartment for two double-A batteries. It weighed less than fourteen ounces (including batteries), and the headphones weighed about an ounce and a half. Sony initially produced 30,000 units in Japan. As a marketing ploy, the company hired young couples to walk through Tokyo’s Ginza district, a popular shopping destination, on Sundays listening to their Walkmans. When word started to spread, sales picked up. The inventory sold out in two months.53 Not long thereafter, Ron Robinson, a man in his late twenties in the retail clothing business, was at a dinner party in Los Angeles. At the dinner he met three young Japanese 36

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men, who were also in the apparel business, and they hit it off. He invited them to visit his store in downtown Los Angeles the next day. The three men came into the store. “One is wearing this piece on his belt,” Robinson recalls. As the man, whose nickname was Ruki, walked around the store, Robinson eventually couldn’t resist asking, “By the way, what is that?” “You don’t know?” he said. “Here. Listen to this.” He placed the headphones on Robinson’s ears. “It was, ‘Wow.’ It was the biggest-sounding, most phenomenal sound I’d ever heard. It was like a kid seeing Disneyland for the first time. It was so huge. It was so clear. My eyes lit up.” “You like it?” Ruki asked. “I love it. Where can I get one?” “Here.” Ruki indicated that he should keep it. Robinson emphasizes that he knew music—he’d had a job installing eight-track stereos in cars—but this was an entirely new sensation. “I remember the emotion as if it were now,” he says. “It was one of those moments out of your life that you remember.” He would listen to his new device all the time—the Rolling Stones, the Who, the Beatles, the Talking Heads. Robinson was one of the first Americans to own a Walkman, since at the time it was not yet available in the United States. His experience resembled Pavel’s. “This was like having the cool new toy,” he says. “I was the big man on campus. I had the equivalent of the cool car on the block, OK?”54 NOVELTY

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The Walkman went on sale in the United States in December 1979, retailing in most places for $200 (about $600 in today’s dollars). The first shipments quickly sold out, and stores such as Bloomingdale’s and Macy’s put customers on four-to-eightweek waiting lists for reorders. Some customers reportedly offered $300 for the display samples.55 Sony produced more than half a million units in the year after its debut, continually struggling, without success, to meet demand.56 Two years after the product’s release, 1.5 million had sold.57 The novelist William Gibson described his introduction to the Walkman this way: “I had gone into a small neighborhood electronics store, never even having heard of the Walkman,” he said. “They had one on display and the guy told me, ‘You’re not going to believe this.’ ”58 An early Sony newspaper ad conveyed the novelty, and underscored the perceived relationship between sound quality and size (Figure 1.4). “It sounds like it weighs a ton,” the ad read. “Stop by a Sony dealer and hear one for yourself. Your eyes won’t believe your ears. Because nothing this small ever sounded this big.” Other ads emphasized mobility: “For Anytime, Anywhere, + Anybody,” one read, with photographs of people roller-skating, painting a wall, and carrying groceries while wearing headphones (Figure 1.5). From the outset, we can see some of the themes that would come to define the Walkman and its descendants. Some listeners used it to provide a pleasant soundtrack to daily life—to enliven an otherwise boring experience or drown out the unpleasant default noise. One woman told a 38

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Figure 1.4  Early Walkman ad.

New York Times reporter in July 1980 that she was listening to Pavarotti’s Greatest Hits as she walked along East 57th Street. She raved, “Its sound is so fantastic and it shuts out the awful sounds of the city.”59 A business consultant told a reporter for NOVELTY

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Figure 1.5  Early Walkman ad. This image also appeared in another ad along with other photos of Walkman wearers engaged in various on-the-go activities.

the Chicago Tribune that she listened to her Walkman on her walk to work: “a 34-minute round-trip journey of ‘dead time’ that is now filled with sound.”60 Others already had the idea of using it to customize their own entertainment without having to deal with the

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preferences of other people. One Mark Lavasco told the Times reporter that he took his Walkman to the disco, and if he didn’t like the music the DJ was playing, “I play my own and I’m happy.”61 Still others were starting to use it to do what we would now call multitasking. Although the Walkman was conceived primarily as a way to listen to music, and that was the dominant use, it wasn’t the only one. Another woman was listening to a beginner’s French lesson as she roller-skated around Washington Square Park. A man in a pinstriped suit was catching up on a business meeting his secretary had taped for him.62

“The thinking man’s box” At the time, it was hard to talk about the Walkman without talking about its louder, bigger predecessor, the boom box (often just called “the box” or “boogie box,” or, more pejoratively, the “ghetto blaster”). Boom boxes first appeared in the US in the mid-1970s, and soon became a part of urban youth culture, especially hip-hop culture in New York. For some, they were a joyful and vital part: a “sonic campfire” that drew people together in parks and on street corners.63 They were a means of providing a desirable service. “In the neighborhood, everybody has their role,” said hip-hop clothing designer Trevor Clark. “So-and-so is the bug-out;

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so-and-so is the tough guy; so-and-so is, you know, a good dancer or whatever. And then there’s the boombox guy. And you hang around with him because he has a boombox.”64 It was a status symbol, a way to throw a portable party. Yet not everyone welcomed the unsolicited, deafening sounds of hip-hop. To carry a boom box, you had to be willing to court dirty looks, if not a fight. In that sense, it was seen as an empowering assertion of self, a political statement. “Back then, the black man wasn’t being heard in American society,” said hip-hop historian Adisa Banjoko. “And so when he’s got his boombox in his hand, he forced you to hear him[.]”65 Unsurprisingly, this celebratory view of the boom box was not unanimous. A Wall Street Journal reporter wrote that the box “seems to have only one volume setting— loud. It’s played only in places that should be quiet, such as parks, and in places that already are too noisy, such as streets, buses and subways. Nobody ever asks the fellow who totes it to turn it off. That’s because he’s usually eight feet tall and weighs four hundred pounds. If he’s small, he is generally believed to conceal a knife in one pocket and a zap gun in the other.”66 The unspoken assumption was that the fellow was also black. When the Walkman came onto the scene, the differences with the boom box were conspicuous. First of all, as Rosie Perez said of boom boxes, “them shits were heavy—really, really heavy.”67 By contrast, the Walkman’s diminutive size

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and minimal weight were two of its selling points. And it appealed to a very different crowd. Although Morita had conceived of youth as the major market for the Walkman, it initially seemed to attract a somewhat more sophisticated customer. Several early press reports noted that Walkman users were not the type to carry boom boxes, a distinction that carried associations with age, class, and race. One man on the street called the Walkman “the thinking man’s box.”68 So the Walkman became a status symbol as well, but for a different demographic. The Wall Street Journal reporter noted, “People who pal around with Margaux Hemingway and Henry Kissinger rarely carry ‘boxes’ on the subway. But the smart set is scrambling for one of the hottest new status symbols around, and that’s the middle- and upperclass answer to the box.” For demonstrations of the Walkman at Bloomingdale’s, the sample products played the “softest schmaltz and classical music.”69 A contrast emerges between two approaches: one that’s more social and gregarious, but also intrusive, and another that’s more polite and private, but also withdrawn. One is more confrontational and in some cases political; the other is inward-looking and apolitical. Each leads to a very different influence on public space and civic life. Even some fans of the boom box appreciated the latter approach, though. Spike Lee, who created a box-toting character for his movie Do the Right Thing, later wrote, “Do I miss them? Hell no. Thank God for Sony’s Walkman[.]”70

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The Walkman, culottes, and moccasins At first, the devices were new enough and unusual enough that wearers would acknowledge one another on the street with a smile or a nod or by tipping their headphones at each other. This gesture was likened, on more than one occasion, to Mercedes-Benz owners giving each other friendly honks of recognition.71 There were even reports of wearers momentarily swapping headphones.72 Soon the Walkman began to penetrate beyond early adopters, becoming downright trendy. “A chic list of 100 things now in fashion,” published in the Chicago Tribune in August 1980, deemed sharing Walkman headphones with a friend “in,” in addition to other hot trends such as moccasins, culottes, plaid, and men with tousled hair. (Adidas, quiche, paisley, and denim jackets were “out,” along with boom boxes.)73 Before long, what was striking was the sheer diversity of the people who were sporting the gadget. In September 1981, an unsigned “Talk of the Town” piece in the New Yorker reported, “Like bird-watchers who track the range of a species, we’ve been taking notice of people wearing the Walkman during the past few weeks.” The appraisal covered New York, Washington, DC, Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle, and Victoria, British Columbia. Among other creatures in earphones, the writer spotted roller skaters, delivery boys, dark-suited diplomats, a policeman on a horse, stewardesses, 44

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a San Francisco cable car conductor, a “solemn Oriental couple,” a white-haired hiker with rainbow suspenders, and a small child.74 But others were less than thrilled with this new gizmo, particularly its addictive qualities. There were reports of breakups threatened and consummated over it. “Our marriage or your Sony,” one woman told her husband, who duly sold the Walkman to a bachelor friend.75 A young woman named December Cole, a sales executive at a beauty magazine, recalled a trip to Atlantic City with “a basically rude” man who wouldn’t stop “bopping around to his own music.” “Every once in a while, he’d say, ‘You gotta hear this.’ He’d put [the headphones] on my head for a second and I’d say, ‘Yeah, yeah, great,’ and then he’d take them back.” That was their last date.76

“Outside of reality” Beyond sheer amazement and pleasure, what did it feel like to listen to a Walkman? Now most of us are familiar with comparable experiences—from an iPod or a smartphone— but that very familiarity means that we seldom pause to reflect on them. The fundamental strangeness of the Walkman experience had to do with the disjunction between sight and sound. First of all, the sounds that corresponded to what you were seeing—the cars driving down the street, people chatting on NOVELTY

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the subway—were gone, or at least much diminished. This in itself sufficed to alter one’s encounter with reality. Not only that, other sounds were streaming directly into your ears. And whereas usually music came from some clearly external source—whether speakers at a concert or the stereo system in your living room—with headphones it almost felt like the sounds were originating in your own head. On the most basic level, these departures from sensory norms simply made for a surreal experience, which, echoing Pavel, was often likened to a drug. In one survey, a young man, asked if he’d experienced a similar mood, replied, “Maybe when I was tipsy, or on the way home in the evening slightly intoxicated—that is most likely.”77 The Walkman made some people engage with the world around them in a different way. They didn’t necessarily withdraw from it; they just saw it differently. As one female listener put it in the same survey, “Due to the Walkman the intense activity on the sidewalk becomes strangely remote and yet I am more conscious of it than without the Walkman.”78 The Walkman wearer became a spectator rather than a participant in the scene. Other than drugs, perhaps the most commonly invoked analogy, as we have already seen, was to cinema. After all, that medium was the first to introduce the notion of “non-diegetic sound”: sound imposed on the story from without. Some felt like they were in the movie, others like they were watching it. One man, a 35-year-old academic from Afghanistan living in Germany, wrote: “The world again looks magnificent, much 46

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more colorful, much more varied, much freer. It is like a panorama, like a film, like a film with a story. Reality changes. One feels as if one were outside of reality.”79 Years later, the Norwegian novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard described the peculiar state of mind the Walkman induced. As he walked through town, listening to Iggy Pop and Roxy Music, he noted, “Something to do with the distance between the inside and the outside worlds arose then, something that I liked so much; when I saw all the drunken faces of people who had gathered by the bars it was as if they existed in a different dimension from mine, the same applied to the cars driving by, to the drivers getting in and out of their cars at the gas stations, to the shop assistants standing behind counters with their weary smiles and mechanical movements, and to men out walking their dogs.”80 Though sight and sound were severed, sometimes they seemed to reconvene in amusing ways. “When I listen to the Walkman I’m not just tuning out. I’m also tuning in a soundtrack for the scenery around me,” wrote an unnamed woman in the New Yorker. “Every now and then, what I hear fits so smoothly with what I see that, say, pedestrians darting and weaving across the street seem to be choreographed by a funky director in some grand, slightly asymmetrical production.”81 The strangeness of these new ways of seeing and hearing was no less than sublime. William Gibson, the novelist, bought a Walkman although he could barely afford it, and later admitted, “I didn’t take that thing off for a month.”82 NOVELTY

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One day in the mid-1980s, Chris Goffard, a skinny 13-year-old kid, was walking outside a mall in Los Angeles with his friend Sam. The two had Chris’s Walkman, and his favorite tape, Metal Health, by the heavy metal band Quiet Riot, which he had saved up to buy. “I never had any money,” Chris recalls, “so this was a big deal for me.” He knew all the songs by heart. As they walked, a man, pushing a stroller with a female companion, approached them and asked if he could have a listen. Chris and his friend were not naïve—this was LA in the 1980s, and they were always on guard—but the man seemed harmless. He gave off a friendly vibe, and he was evidently a family man. Sam, who was holding the Walkman at the moment, handed it over. The man took it and put the headphones on. “Now it’s mine. Get the fuck out of here.” Stunned, Chris and Sam protested, but the man was twice their size. He and the woman walked away, pushing the stroller. No police or payphones were in sight. There was nothing to be done.

At home, Chris remembers, “I had the empty Metal Health cassette case, with its arresting cover painting of a straitjacketed psychotic glaring through the eyeslits of a metal mask, which I didn’t throw away for years, as if I thought the tape would somehow find its way back inside.” For years, he nursed revenge fantasies.1

Hear Muffs and baladeurs Aside from its exceptional brazenness, this theft was not so unusual. The Walkman was an item that often went missing from bags and lockers. It was also frequently doled out as a prize in raffles and contests (Figure 2.1). In other words, it was a coveted consumer product and remained so long after its debut. By the mid-1980s, it was clear that what was sometimes called the “Walkman revolution” was far more than a short-lived fad. Personal stereos were no longer a novelty but essential equipment for millions of people and a fixture of urban life around the world. By 1989, the Walkman’s tenth anniversary, Sony had sold more than 50 million units.2 The company had introduced several dozen models over the years, offering a variety of refinements: more svelte dimensions, noise reduction features, AM/FM radio, and a rainbow of color options. (The popular waterproof Sports Walkman was taxicab yellow.) In 1986, Sony even released a solar-powered model. Meanwhile,

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Figure 2.1  This ad appeared in Melody Maker in 1983.

competitors such as Panasonic, Toshiba, Sanyo, Hitachi, and Sharp had also collectively manufactured over 30 million personal stereos per year.3 Sony’s prices had dropped, and

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most off-brand versions cost even less—as little as $104— making them broadly affordable. Enterprising businessmen of all stripes got into the game: An inventive furrier, for one, introduced “Hear Muffs,” which placed earphones inside of earmuffs, so that cold weather would not interfere with listening pleasure.5 The craze encompassed much, though not all, of the world. In addition to Japan, the United States, and Canada, the personal stereo was enormously popular in Western Europe. In France, “le Walkman” had infiltrated the French language, incurring the disapproval of the government, which promoted baladeur as an acceptable alternative. In the Soviet bloc and what was then known as the Third World, poverty and trade restrictions limited but did not entirely stop the gadget’s spread. In India, smugglers evaded the country’s import controls to sell personal stereos on the black market.6

Symbol of the 1980s But this enduring popularity correlated with mounting unease about the device. Concerns ranged from the legitimate to the alarmist, from the mundane to the philosophical. In part, these worries signaled the anxiety that inevitably accompanies the rapid dissemination of a new technology. Although the Walkman’s technological innovation was minimal, the change in practices was marked; moreover, it happened quickly, and it was highly visible. One day virtually 52

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nobody wore headphones in public—then, suddenly, they were as common as perms and polyester. The changes were several. For the first time, millions of people were listening to speakers just millimeters from their eardrums, raising concerns about hearing damage. They were doing so while engaging in other activities, raising concerns about safety. And they were listening to cassettes, which had previously not been nearly as popular as LPs, and the rise of which rattled the music industry. The notion of toting personal entertainment out and about was not entirely new; it had long been possible to read a book on a bench or a magazine on a train, or to hoist a boom box onto your shoulders. What was new was an electronic system that offered such an individualized and immersive experience, and that so altered your relationship with the world around you. A century earlier, recording technology had enabled people to listen to music alone in private; this new iteration enabled people to bring that private experience out in public. The distinction between the two realms began to collapse in disorienting ways. Some of the concerns—about hearing loss or the effect on the music industry—were relatively straightforward. But the deeper concerns focused on the Walkman’s larger meaning, and these would be harder to resolve. The personal stereo soon became a symbol of the decade in which it rose to prominence. The symbolism was promiscuous: the Walkman was invoked to stand for both the MTV generation and the yuppies; American consumerism and NORM

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American weakness; and above all, the individualism that was seen as rampant in the 1980s, in the United States and beyond. How could it symbolize all that? Keep in mind that although today its abilities seem painfully limited, the Walkman was actually quite versatile. Because it was portable, you could use it in a wide variety of settings, from to the bus to the gym to the street. Because of music’s heterogeneity, you could use it to zone out, to work out, to savor a fine performance, or to fall asleep. (You could also use it to study Swahili or listen to a recording of Anna Karenina.) And with it, crucially, you could (and did, whether intentionally or not) erect a barrier between yourself and your surroundings. This feature impeded social interactions and affected public space in a way that was subtle but unsettling. As a result, the Walkman was seen as both emblematic of the era’s underlying ills and responsible for aggravating them. And that perception was not entirely unfounded. But in the hearts of the people who loved Walkmans, the full truth was considerably more nuanced.

A public health problem First, let’s examine the more practical objections to the device. One of the Walkman’s virtues was that, in theory, it did not disturb others. But not everyone found this to be the case. True, it wasn’t nearly as intrusive as the boom box. But when played at high volume, music often seeped out of the 54

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headphones into the earshot of those in the vicinity. Hearing the unwanted beats of hip-hop and rock became a common complaint, especially on public transportation. In 1989, on a Tokyo subway, a middle-aged man reportedly lifted the earphones of a young student to ask him to lower the volume. The student did not take kindly to the request: he allegedly broke the man’s jaw while other passengers looked on.7 A few years later, a commuter on the London Tube, exasperated by the leakage of pounding music, snipped a teen’s headphone cord, winning applause from fellow riders.8 Hearing loss was a related concern. Not only was the sound source right next to the ear; the music was often competing with the noise of the city (or factory or lawn mower), forcing listeners to crank up the volume. Over the years, several studies suggested that heavy Walkman use could inflict damage on the ears. Commentators fretted that a whole generation, raised on the Walkman and loud concerts, might be going deaf. In 1970, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration had determined that exposure to sounds of at least 95 decibels for four hours or more daily was liable to cause lasting hearing damage, and that prolonged exposure to 115 decibels was never safe. In a 1982 letter to the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers from Tufts-New England Medical Center described their tests of three personal stereos. They had found that at volume setting 4, the intensity ranged from 93 to 108 decibels, while at setting 8 and above, the level usually exceeded 115 decibels. “In the light of what is known regarding noise and its effect NORM

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on hearing, there can be no doubt that these units have the potential for inducing a permanent bilateral sensorineural hearing loss,” the researchers concluded.9 (In plain English, that type of damage makes it harder to hear faint sounds and to decipher speech.) A survey taken on New York streets revealed that it was common for listeners to raise the volume to 100 or even 120 decibels. “That’s close to the sound level of unmuffled jackhammers,” New York Times columnist Hans Fantel wrote. He lamented that, following the lead of the auto industry, the consumer electronics industry was dodging responsibility for this “public health problem,” blaming hearing damage not on their products but on improper use. However, one company, Koss, had taken the concerns seriously, incorporating a warning light into some of its devices that would flash when the volume reached 95 decibels.10 Sony later introduced “My First Sony,” a bright red Walkman for kids, which allowed parents to set the maximum volume. Andreas Pavel had likened his gadget to a drug, but the comparison may have been even more apt than he realized. Audiologists noted that loud sounds could have effects similar to alcohol, causing excitement followed by sedation. “You can get high on noise,” said one expert. “Very loud sound produces a sense of euphoria that can be addictive.” And perversely, hearing damage would mean that an even higher volume would be needed to achieve the same effect.11 By the end of the decade, professors at the University of Keele in England noticed that their graduate students seemed 56

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to have worse hearing than the faculty members. When they decided to conduct a study of hearing loss in young people who had been attending rock concerts and listening to headphones, they initially encountered a challenge: finding a control group of subjects who did not fall into this category. They eventually identified some Chinese exchange students who fit the bill, and some subjects whose religion discouraged loud music. The study results showed that over a third of the Walkman and rock fans suffered from measurable hearing loss, more than twice the rate of the control group.12

Death by Walkman Meanwhile, safety hazards were another worry, specifically regarding the personal stereo’s immediate interference with hearing. At least nine states banned the use of headphones in motor vehicles: California, Florida, Georgia, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Illinois, and Washington.13 California’s law had actually been enacted in 1974, but after the Walkman’s introduction, violations sharply increased. A Beverly Hills cop recalled, “Like the other day, I clocked a guy going 57 m.p.h. down Coldwater Canyon Boulevard. I went to pull him over and pulled up right next to him with my siren going. He looked at me and didn’t hear a thing. It took blocks before he realized I was trailing him.”14 In 1982, Woodbridge, New Jersey made headlines for extending the ban to cyclists and pedestrians crossing NORM

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the street. (Sidewalk use was permitted.) The legislation stipulated a penalty of a $50 fine or up to fifteen days in jail.15 Richard Kuzniak, the councilman who sponsored the ban, claimed to know of several headphone-related deaths, and said that two hundred other municipalities had requested the text of the ordinance.16 The first pedestrian to be stopped for a violation in Woodbridge was a man named Oscar Gross, who refused to remove his headphones while crossing Main Street. “I’m proud to say I got the first summons,” he said. “In my opinion the ordinance is unconstitutional because it forbids wearing what a person sees fit whenever he wants.” Indeed, he flouted the prohibition to make a point, in one of the more idiosyncratic examples of civil disobedience on record: his headphones were not even plugged in at the time.17 Were the risks real? Though the tragedies hardly reached epidemic levels, there were occasional reports that seemed to vindicate the concerns. By 1983, the following casualties had appeared in the news: in the Washington, DC area, an Amtrak train fatally struck an 18-year-old who was riding his bike18; a young woman was killed while crossing a busy street in the Chicago suburbs; and, in separate incidents, two Pennsylvania men were killed by trains as they walked along railroad tracks.19 All of them were said to be wearing headphones at the time. Fears focused on crime as well as accidents. In February 1989, a 20-year-old University of Florida student, Tiffany Sessions, went missing after heading out for a power walk with her Walkman as dusk was falling. A spokesman 58

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from the county Sheriff ’s Department issued a warning to outdoor-exercise buffs: “Don’t wear a Walkman,” he said. “If a car came up behind you and stopped, you wouldn’t hear it. And if there was someone hiding in the bushes and making rustling sounds, you wouldn’t hear that until it was too late.”20

“Home taping is killing music” In the business world, the Walkman had a mixed reception. On the plus side, it was obviously a huge boon to the consumer electronics industry, and it also drove the surging popularity of books on tape. By 1983, several companies—including Books on Tape and Tape-Worm—were renting or selling recorded books. Though Books on Tape had been founded in 1975, sales were sluggish until 1980, when the Walkman became fashionable. Offerings ranged from Tracy Kidder’s bestseller The Soul of a New Machine to Treasure Island to self-help fare such as I’m OK—You’re OK.21 The 1980s also saw the emergence of products such as “Travelcassettes” to guide sightseeing in a number of international cities.22 For the record industry, it was hard to say to what extent the Walkman was a blessing or a curse. Its main effect was to increase the appetite for cassettes. Cassettes became the one medium that could be used pretty much anywhere: at home, in the car, and now on foot. In many cases, listening to cassettes meant taping from vinyl. That could mean copying a record you owned in order NORM

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to listen to it on your Walkman or in your car. Or it could mean taping from a record you didn’t own, which was more controversial. In Japan, home taping was aided by the ascent of record rental shops, which were more or less explicitly intended to facilitate the practice. US record industrysponsored studies claimed that home taping was leading to losses of at least a billion dollars per year.23 The industry considered home taping a form of theft that was depriving artists and corporations of rightful revenue. In the United States and the United Kingdom, trade groups tried vigorously to discourage the offense, condemning it as both unethical and illegal (although its legal status was in fact ambiguous, at least in the United States). “Home taping is killing music” was the famous slogan of a campaign launched in 1981 by the British Phonographic Industry (Figure 2.2). These words were printed, along with the image of a cassette and crossbones (the ocular holes in the cassette gave it a passing resemblance to a skull), on the sleeves of records released by BPI member labels over the next few years.24 The industry pushed for a tax on blank tapes in the United States, and succeeded in adding a levy in West Germany, Sweden, Hungary, and Austria.25 Some observers later saw in their aggressive reaction the beginning of an adversarial relationship between the industry and fans, presaging the subsequent, more intense fights over MP3s.26 At the same time, though, the quality of “prerecorded cassettes”—that is, music tapes the record companies sold—steadily increased until their popularity rivaled that 60

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Figure 2.2  British Phonographic Industry.

of vinyl. Since cassettes had not initially been intended for music—remember that they had historically been used for a variety of other purposes—this development was something of a shock at the time. “Blame it on the automobile, or the beach, or the Walkman, or size, or convenience, or improved sound and reliability,” wrote a New York Times columnist in 1982. “Wherever you place the blame (or credit) something astonishing is happening to the record business: it is becoming the cassette business as well.”27 In 1980, 99 million cassettes were sold, versus 308 million EPs and LPs. By 1984, 332 million cassettes were sold, versus 204.6 million EPs and LPs. (CDs were NORM

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introduced in 1982, but did not start to outsell cassettes until the early 1990s.)28

“First, drug abuse; now, earphone abuse” As we’ve seen, the Walkman experience enthralled those who tried it. But how did it come across to their counterparts who did not? Especially in the early days, people looked odd—not only because the headphones were conspicuous, but sometimes because they weren’t. Some listeners were unable to resist bopping along to their private tunes, which looked, at least from afar, crazy. One observer wrote that it was “strange to witness a person gyrating and foot-tapping to an imperceptible beat. The suspicion of a possible mental disturbance vanishes with the sight of an earphone[.]”29 Even after the personal stereo became more normal, it was often perceived as antisocial. After all, “Walkmenaces” (as at least one wit dubbed them30) were opting out, to some extent, of shared space. Walkman enthusiast Vince Jackson, writing in the British magazine Touch, pondered this dynamic. “The experience of listening to your Walkman is intensely insular,” he wrote. “It signals a desire to cut yourself off from the rest of the world at the touch of a button. You close your eyes and you could be anywhere.” As he acknowledged, that liberation

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could be alienating to others. “Play your Walkman and you might as well shout ‘Everybody just piss off!’”31 Obviously it would be a mistake to believe that before the advent of the Walkman, urban public space was defined by warmth and gregariousness. In “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” a seminal essay from 1903, the German sociologist Georg Simmel remarked that the “metropolitan type” generates a “protective organ” as a defense against the sensory stimulation of the city as well as the proximity to countless strangers.32 The Walkman was arguably in part a physical manifestation of this protective organ. And yet, for the same reasons that urban life could be overwhelming, it was also exciting. The modern city offered an embarrassment of aesthetic and sensory riches as well as limitless opportunities for adventure. As the Dutch artist Constanin Guys put it, “Anyone who is capable of being bored in a crowd is a blockhead. I repeat: a blockhead, and a contemptible one.”33 In a way, the Walkman could enhance that excitement, by adding a new aesthetic dimension. But it deterred encounters between strangers, and it also eroded a more ineffable quality of public space. German psychologist Rainer Schönhammer, attempting to understand his own irritated response to the Walkman, observed, “People with earphones seem to violate an unwritten law of interpersonal reciprocity: the certainty of common sensual presence in shared situations.”34 On some primal level, Schönhammer posited, this was especially true of auditory experiences. It was less

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unsettling to see someone reading a newspaper in public, for example, because sight is not shared to the same extent as sound. People in the same space do not necessarily have the same field of vision, but they do generally hear the same sounds; moreover, “Nature provides us with eyelids to close our eyes but not with earlids to close our ears.”35 (Of course, another factor may have been that people were simply more accustomed to seeing others leaf through the newspaper.) At the same time, headphones sent the message that their wearers were having a superior experience. They were basking in the tunes of MC Hammer or Cyndi Lauper; you were subjected to the din of construction and boring small talk. Similarly, as we’ve seen, their remove sometimes caused them to feel like spectators instead of participants in the scene around them. This perspective in a sense reduced other people to spectacles who seemed to exist merely for entertainment purposes. Alternatively, the Walkman wearers might just ignore you. Not only were they presumably having more fun, but they were concealing the details of their superior experience. Although this discretion was considered more courteous than the imposition of the boom box, there was also something disconcerting about it. Another observer, Japanese musicologist Shuhei Hosokawa, noted that people were unnerved because “they could know whether the walkman user was listening to something, but not what he

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was listening to. Something was there, but it did not appear: it was secret[.]” And secrets, again, implied superiority: “The secret-holder always has an advantage over the secretbeholder,” Hosokawa wrote.36 Analysis in the popular press was less theoretical but no less critical. In the Chicago Tribune, writer Rick Horowitz worried about the social and psychological implications of the Walkman’s spread. “There is only a small leap between ‘not intruding’ on the outside world and ignoring it altogether,” he wrote. “In seeking a sort of emotional climate control wherever we go, are we not simply proving anew our growing determination not to deal with one another?”37 Particularly poignant, if unintentionally amusing, was another columnist’s jeremiad, also in the Chicago Tribune. In a piece titled, “First, Drug Abuse; Now, Earphone Abuse,” Bob Greene expressed his dismay at a recent scandal he’d witnessed. “Of all the saddening signs of a troubled society, I saw perhaps the most chilling of all the other afternoon,” he began. This abomination was not, as the reader might expect, a bloody crime or flagrant child abuse. Rather, “There, on the midway of the Ohio State Fair, strolled teen-agers wearing Sony Walkman earphones.” He went on, “The Walkman is replacing certain drugs as a mind- and mood-altering device. . . . When teen-agers have reached the point where they feel they must shut out the sounds of the Ohio State Fair, society is surely ready to collapse.” As he watched the young ingrates,

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“my eyes teared over at the thought of how jaded they have become at such an early age.” As for Walkmans, he wondered “if it might not be a good idea to ban them completely, on a national level.”38

“There is no such thing as society” One day in December 1989, Jack Straw, a Labour Party Member of Parliament, was waiting for the train in the Westminster station of the London Underground. Nearby, a young man wearing a Walkman was standing right next to a red trash bin. “He could certainly see it,” Straw wrote, “yet he dropped a large piece of paper on the platform.” After a bit of internal agonizing, Straw decided to politely confront him. The youngster did not react well. “What f. . .ing business is it of yours?” he asked. “You’re f. . .ing mad. Who do you think you bloody are anyway?” Then his sidekick, whom Straw hadn’t previously noticed, materialized, and joined in the obscenities. He was, Straw made a point of noting, also wearing a Walkman. Straw recalled Margaret Thatcher’s famous quote: “There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.” He thought to himself, “These youths were a product of the Thatcher years. They remember no other. They had no conception of society, no sense of responsibility to others.”39 66

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Thatcher had risen to power in 1979. That same year, US president Jimmy Carter had warned that the nation was losing its moral compass. “We are at a turning point in our history,” he said. “There are two paths to choose. One is a path I’ve warned about tonight, the path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest.” The other was “the path of common purpose and the restoration of American values.” In the same speech, he requested authority from Congress to ration gasoline, pledged to commit $10 billion to public transportation, and urged the citizenry to carpool and take other measures to conserve energy. “There is simply no way to avoid sacrifice,” he said.40 In the 1980 election, Ronald Reagan defeated Carter in forty-four states on a promise of lower taxes and expanded exploitation of the nation’s energy resources. By this point in American history, individualism was of course nothing new. “Rugged individualists” had struck out into the frontier (at least that was the myth), and the nation was known for its relatively libertarian bent. But this spirit had been counterbalanced by programs such as those of the New Deal and the War on Poverty, and a flowering of interest in socialism and communal living in the 1960s. In the 1970s, the cultural narrative held that the country was moving toward a greater focus on the self; in a 1976 New York article, Tom Wolfe famously dubbed the 1970s the “me decade.”41 And the rise of Reagan and Thatcher—with their platforms of lower taxes, deregulation, and dismantling of social welfare

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programs—seemed to consolidate that shift, setting the stage for an even more individualistic decade to come. The Walkman’s arrival, it seemed, was perfectly timed. To take just one example, wearing headphones made it easier to ignore pleas from homeless people. You no longer had to pretend you didn’t hear them; you actually didn’t hear them. A Walkman also made it less likely that, say, a lost passerby would ask you for directions; it seemed like too much trouble, or possibly intrusive. As the well-known British critic and columnist A. N. Wilson wrote, “The personal stereo became the archetypal accessory of the me-generation.”42

A nonstop masturbational fantasy Individualism is a roomy concept, embodying several kindred but distinct meanings. In addition to the ideas of self-reliance and limited government, another interpretation of the word involves self-indulgence. While left-leaning critics such as Jack Straw perceived the Walkman as a symptom of a right-wing retreat from social responsibility, cultural conservatives were no fonder of it. To them, it represented individualism, too, but with different emphases. They were more concerned about the decline of the family and institutional affiliations, as well as what they saw as the related culture of instant gratification. 68

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Over the course of the 1970s, the number of singleparent families in the United States increased by 69 percent, owing to more divorces, fewer remarriages, and a rise in the percentage of children born to unmarried mothers. In the wry words of a 1982 commentary on the American family in the Economist, “The nuclear family sometimes seems no more popular now than the nuclear bomb.”43 The changing status of the family registered differently depending on your political outlook. Due to changes in divorce law and social mores, more women were empowered to leave abusive or unsatisfying marriages; men and women were freer to forgo marriage and family life altogether. To liberals, then—to proponents of women’s and gay rights in particular—the statistics in some ways reflected progress. And yet, the family, for all its restrictiveness and failings, had long been a source of stability and connection. So, to conservatives, its decline was worrisome—especially for children growing up with just one parent. At the same time, human company was becoming less and less necessary for recreation. On August 1, 1981, MTV aired its first video: “Video Killed the Radio Star,” by the Buggles. Along with the popularity of video games, MTV was part of a trend of mediated, incessantly available entertainment for young people. To conservatives, this trend seemed connected to familial disintegration. For one thing, the penchant for instant gratification seemed related to the decline of marriage and the rise of divorce: it was more tempting to sleep around NORM

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than to commit, easier to bail on a relationship than stick it out. And without the traditional family structure—dad as breadwinner, mom as homemaker—“latchkey kids” were left with more time to themselves, and they had access to the technology to amuse themselves. “Isolation seems to symbolize the members of this generation,” wrote a sociology professor in the New York Times. He told his students, “If I had to conjure up an image representing their generation, it would be someone playing a video game, someone wearing a Walkman. Alone. Detached. Having no connections with other people.” The students laughed but agreed.44 In 1987, Allan Bloom, a professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, published The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students, which became a surprise bestseller and propelled its author into celebrity. Bloom was a lover of Shakespeare and Plato with expensive taste. In 1988, at a talk at Harvard, he famously greeted the crowd, “Fellow elitists,” to rapturous applause. Bloom did not see contemporary young Americans as disrespectful. In his view, students were “nice,” a word of (at best) faint praise he chose deliberately.45 But he did see them as isolated and self-indulgent. In the Vietnam era, the draft gave young people an automatic connection to public affairs and world events; the youth of the 1980s, for better or worse, had nothing comparable. Therefore, Bloom 70

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believed, they were generally absorbed in their own narrow personal concerns. Bloom also rued the erosion of allegiance to groups and communities, and the loss of faith in institutions such as church and country, as well as the decline of the family.46 And he deplored the centrality of music—specifically rock music—in the lives of young people. As he saw it, the Walkman was one of several tools in a suite that offered unrelenting enticements, distracting youths from more challenging and ultimately more gratifying endeavors. Music, he wrote, “is available twenty-four hours a day, everywhere. There is the stereo in the home, in the car; there are concerts; there are music videos . . . there are the Walkmans so that no place—not public transportation, not the library—prevents students from communing with the Muse, even while studying.”47 “Picture a thirteen-year-old boy sitting in the living room of his family home doing his math assignment while wearing his Walkman headphones or watching MTV,” Bloom wrote. He described the teen as taking advantage of centuries of personal sacrifice, political courage, and scientific breakthroughs. “And in what does progress culminate?” Bloom’s answer: “a nonstop, commercially prepackaged masturbational fantasy.”48 He concluded ominously: “As long as they have the Walkman on, they cannot hear what the great tradition has to say. And, after its prolonged use, when they take it off, they find they are deaf.”49 NORM

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Fondalepsy and Walkman’s Oblivion There was still another twist on individualism, and that was self-improvement, which also enjoyed a vogue in the 1980s. A major part of the self-improvement trend centered on health and fitness. Some attributed this fad in part to the looming threat of nuclear holocaust. As Christopher Lasch wrote in his dour 1979 bestseller The Culture of Narcissism, the prospect of disaster had come to seem so unavoidable that efforts to avert it felt pointless. “People busy themselves instead with survival strategies, measures designed to prolong their own lives, or programs guaranteed to ensure good health and peace of mind.”50 All of this health didn’t come free. In 1981, 13 million Americans belonged to health clubs, a number that climbed to 17.3 million by 1987.51 People purchased aerobics videos (Jane Fonda released her first in 1982) and clothes made of materials like Lycra and Spandex and Gore-Tex. And they bought personal stereos to make their exertions more bearable, to allow them to focus on a song or a book instead of a cramp or a strain. In some cases, tapes were marketed to accompany exercise, as in Fonda’s “Fitness Walkout,” which explicitly depended on the Walkman for its use. In 1983, a Vogue article asked, “What do leopard-striped leotards, a

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computerized exercise bike . . . a yellow waterproof Sony ‘Walkman,’ and six-wheel roller skates—orange wheels on black—have in common? Easy. Obviously they are part of today’s fitness explosion.”52 In popular culture, yuppies were often presented as Walkman enthusiasts. The cover of The Yuppie Handbook, published in 1984, featured a blond woman wearing a blue Ralph Lauren suit, running shoes, and a Walkman (Figure 2.3). Declaring 1984 “The Year of the Yuppie,” Newsweek ran on its cover a Garry Trudeau cartoon with a woman in a similar uniform. A Washington Post columnist poked fun at this demographic: “We can now identify and treat many of the gravest behavioral dysfunctions of the middle class—from the gruesome financial hemorrhage of Running-Shoe Fetish to the humiliation of Fondalepsy (violent aerobic seizures triggered by recorded music, also called Simmons’ Palsy or St. Jane’s Dance) to the near-epidemic occlusion of the auditory canal known as Walkman’s Oblivion.”53 While the Walkman came to symbolize teenagers’ passivity and lack of discipline, then, for affluent adults it served the opposite purpose: it was a tool of efficiency and productivity. The Walkman was an indispensable accessory for the kind of person who blasted Depeche Mode to jumpstart a 10-mile jog, or who listened to books on tape while commuting, for maximum edification. There was, however, a common theme to both stereotypes: an apolitical individualism.

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Figure 2.3  Cover of The Yuppie Handbook: The State-of-theArt Manual for Young Urban Professionals, by Marissa Piesman and Marilee Hartley. Copyright © New York: Pocket Books, 1984. Reprinted with permission of Pocket Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Cosmetics, Walkmans, and Mars Bars While some saw the Walkman as a symbol of capitalism’s perversions, others coveted it as one of capitalism’s glories. The Walkman came to be seen as an emblem of the prosperity of the West, of the material abundance of the “free world.” As the US economy picked up speed in the mid-1980s, Americans enjoyed an ever-wider array of consumer goods. From 1980 to 1988, the number of car models reviewed in Consumer Reports increased by 50 percent. VCRs and computers, luxury goods at the beginning of the decade, dropped in price and became household fixtures. In 1984, many supermarkets offered twice as many goods as they had a decade before, incorporating bakeries, delis, and pharmacies into their stores. Over the course of the decade, now-familiar chains, such as Banana Republic and Victoria’s Secret, spread throughout the country.54 Meanwhile, citizens on the other side of the Iron Curtain faced long lines and half-empty shelves. And the products that were available in the Soviet Union were not exactly covetable: chipped pots, broken shoes, ugly jewelry, and asymmetrical clothing. Spontaneously exploding TVs were said to be a leading cause of fires. Then there was the old Soviet joke: “The Soviet Union makes the finest microcomputers! They are the biggest in the whole world!”55 By 1984, the Soviet NORM

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Gross National Product was 52 percent of the US GNP, and per capita consumer spending was roughly a third of that in the United States.56 The Walkman was frequently cited as one of the quintessential amenities of Western life. A Soviet defector living in California “succumbed to popular western temptations, and owns a Walkman stereo set and an exercycle,” noted an article in the Washington Post.57 During the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, there were allegedly rumors in the Soviet Union that people in LA were wearing gas masks because of the intense smog. “The smog is irritating, but what your reporters saw strapped about bodies and attached to heads were not gas masks but toys called ‘Walkman,’” one columnist joked.58 In 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell, visitors from the East were newly able to shop in Western stores, and personal stereos were among the consumer products that they were clamoring for. “East Germans in stonewashed jeans will continue to raid the stores of border towns splurging on cosmetics, Walkmans, Milky Ways and Mars Bars,” a financial newspaper reported.59

“Remember Pearl Harbor” At the same time, the Walkman was one of the most visible Japanese imports to the United States. As such, it, among other products, stoked anxieties about the decline of the United States in relation to the new economic juggernaut. 76

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Back in 1945, when the atomic bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Sony co-founder Akio Morita’s response had been not only horror at the destruction but also awe at the American scientific accomplishment.60 Along with many of his ambitious and patriotic countrymen, he always aspired to compete with the United States. Before the war, Japan had not been known for high-tech or high-quality goods. It was instead known, as Morita recalled in his autobiography, for cheap trinkets and paper umbrellas. Well into the 1950s, imports from Japan were dismissed by Americans as “Jap crap”61 (which may have also reflected residual hostility from the war). When Sony began exporting its goods, it tried to make its “Made in Japan” labels, required by international rules, inconspicuous; on one occasion, US Customs had to tell Sony to enlarge the label.62 But as Sony and other Japanese companies began to flourish in the postwar era, that reputation changed dramatically. Over the next couple of decades, the country experienced its “economic miracle,” making it the second largest economy in the world, after the United States, as well as the world’s dominant source of motor vehicles and consumer electronics.63 It became a cliché to observe that if a modern-day Rip Van Winkle had fallen asleep in 1944 and woken up in the 1980s, he would assume that Japan had won the war. Americans marveled at Japan’s achievements and tried to learn from them. Books such as The Art of Japanese Management (1981) attempted to unlock the secrets of NORM

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Japan’s success and sell them to the American business class. Explanations ranged from an emphasis on collaboration to subtle ambiguities in communication. Stereotypes abounded: the Japanese were alleged to be naturally harmonious and hard-working.64 Granted, some of these generalizations were promoted by Japanese people themselves. Morita was a vocal defender of the Japanese approach to business, and a frequent critic of the American style. In a Playboy interview in August 1982, Morita explained, “You know, in Japan, we think of a company as a family. The workers and the management are in the same boat. Harmony is the most important element in an organization. It is a fate-sharing body.”65 Japan was the home of Nintendo, the video-game company that brought us Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda; major car manufacturers such as Toyota, Honda and Nissan; and, in addition to Sony, consumer electronics companies including Panasonic, Toshiba, Yamaha, and Canon. Japanese companies became known for scrupulous attention to detail and unimpeachable quality. In the same Playboy interview, Morita recounted that when Sony opened a plant in San Diego, “our American dealers were afraid there would be something wrong with the television sets! They asked, ‘Will they be as good as TVs made in Japan?’”66 But this admiration coexisted with apprehensiveness and resentment. After all, some Americans felt, the United States had been partially responsible for Japan’s postwar rebirth.

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During the occupation, the United States had overseen the country’s successful reconstruction as a parliamentary democracy. By 1985, the US trade deficit with Japan exceeded $46 billion.67 The imbalance was due partly to Japan’s somewhat protectionist policies, and partly to the quality of Japanese goods. But even the latter factor caused bitterness among some Americans, who believed that the Japanese didn’t truly innovate, but rather appropriated American ideas and perfected them for the consumer market. By 1987, the trade deficit reached $56 billion.68 American consumers continued to voraciously snap up Japanese products—cameras, cars, VCRs, sound systems—despite pleas to “buy American.” Tensions flared between the two allies, leading to predictions of a trade war and the resurgence of old animosities. In Detroit, “Remember Pearl Harbor” bumper stickers began to appear.69 Meanwhile, personal stereos, largely from Japan, were more pervasive than ever.

The management of everyday life The Walkman, then, worked overtime as a metaphor. But what was the actual experience like for people who regularly used the device, not just as a novel sensation, but on a regular

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basis, fully integrated into their lives? What was it like inside the headphones? Michael Bull, a professor of Sound Studies at the University of Sussex in England, was a pioneer of empirical research to answer this question. He interviewed about forty British youths, some of whom rarely if ever went out in public without their Walkmans. (“I wear it all the time, like a pacemaker!” said one. “A life support machine!”70) Bull found that his subjects used their personal stereos for a variety of purposes, from lifting their moods to avoiding awkward small talk. But the common theme was “the management of everyday life.”71 Some respondents reported that they counted on their personal stereos to energize them, especially in the morning on the way to work. But another frequent response was that listening to a Walkman could induce calm and relaxation. As “Robina” put it, “It desensitizes any pain or stress that I might be feeling. It just takes me away.”72 Again the drug analogy resonates: the Walkman could function as an upper or an opiate, depending on the person, the setting, and the choice of music. (Chopin did not have quite the same effect as Def Leppard.) Some described using the Walkman as a way to domesticate their surroundings. “Jay” characterized it almost as a security blanket: “I like to have a piece of my own world. Familiar and secure. . . . In a sense like when you’re little and you have your mum and dad.”73 But then, some respondents also used it for the opposite reason: to make a familiar environment, such as a daily commute, more exciting. 80

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The Walkman offered a form of company, whether among a sea of strangers or alone in bed at night. One of Bull’s subjects described feeling “confident, as if she’s ‘with’ the singer.”74 Even without such a literal sense of connection, the sounds could provide a more ambient balm for—or distraction from—loneliness. Finally, subjects reported that they used their personal stereos to vividly evoke fond memories. After all, music, like the sense of smell, has the power to trigger what Proust called “involuntary memory,” which is visceral and emotional, and much more powerful than its voluntary counterpart, the memory of the intellect. With the press of a button, listeners could relive a recent party or summon a feeling from childhood. While other sound systems could serve the same purpose, the intimacy of the personal stereo made it particularly conducive to reminiscence. From his research, Bull drew a rather remarkable conclusion about the Walkman: “It injects a level of satisfaction into the everyday otherwise unobtainable for the individual.”75 Yet a good deal of the testimony was by no means inconsistent with the concerns raised by critics. Sometimes the management of everyday life meant trying to customize reality, editing other people out of it. Listening to her Walkman at the beach, one subject said, “I have the warmth but I don’t have all the crap around me. I can eliminate that and I can get much more out of what the ocean has to offer me. . . . Not being disturbed by screaming kids and all NORM

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that shouting which is not why I went there. I went to have harmony with the sea and the sun.”76 Several subjects indicated that they wore their headphones at least in part to deflect unwanted interactions. Intriguingly, Bull noted that more women than men cited this motive, suggesting that they may have been seeking to avoid male advances.77 This theory received support from one psychology study, which found that men didn’t bother to harass a woman if she wasn’t paying attention. One of the study’s interviewees reported that since she had started wearing earphones on the street, men had stopped catcalling her.78

A listening, enjoying unit So it was certainly true that the Walkman separated listeners from those around them, sometimes as an incidental side effect and sometimes as the main point. But was that necessarily bad? What some saw as disturbingly antisocial behavior, others perceived as harmless solitude, precious autonomy. In Evan Eisenberg’s book The Recording Angel, a brilliant meditation on recorded music, the author quotes his friend “Nina,” a classically trained pianist. She tells him she had worried about the effects of constant Walkman listening. But her therapist reassured her, arguing that it was healthy to focus on the pleasure of the music instead of the constraints of social etiquette. “If you’re walking down the street or riding a train or a bus, having a nice time listening to music, you 82

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are not going to worry about whether your shoes are scuffed, whether you’re being polite to the bus driver, whether you’re jostling the guy next to you. You’ll be enjoying yourself instead.” To Nina, this sounded like a positive thing: “It’s your way of refusing to be a social unit for a little while, or any other kind of unit besides a listening, enjoying unit that thinks its own thoughts and maps its own emotions.”79 The promise of autonomy was especially alluring for adolescents, who often listened to their Walkmans at home or in the car with their families. The practice may have seemed—and may have been—rude, but inside the headphones it felt like freedom. My friend Rose, who grew up in Connecticut in the 1980s, recalled that when her older sister was in seventh grade, “she began listening to her walkman in the car. Instead of using the car’s tape deck, so we could all hear the music, she kept her Bangles tape to herself. I remember stealing her walkman when she wasn’t using it just so I could hear what the tape sounded like through it. The lyrics, ‘Standing in the hallway, trouble coming my way,’ seemed so grown-up to my 4th grade ears. I was a goody two-shoes, and for the first time, I realized that some people didn’t mind being ‘in trouble’, and even wanted to be rebellious.”80 For another friend, who grew up in New Jersey around the same time, the Walkman offered a portal to the wider world. Her parents were devotees of classical music and opera, which she also loved. But then she discovered pop music. NORM

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I soon learned that if I attempted to explore anything nonclassical on my home stereo that my father would quickly appear and make bewildered faces at me. A few times, he lectured me on the inferiority of “amplified music.” This led to awkward silences, and a sense of constraint that stifled me. Enter: the walkman. Thanks to my beloved walkman, I was able to explore music of all kinds, without offending the sensibilities of my parents. All through high school, I spent hours on my walkman. I did my homework, rode the bus, and fell asleep while exploring music on my walkman. My inner world was enriched by the freedom to explore music on my own— which not only allowed me to learn about a range of musical styles, but also about my own limitless capacity for experimentation. The walkman opened up worlds to me and afforded me the privacy to enhance my inner world.81 The Walkman was a tool for breaking rules. In the iconic 1985 film Back to the Future, 17-year-old Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) skateboards to school, grabbing hold of the back of a series of vehicles to accelerate his ride. He is wearing headphones; the audience hears “The Power of Love” blasting. In this scene, the Walkman seems to represent the character’s youthful insouciance and indifference to the judgments of others. We can also see how his Walkman makes his adventure more exhilarating and may have also helped him muster the chutzpah and energy to undertake it (Figure 2.4). 84

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Figure 2.4  Back to the Future. Dir. Robert Zemeckis. Amblin Entertainment, 1985.

As for me, having learned about the disapproval and alarm surrounding the Walkman, what strikes me now is how benign mine always felt to me. It was a source of elation and comfort. Walking home from my piano lesson, listening to the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ cheerfully raunchy album Blood Sugar Sex Magik, I would succumb to the overpowering urge to sing along with Anthony Kiedis as he recounted the details of getting stopped by a lady cop. One lonely month in France, the summer I was sixteen, I did a home-stay with a family in the countryside. The girl my age was aloof, and I was too shy to speak much French. I would curl up in the guest room at night with my headphones and a dubbed copy of Bob Dylan’s Desire, thinking of home.

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What would Miss Manners say? In July 1989, the Walkman celebrated its tenth birthday. In honor of the anniversary, the Hard Rock Café in New York hosted a gala and put one of the originals on display.82 In a park in Vienna, Sony Austria erected a monument for the occasion—a statue of a giant Walkman, attached to a lifesized, headphone-clad figure in motion (Figure 2.5). The

Figure 2.5  Walkman monument in Vienna. Reprinted with permission of Sony Corporation.

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company manufactured two hundred commemorative, silverplated Walkmans,83 and, in collaboration with Tiffany & Co., designed a limited-edition, hand-engraved model to be given to luminaries such as Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner.84 By the 1990s, personal stereos were so mainstream that, during the Gulf War, the US military asked Tokyo to donate 40,000 of them to the troops as part of Japan’s official support for the war effort. (The Japanese government balked, but made it known that it would not object if private Japanese firms chose to step up. Companies obliged with about 20,000 units, though we don’t know which companies—they requested anonymity for fear of controversy relating to the war.85) In 1992, Akio Morita received an honorary knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II, and was thereafter sometimes referred to as “Sir Sony Walkman.” And during all this time, as people grew accustomed to the Walkman and the way it changed social mores, they were speculating about the future it augured. As early as 1984, there were forecasts that bore a striking resemblance to our present. Washington Post columnist Michael Schrage predicted, “Personal communications technologies are going to radically redefine everyday things like manners and style and fashion.” He went on to sketch what at the time sounded like an absurd scene. “A lot of people—a media elite—will carry their telephones with them. That means that sometime in the future, a couple strolling down a sandy beach, friends bumping into each other on the street, and a luncheon NORM

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meeting with business partners will all be interrupted by a telltale ring or buzz or beep. “What’s the etiquette of that situation? ‘Excuse me, I have to take this call?’ with the implicit statement that whoever’s on the phone is more important than the person who is physically there. What would Miss Manners say?” He  concluded that “the new personal media technologies will give us the ability to stand apart and not care who we are currently with or where we might be going.”86 To Schrage’s readers, this may have sounded like a laughably exaggerated, perhaps implausibly dystopian, vision of the future.

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3  NOSTALGIA

Toward the end of the 2015 movie Steve Jobs, the eponymous tech legend admonishes his teenage daughter Lisa. The year is 1998, and Lisa is holding a black Walkman in her hand. “I can’t stand looking at that inexplicable Walkman anymore,” he tells her. “We’re not savages.” He boasts that he’s going to make a new portable music device that will allow her to carry a thousand songs in her pocket. “You can do that?” she asks skeptically. He could—or rather, if the movie’s depiction of Jobs is any indication, his abused underlings could. His reference to the Walkman as a primitive instrument, as though it were little more advanced than a bone flute, indicates how much the world had changed in the past two decades. And in a few years, the new product Jobs promised his daughter would change it even more.

Music wants to be free By the turn of the millennium, the homely cassette did seem rather antique, having been succeeded by the digital

formats of the compact disc and then the MP3. According to Searchterms.com, by 1999, searches for “MP3” were second only to searches for “sex.”1 On some college campuses, the peer-to-peer file-sharing service Napster accounted for up to 60 percent of all internet traffic, clogging up the networks.2 British writer Tom Lamont later recalled the sudden “seismic” change in music consumption. “Music was something you bought after protracted debate with friends in the aisles of Our Price”—a UK record store chain—“and then, suddenly, songs were accessible from home,” he wrote. Most astonishingly, “They didn’t cost anything.”3 The music industry’s anxieties about home taping gave way to outright hyperventilation over MP3s. In 1999, the Recording Industry Association of America sued Napster. In 2000, Metallica and Dr. Dre also sued Napster. Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich intoned that it was “sickening to know that our art is being traded like a commodity rather than the art that it is.”4 The lawsuits eventually led Napster to shut down its network and declare bankruptcy. The RIAA went on to sue thousands of individuals, ranging from children to grandmothers, for peer-to-peer file sharing. To say the least, this tactic did not help repair the adversarial dynamic between the industry and fans first introduced by the campaigns against home taping. When vinyl had given way to cassettes and then CDs, the shifts brought subtle changes in sound quality and bigger changes in the equipment needed for listening. But some fundamental features had remained stable since the advent 90

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of recording: the idea of music as an object and a commodity, something you could touch, own, collect, sell. Now, MP3s upended those principles. Music no longer seemed like a thing. It also started to seem less like a commodity—pace Lars Ulrich—and more like a publicly available resource. This notion fit into the early, utopian internet ethos that prevailed in the 1990s. “Information wants to be free,” Stewart Brand, creator of the hippie bible the Whole Earth Catalog, famously stated, and increasingly, the same was thought to be true of everything from pornography to recipes to music. MP3s are in fact more material than we tend to think— as the media theorist Jonathan Sterne has pointed out, they do take up space on hard drives, albeit at an imperceptible scale.5 And they were never entirely free, since you needed a computer and a high-speed internet connection to download them painlessly. But they certainly didn’t feel like possessions in the same way that their predecessors did. When I was a teenager, I would take stock of my modest collection of carefully selected tapes and CDs arranged on a wooden rack. I would run my finger along the plastic cases of P. J. Harvey and Sonic Youth albums, admiring the evidence of my own taste. I would also make lists of albums I coveted, and, when I’d saved up enough money, feel the thrill of acquiring them. MP3s made it harder to feel the same pride of possession and the same intensity of desire and its fulfillment. You also couldn’t casually display your MP3 collection to attractive visitors. NOSTALGIA

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The iPod arrives While MP3s were not susceptible to fetishization, something else soon filled that role: the device for playing them. By 1999, a few portable MP3 players had come on the market, but they were clunky, with highly limited capacity— one held only twenty-four songs.6 When Apple launched the iPod in October 2001, it was immensely superior to any previous MP3 player. At the launch, Jobs concluded his presentation by pulling an iPod out of the pocket of his jeans. “This amazing little device holds a thousand songs—and fits in my pocket,” he marveled.7 The first-generation iPod weighed 6.5 ounces and sold for $399. With a surface of white polycarbonate and stainless steel, it was slim and sleek (at least by the standards of the day), with Apple’s characteristic minimalist design, including its trademark scroll wheel to enable quick scanning of artists, songs, and albums. It was soon followed by even smaller versions: the mini (2004), which came in silver, gold, pink, blue, and green; and then the still more diminutive nano (2005). At the time, the differences between the iPod and the Walkman were striking, most notably the sheer quantity of music you could now bring along on your peregrinations. Instead of three or four albums, you could carry your entire music collection. This feature augmented the ability to tailor your own soundtrack to your moods and whims, which made

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this new personal stereo that much more addictive. You never found yourself craving Sade but stuck with Pearl Jam. Nor were you stuck listening to album filler. The Walkman had a fast-forward button, of course, but that now seemed woefully misnamed. To get to the next song, you had to press “FF,” wait, press “stop,” then either resume fast-forward or, if you had exceeded your target, rewind, and so on.8 It was a little like trying to scratch someone’s back in just the right spot, while the scratchee gives you directions: “Up a little. No, down a little.” With the iPod, that nuisance was gone. (CDs had already introduced these advance, but many people, including me, never switched over from the Walkman to the Discman. The Discman was too big and cumbersome to carry around, as were CDs—and motion caused CDs to skip annoyingly.9) Cue a new wave of cultural anxiety: the idea that the “iPod generation” suffered from “a mind-set that demands choice and the means to scroll through ideas and ideologies as easily as a finger circles the wheel on the iconic front panel of an iPod,” as tech journalist Steven Levy put it.10 In short, the iPod was the Walkman of its day, a formulation that suggests both their differences and similarities. The musician Seal appeared in a video played at the iPod’s launch. In Levy’s words, Seal was “fondling the iPod as if it were a pet mouse he adored.” Seal asked rhetorically, “Do you remember what it was like to get your first Walkman? Do you know that feeling?” The iPod, he said, was the first MP3 player to make him feel the same way. “Everyone’s going to want to have one of these.”11 NOSTALGIA

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Whatever happened to Sony? By all rights, Sony should have been the one to pioneer a portable MP3 player, and in fact, Akio Morita had hatched the basic idea back in the 1980s.12 But by the end of the millennium, the company was struggling. Japan, after decades as an economic superpower, was struggling, too. In the early 1990s, it endured an economic crisis sparked by the bursting of a gigantic real estate and stock market bubble, leading to a “lost decade” of stagnation and Japan’s gradual exit from the center of the world stage. But Sony’s problems went beyond those of its nation. For more than forty years, Morita and Ibuka enjoyed a warm, symbiotic, fabled relationship. In their offices, they would play together on the floor with prototypes of products.13 They even had something akin to a private shared language. Morita’s elder son recalled overhearing their conversations in the dining room at his home: “They would sit there, talking to each other, and we would listen but we had no idea what they were saying.”14 But in the early 1990s, both suffered strokes and lost the capacity for speech.15 According to Ibuka’s son, “They sit together in silence, holding hands, the tears running down their cheeks, and they’re communicating without words. That’s the kind of friendship they always shared.”16 Ibuka died in 1997, Morita in 1999. After their departure, Sony underwent a long slide from its position as a global leader in consumer electronics. A variety

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of persuasive explanations—far from mutually exclusive— have been advanced for this decline. Without the visionary leadership of its founders, the company lost its way. Sony was too slow to adapt to the digital revolution and to the ascendancy of software over hardware.17 The teams were too siloed, unlike the thoroughly integrated operation that Steve Jobs ran at Apple, and they shared no focused strategy.18 Exacerbating this last problem, different parts of Sony had different incentives. In 1987, Sony had acquired CBS Records, which came with the rights to songs by megastars such as Michael Jackson, Billy Joel, and Bruce Springsteen. But with the advent of digital music, Sony faced a dilemma. The electronics department wanted to be the first to develop a digital music player, but the record company leaders were heavily invested in the traditional revenue model of album sales. So they hesitated to plunge into accelerating the shift to digital. Starkly illustrating this disjunction, while Sony Music was one of the companies that sued Napster, an industry group to which Sony Electronics belonged filed an amicus brief objecting to some elements of the lower court’s decision against Napster.19 In 2003, the head of Sony Music, Andy Lack, arrived in Tokyo for a meeting with Sony CEO Nobuyuki Idei and two hundred managers. He pulled out the latest model of the iPod. “Here it is,” he said. “Here’s the Walkman killer.”20 As of 2009, Sony was no longer profitable. In 2010, it discontinued production of the Walkman (though it would

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later resurrect the name for digital players). In 2011, the company suffered record losses of $5.7 billion.21

From crazy to normal, from glares to shrugs While the iPod offered clear advantages over the Walkman, it provided the same fundamental experience for the user: a portable cocoon of sound. And the broader repercussions— that is, the effects on social interactions and public space— were basically the same as those first introduced by the Walkman. But the iPod was not the only device that achieved ubiquity during this time. The history of technology is in part the story of normal people starting to do things that used to be considered signs of insanity. First it was hearing the voices of people who weren’t there; then it was tapping your foot to music nobody else could hear. And still later, it was talking when walking on the street, alone. By 1999, there were about 86 million cell phone subscribers in the United States; by 2004, there were more than 182 million.22 As the Walkman had twenty years before, widespread cell phone adoption raised new questions about the vanishing line between public and private, prompting new negotiations over etiquette. Was it okay to take a call in a restaurant? Was it okay not to take the call, potentially affronting the caller? Was it okay to ask a stranger to take 96

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her call outside, or should you restrict yourself to glaring? Then the smartphone consolidated these two functions—the phone and the personal stereo—along with countless others. If the Walkman removed one block from the Jenga tower of established manners, and the cell phone removed another, the smartphone pulled out several more. In contrast to the Walkman, smartphone use is largely visual—people staring at their screens instead of their surroundings. As we saw previously, one theory posits that it’s less disconcerting when people opt out of shared sight than shared sound, since hearing is typically more of a common experience. But smartphones challenge that logic, because of the scope of their offerings. A fellow subway rider reading a newspaper still seems to be sharing our social space; a rider thumbing an iPhone seems to be engrossed in a different universe. Recall the idea of Walkman wearers as secret holders. Secrets put distance between people. When you saw a guy listening to a Walkman, you didn’t know if he was listening to Beethoven or Public Enemy. Now that effect is amplified because the options have multiplied. When you see a guy on a smart device, he could be texting a lover, reading Elena Ferrante, retweeting @realDonaldTrump, or playing Candy Crush, among all but unlimited other possibilities. Yet however unsettling these secrets may be, they are distinctly preferable to the alternative. Increasingly, smartphone users do not keep their activities secret at all. They play music, watch videos, and conduct FaceTime NOSTALGIA

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conversations freely, with no headphones or earbuds. Unlike the boom box luggers of yore, these individuals do not seem to be trying to either gregariously share or aggressively impose. They seem oblivious. Or maybe the etiquette they’re violating is obsolete—the Jenga tower has collapsed—and it’s only curmudgeons like me who grumble.

“I only listen to cassettes” Some of us, then, are nostalgic for the days before the smartphone—and specifically for its ancestor, the humble personal stereo. I stuck with mine for years after most had been forsaken. Back in the iPod’s heyday, I used to take the Chinatown bus between New York and Boston. Well into 2006, while everyone else was installing earbuds and scrolling through playlists, I would produce my scratched-up Walkman, half proud, half embarrassed. I did eventually get an iPod, though, and alas, lost track of the Walkman. I’m not alone in my nostalgia. Several websites are devoted to memorializing the Walkman. As early as 2004, a website called Pocket Calculator included a “Walkman Museum,” displaying images of different brands and iterations of personal stereos. The website also showcases photos and stories of other vintage technologies, such as boom boxes and old calculators. “We collect and celebrate personal memories of all integrated circuit-based consumer products from the 98

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electronics revolution of the 1970s and 1980s,” reads their mission statement. “Share your original stories related to the golden age of consumer electronics, and together we’ll demonstrate why there has never been another era abounding [in] more originality, excitement and SOUL!!!”23 Another website, Walkman Central, provides a comprehensive inventory, including fourteen sports models, ten with recording capability, and one solar-powered model, alongside photographs and detailed descriptions of each. “The site can be used for historical research or just to bring back memories of equipment you once owned or wanted,” the FAQ page reads.24 Then there was the 2014 Marvel Comics superhero movie Guardians of the Galaxy. It opens in 1988, with a young boy listening to a blue Sony Walkman (the original TPS-L2) with orange foam headphones. We hear the song “I’m Not in Love,” by 10CC, and we see that the cassette is labeled “Awesome Mix Vol. 1.” In virtually the first words of the movie, the boy’s grandfather says, “Take these fool things off.” In short order, the boy’s mother dies and he is abducted by aliens. In the next scene, twenty-six years later, we see an adult Peter, now also known as Star-Lord (played by Chris Pratt), wearing the same Walkman, singing along to “Come and Get Your Love,” by Redbone, and dancing spunkily through a cavernous extraterrestrial landscape. The Walkman is his prized possession. When a prison guard confiscates it and Peter sees him wearing the headphones, he cries, “That song belongs to me!” When he and his comrades just barely manage NOSTALGIA

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to escape from prison, he returns to retrieve his Walkman, baffling his comrades. “Why would you risk your life for this?” asks Gamora, Zoe Saldana’s character. He explains that his mother gave it to him. He also lets her listen to it, and its magic almost lulls her into being seduced (Figure 3.1). The Walkman is thus portrayed alternately as a source of comfort, thrills, and enchantment. It’s an object of nostalgia that continues to be functional and rewarding. After the movie was released, some fans apparently were not content to reminisce about their old Walkmans. The TPS-L2 subsequently became a hot commodity on eBay, where it sold for up to $820.25 Recent years have also seen a robust resurrection of the cassette. In 2009, indie-rock elder Thurston Moore, who also

Figure 3.1  Guardians of the Galaxy. Dir. James Gunn. Marvel Studios, 2014.

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edited the anthology Mix Tape: The Art of Cassette Culture, told CBC Radio, “I only listen to cassettes.”26 In 2015, the National Audio Company, the country’s largest cassette manufacturer, reported its best year of sales since opening in 1969, producing well over 10 million cassettes. “Probably the thing that has really enlarged our business at a faster phase [sic] than anything is the retro movement,” the company’s president, Steve Stepp, said. “There’s the nostalgia of holding the audio cassette in your hand.”27 Some technologies—records and typewriters and trains—are more obviously conducive to fetishization. They are elegant and romantic. The Walkman, along with early computers and video game consoles, falls between that brand of romance and the sleek glamour of today’s technologies. This intermediate generation is unlovely and almost dorky, and its underdog charm makes it that much more endearing. It is fetishized with a tinge of irony.

Why the analog nostalgia? The Walkman and the cassette are hardly the only analog objects with a fan base. Indeed, analog nostalgia has become something of a trend. In his 2016 book The Revenge of Analog, journalist David Sax documents the surging popularity of vinyl, Moleskine notebooks, bookstores, and board games. There are several broad, related reasons for the renewed value placed on these kinds of items, Sax suggests. One is scarcity. NOSTALGIA 101

As our lives become increasingly digitally mediated, we begin to crave a break from screens, to hanker for the less common experience of turning actual pages or hearing the crackle of a needle on a record. These experiences become luxuries. It’s the same reason we have a cult of the “natural” and the “artisanal” in a world that feels largely synthetic and mass-produced. But scarcity is not the only reason—analog also has some inherent advantages. We like tactile experiences. We like things that engage more than one of our senses: the smell and feel of a book, the satisfying clacking of a typewriter as the ink hits the paper. There’s something more human and fathomable about this physicality, about sensing the connection between the observable characteristics of an object and what it does. When the tape ribbon moves, the music plays; when the ribbon is wrinkled, the music sounds garbled. This logic is the logic of our own bodies, with organs and limbs whose motions are connected to their functions, and which are susceptible to injury and gradual breakdown.28 Another attribute of analog is limits. We may not think we want limits, but it turns out that the effects of endless choice and information range from paralyzing to nauseating. It is a relief to hold one magazine in your hand—Sax refers to the value of “finishability”29—or to select from a record shelf instead of from the entire history of recorded music. I would add a final virtue of analog devices: specialization. Not long ago, I bought an alarm clock. It’s made of silver metal, about five inches in diameter, with a white face, black numbers and hands, and a clapper that vibrates between two 102 Personal Stereo

bells. It has little feet of the kind I associate primarily with bathtubs. It’s nothing fancy—I got it for fifteen bucks. The impetus was that when I used my phone as an alarm, I kept getting awakened too early by spam calls. To avoid this, I’d have to turn on airplane mode, after hunting for the clock app, then choosing the alarm function and selecting the time. To set the alarm on the clock, I simply turn a knob on the back and switch the “on” button. The benefits of the smartphone’s omnifunctionality are obvious, namely extreme convenience. But precisely because it is all-purpose, it isn’t as good at each individual job. There’s something beautiful about the simplicity of the clock, the way its design fulfills its function, and the way you can see exactly how it does so—watch the hands moving, watch, hear, and even feel the bell ringing. I’m reminded of how the Walkman was unusual in subtracting a function from the tape recorder’s capabilities, so that it could do only one thing. A clock (or a record player or a Walkman) is like a charming pastry shop or produce stand, a clothing boutique or Parisian boulangerie. A smartphone is like Walmart.

Revenge of the Walkman As with other analog products, the Walkman’s very shortcomings now appear as virtues, seeming both valuable in themselves and as part of a culture that was different from our own. Now when we think of the Walkman, we don’t NOSTALGIA 103

think of self-indulgence, of Allan Bloom’s “masturbational fantasy.” On the contrary, compared with today’s options, the Walkman seems downright ascetic: we are struck by its limitations. As we’ve seen, one common theme to Walkman use was a sense of control. We could exert influence over our emotions, playing the Monkees to chase away a bad mood or Erik Satie to wallow in it. We could modulate our interactions with others, discouraging strangers from approaching us if we wanted to. We could reclaim our time, so that the commute to work was not wasted, but an opportunity for rapture.30 The iPod and then the smartphone vastly expanded our power to customize our daily lives. But unlimited choices can interfere with our ability to fully enjoy any given experience. You’re listening to “Sun King,” but you can easily skip to “Mean Mr. Mustard”—the next song on the album—or any other Beatles song, or, for that matter, any Bob Dylan or Rolling Stones song, or switch genres entirely and opt for The Chronic. That may make it a little harder to give yourself over to “Sun King.” It’s particularly hard to have the patience to listen to Abbey Road from beginning to end. Any commitment-phobic online dater can relate. In 2010, one blogger, Snoutbagger, wrote, “The ipod generation will never know the wonderful limits of the Sony Walkman. . . . I think it was better to be forced to listen to one tape at a time rather than choose the myriad combinations of artists and songs the shuffle and playlist features of today’s ipods/mp3 players allow. It’s the same logic that reveals 104 Personal Stereo

why LPs are better than CDs in many ways; you are forced to listen to an album in its entirety, in the order the artist intended.”31 A letter to the editor in the New York Times made a similar case: “The cassette is for people with an attention span, people who are generous enough to let an artist curate a whole half-hour of listening, or in the case of a mixtape, between 60 and 120 minutes,” the reader wrote. “The cassette is a reaction against our attention-deficient, on-demand, fastforward-through-life, listen-to-only-half-a-song culture.”32 The more patient, generous style of listening is not so much self-abnegation as enlightened hedonism. Not only does it give you the opportunity to cultivate enjoyment of what is not immediately catchy. Even if you never learn to like a song—especially then—listening to it anyway heightens the pleasure of the songs you do love. Waiting through “Sun King” intensifies the joy when “Mean Mr. Mustard” arrives. If the Walkman gave us an ideal amount of control, its successors have given us too much. But they’ve also robbed us of control—of self-mastery and autonomy. We click, text, and tweet even when we know that we probably shouldn’t, whether it’s mundane procrastination or Anthony Weineresque self-destruction. And the smartphone has abetted the much-lamented rise of surveillance and loss of privacy. I don’t mean just the NSA or Google. I’m old enough to remember a time when you could skinny-dip or cry or smoke in public without the awareness that everyone around you had a camera and an internet connection. (I’m also old enough to remember when smoking was something you NOSTALGIA 105

wanted to be seen doing, not something you wanted to hide, but that’s another story.) Listening to music on a smartphone is not like listening to music on a Walkman. Again, the phone’s functions undermine one another. We are perennially subject to interruptions and temptations. Dead time—waiting for the bus, waiting in line, and so on—is filled by checking Facebook instead of letting our minds wander. While the Walkman fended off boredom during those same kinds of moments, its effect on our minds could not have been more different. It was a machine for daydreaming.

A force that bends logic The word nostalgia—from the Greek nostos, return home, and algia, a painful condition—was coined in the late seventeenth century, by the Swiss doctor Johannes Hofer, to describe the severe homesickness that seized some Swiss soldiers stationed far from home. Symptoms included despondency, weeping, weight loss, and suicide attempts.33 Over time, the word’s associations evolved. Now we tend to think of nostalgia as entailing pleasure as well as pain. It is something we indulge in rather than something we cure. I savor a sweet memory—it’s summer dusk in Brooklyn, I’m young, I have the night and my life before me—while grieving that that moment is irretrievable. What’s more, nostalgia now

106 Personal Stereo

emphasizes time rather than place. This shift seems apt, as since the seventeenth century, places have become more similar and times more different. Homesickness is easier to resist when you can travel across the world and drink the same Caramelized Honey Lattes from Starbucks and Skype with your mom. But it is hard not to pine for a time before that was possible. Nostalgia often attaches in particular to outmoded technology because technology is a principal agent of change, largely responsible for making the world of the present different from the world of the past. Before modernity and rapid technological change, nostalgia presumably didn’t center on technology; if you used a wheelbarrow and a lantern your whole life, what was there to be nostalgic for? Similarly, it’s worth keeping in mind that we are not nostalgic for appliances, such as the refrigerator and the microwave, that haven’t fundamentally changed over the decades. When we resent new inventions, we often forget that we owe them, at least in part, our love for the ones they supplanted. Technological nostalgia depends on obsolescence. So what should we make of this ineluctable cycle—this trajectory that repeats from alarm to wistfulness? Does it mean that the alarm is unwarranted, the wistfulness delusional, that both are irrational? That we should just stop worrying and learn to love technological innovation and its ramifications? A modicum of social anxiety is, I think, a perfectly appropriate response to the widespread dissemination of

NOSTALGIA 107

new technology. It’s the impetus to sort out urgent questions about how to assimilate these strange new powers into our collective life. It’s how we grope toward the updated norms, ethics, and laws that we need. After all, the boons introduced by technologies, dating back to the discovery of fire, are typically accompanied by commensurate problems. As for nostalgia, there’s something icky about fetishizing a consumer product, about being nostalgic for a slightly earlier iteration of consumer capitalism. As Christopher Lasch argued, our society “has made ‘nostalgia’ a marketable commodity on the cultural exchange . . . trivialized the past by equating it with outmoded styles of consumption, discarded fashions and attitudes[.]”34 But really, my deepest longing is not for the Walkman but for the absence of— freedom from—the technologies that came later. The Walkman gave rise to some issues that have only intensified with subsequent innovation: the need for constant stimulation, the atomization of public space, the safety concerns (e.g., texting while driving). Social anxiety about the Walkman was a way to process the change incrementally. This is also one reason alarm and nostalgia are not irrational—in some cases, with each advance, the problems get worse. But in other ways, of course, smartphones are utterly different from personal stereos. Unlike the Walkman, the smartphone is a social and political tool. Think of the video of the Iranian protestor bleeding to death in the street,

108 Personal Stereo

or of police shootings in the United States, taken with smartphones, disseminated with smartphones, watched on smartphones around the world. Smartphones are helpful in emergencies; they have saved lives. The Walkman couldn’t do that (although some of its most passionate enthusiasts might disagree). When we read, say, Bob Greene’s jeremiad about teenagers wearing headphones at the Ohio State Fair, it’s hard to know how to react. Should we take comfort in his distress, because it seems silly now, suggesting that our own distress may be groundless, too? Or should it unnerve us, because the source of his concern has grown more salient by several orders of magnitude? I don’t know. What I do believe is that the main reason the Walkman and other analog technologies never really bothered me is that I grew up with them. They were my baseline for what the world was like. In Encounters with the Archdruid, John McPhee’s book about environmental activist David Brower, the author notes that Brower, who as a rule vehemently opposed any intrusion on his beloved mountains, had a soft spot for trains. “The force of nostalgia in Brower is such that it can in some instances bend logic,” McPhee wrote. “A railroad over the Sierra is all right. It was there. An interstate highway is an assault on the terrain.”35 For children today, the phones their parents are always clutching—as well as iPads, virtual personal assistants,

NOSTALGIA 109

and the drones that have begun to hover in the sky—are unremarkable. In the future, these technologies will, I suppose, seem limited, crude, unthreatening, and beloved, in comparison with whatever it is that will come next. And we will reminisce about them, relics of a simpler time.

110 Personal Stereo

EPILOGUE

Not long ago, I borrowed a Walkman from a friend who was wise enough to hold onto hers. Inside it was a cassette, a mix tape her husband had made for her years ago. One day, in preparation for my first listen, I stashed it in my bag, along with my phone and keys and sunglasses, and began walking to my office on a university campus. At an outdoor table on campus, near an ATM and a food court, I sat down and pulled the thing out of my bag. I felt oddly nervous. Would people think I was weird or old? Would the last Walkman wearer attract the same kind of baffled looks as the first? I glanced around. There were two students nearby, each sitting alone at a table. They paid no attention to me; they were looking at their phones. I took a breath, and finally pressed “play.” And then . . . nothing. No sound from the headphones, no motion in the cassette. What was going on? I inspected and fiddled, until finally it came to me. I turned the Walkman over, and pried open the battery compartment on the back. It was empty.

112

Acknowledgments

I

am grateful to have Sarah Burnes on my team. Chris Schaberg gave me astute edits and unflagging encouragement. Haaris Naqvi proved exceptionally gracious and skilled at ushering this book into existence. Thanks to all of you, as well as Ian Bogost, for your support. Thanks to Alice Marwick for the classy cover design. Thanks to Susan Clements and Anita Singh. The Forum for the Academy and the Public and the Newkirk Center for Science and Society, both at UC Irvine, provided me with support during the writing process. I am indebted to the journalists who wrote the articles on which much of my research drew. And for all my kvetching about the internet, this book could not have been written without it. A number of friends and friends of friends helped by sharing their Walkman memories. Thanks to all of you; even if your story did not appear, it informed this book. Thanks to Cascade Sorte for lending me her Walkman, and to John Palattella for later giving me one. Thanks to Andreas Pavel for patiently answering my many questions. Thanks to Keith Beresford for helping me track down Andreas Pavel. Thanks

to Thomas Laemmel and Ryoichi Numata of Sony for taking the time to respond to my inquiries. Jeff Wasserstrom, Jack Lerner, and Barry Siegel offered helpful comments on parts of this book and/or gave me leads on Walkman arcana. Evan Kindley alerted me to the Object Lessons series and provided valuable guidance throughout this process. Since around the time I started listening to a Walkman, Rosalie Metro’s wisdom has enriched my writing and my life. Mark Engler has provided incisive feedback on nearly everything I’ve written for publication, including this book. Thanks to Melinda Tuhus and Robert Dubrow for your loving support and profound integrity; Daniel TuhusDubrow for your good heart and dry wit; and Jane and Paul Marantz for your generosity and élan. Thanks to Eliza for being your sweet and spunky self. Thank you, Nicholas, for, among many other gifts, the laughs.

114 Acknowledgments

NOTES

Introduction 1 Scott Campbell, “Giving Up My iPod for a Walkman,” BBC

News Magazine, June 29, 2009.

2 Martin Linton, “Sound of Walkman Discord Reaches Patent

Court,” Guardian, October 13, 1992.

3 Peter Popham, “The Creator of Our Private Universe,”

Independent, March 22, 1996.

4 I will capitalize it except where it appears in quotes in lowercase. And though the plural “Walkmen” is more charming, I will use the more standard “Walkmans.”

Novelty 1 Akio Morita with Edwin M. Reingold and Mitsuko

Shimomura, Made in Japan: Akio Morita and Sony (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1986), 47. The other facts in this paragraph and the previous one come from Paul J. Bailey, Postwar Japan: 1945 to the Present (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers, 1996), 22–24.

2 John Nathan, Sony: The Private Life (Boston and New York:

Houghton Mifflin Company, 1999), 12. For criticism of the militaristic leaders, see Morita, 29.

3 Unless otherwise noted, information about Sony’s origins

comes from Morita.

4 Nathan, Sony, 4. Their ages at the time of meeting come from

correspondence with Sony.

5 Morita, Made in Japan, 13. 6 Quoted in Nathan, Sony, 7. The detail about Ibuka’s age at his

father’s death comes from correspondence with Sony.

7 Ibid., 4–7. The translation “running neon” comes from

correspondence with Sony.

8 Sony website: http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/CorporateInfo/

History/prospectus.html, accessed April 19, 2017. The prospectus was written in 1946. The early history of the company was a bit complicated. Ibuka first named it Tokyo Telecommunications Research Institute (which has also been translated as Tokyo Telecommunications Research Laboratory). Then, in May 1946, the company, now with Morita on board, formally incorporated as Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo Kabushiki Kaisha: Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation. Finally, this name was officially changed to Sony in 1958.

9 Morita, Made in Japan, 47. 10 Nathan, Sony, 22. 11 Morita, Made in Japan, 48. 12 Nathan, Sony, 14–15. 13 Frank Swinnerton, “A Defence of the Gramophone,”

Gramophone I (1923): 52–53. Quoted in Mark Katz, Capturing Sound (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 22.

116 NOTES

14 Katz, Capturing Sound, 23–24. 15 Disques 2 (August 1931): 240. Quoted in Katz, Capturing

Sound, 21.

16 Orlo Williams, “Times and Seasons,” Gramophone I (1923):

38–39. Quoted in Katz, Capturing Sound, 20.

17 Evan Eisenberg, The Recording Angel: Music, Records and

Culture from Aristotle to Zappa, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 22.

18 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections,

edited and with an introduction by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 220.

19 Eisenberg, The Recording Angel, 13. 20 Michael Brian Schiffer, The Portable Radio in American Life

(Tucson and London: The University of Arizona Press, 1991), 181.

21 P. Ranganath Nayak and John M. Ketteringham,

Breakthroughs! (New York: Rawson Associates, 1986), 136.

22 Nathan, Sony, 36. 23 Morita, Made in Japan, 99. 24 Ibid., 79. 25 Ibid. 26 Nathan, Sony, 150–51. 27 Jon Woronoff, “Who in Sony Invented Walkman?” Japan

Economic Journal, June 9, 1981.

28 Vivek Chaudhary, “Eccentric Left Penniless in Quest to Be

Recognised as a Seer of the Audio Revolution,” Guardian, March 22, 1996.

NOTES 117

29 For example, see Popham, “The Creator of Our Private

Universe,” and Lincoln Caplan, “The Walkman,” New Yorker, September 21, 1981.

30 Nayak and Ketteringham, Breakthroughs!, 136. 31 Ibid., 130–37. 32 Karin Bijsterveld and Annelies Jacobs, “Storing Sound

Souvenirs: The Multi-Sited Domestication of the Typewriter,” in Sound Souvenirs: Audio Technologies, Memory and Cultural Practices, Karin Bijsterveld and Jose van Dijck, eds. (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009), 29.

33 Nayak and Ketteringham, Breakthroughs!, 135. 34 Morita, Made in Japan, 79. 35 Correspondence with Sony. 36 Morita, Made in Japan, 80. 37 Ibid., 81. 38 Unless otherwise noted, all information about Pavel comes

from interviews with or emails to the author.

39 Larry Rohter tells most of this story in a New York Times

article. Larry Rohter, “An Unlikely Trendsetter Made Earphones a Way of Life,” New York Times, December 17, 2005. This version comes directly from Pavel, though.

40 Christine Montgomery, “Music to Our Ears,” St. Petersburg

Times, July 12, 2009.

41 Ian Katz, “‘Inventor’ of Personal Stereo Experiences Ultimate

Switch-off,” Guardian, January 16, 1993.

42 Andreas Pavel, “The Coming Audio Revolution: a report

on the STEREOBELT audio system,” 1977, unpublished manuscript emailed to author. In his patent, Pavel also anticipated some of the uses of the smartphone. He wrote:

118 NOTES

“Finally, it should be noted that the present system can be supplemented in its essential function of portable high fidelity reproduction by other functions provided by additional devices, such as the necessary apparatus for stereophonic sound recording, for the synchronization of such recording with the simultaneous recording of images, for the electronic sound synthesizing of music, for the capturing of the user’s physiological parameters (such as brainwaves, heartbeat, or skin resistance) and their conversion into audio signals for biofeedback purposes, for the walkie-talkie type of voice communication, and for the reception of additional radio bands, including television audio signals.” 43 Martin Linton, “Sound of Walkman Discord Reaches Patent

Court,” Guardian, October 13, 1992.

44 Katz, “‘Inventor’ of Personal Stereo Experiences Ultimate

Switch-off.”

45 Dominic Kennedy, “Defeat for the Little Man in £1 Million

War of Walkmans,” Daily Mail (London), January 14, 1993.

46 Katz, “‘Inventor’ of Personal Stereo Experiences Ultimate

Switch-off.”

47 Natasha Narayan and Ian Katz, “Judgment is Music to Sony’s

Ears,” Guardian, January 14, 1993.

48 Katz, “‘Inventor’ of Personal Stereo Experiences Ultimate

Switch-off.”

49 “Walkman Battle Costs Taxpayers Pounds 500,000,” Independent,

March 22, 1996; Chaudhary, “Eccentric Left Penniless in Quest to Be Recognised as a Seer of the Audio Revolution.”

50 Charles Arthur, “Pioneer of Personal Stereo Wins Millions in

Sony Case,” Independent, June 3, 2004.

51 Nayak and Ketteringham, Breakthroughs!, 134–35.

NOTES 119

52 Schiffer, The Portable Radio in American Life, 9. 53 Correspondence with Sony. The detail about the marketing

ploy comes from Morita, Made in Japan, 81.

54 Interview with author. 55 Ron Alexander, “Stereo-to-Go—and Only You Can Hear It,”

New York Times, July 7, 1980.

56 “Japan’s Next Assault,” Observer, October 5, 1980. 57 Correspondence with Sony. 58 Bruce Headlam, “Origins; Walkman Sounded Bell for

Cyberspace,” New York Times, July 29, 1999.

59 Alexander, “Stereo-to-Go.” 60 Rick Horowitz, “Our Tuned-in World Is Tuning Out,” Chicago

Tribune, August 16, 1981.

61 Alexander, “Stereo-to-Go.” 62 Ibid. 63 Lyle Owerko, The Boombox Project: The Machines, the Music,

and the Urban Underground (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2010), 13.

64 Ibid., 62. 65 Ibid., 26. 66 Raymond A. Joseph, “Hey, Man! New Cassette Player

Outclasses Street People’s ‘Box,’” Wall Street Journal, June 23, 1980.

67 Owerko, The Boombox Project, 26. 68 Alexander, “Stereo-to-Go.” 69 Joseph, “Hey, Man!” 70 Owerko, The Boombox Project, 6. 71 Alexander, “Stereo-to-Go”; Joseph, “Hey, Man!” 120 NOTES

72 George Dullea, “Private Music and Public Silence,” New York

Times, April 17, 1981.

73 Linnea Lannon and Genevieve Buck, “In or Out? A Chic List

of 100 Things Now in Fashion,” Chicago Tribune, August 11, 1980.

74 Lincoln Caplan, “The Walkman,” New Yorker, September 21,

1981. This “Talk of the Town” piece was unsigned at the time, but the byline is now included in the citation in the archives.

75 Alexander, “Stereo-to-Go.” 76 Dullea, “Private Music and Public Silence.” 77 Rainer Schönhammer, “The Walkman and the Primary

World of the Senses,” Phenomenology and Pedagogy, Volume 7 (1989): 140. Although this article came out later than the period under discussion, I cite it here because it explores the sensory experience in depth.

78 Ibid., 137. 79 Ibid., 134. 80 Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle: Book One, trans. Don

Bartlett (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), 150.

81 Elizabeth Morgan, “Walkman,” New Yorker, January 2, 1989.

As in note 79, the writer’s name is now listed in the archives.

82 Headlam, “Origins.”

Norm 1 Interview with and email to author. 2 “Sony Walkman sales exceed 50 million units,” Japan Economic

Journal, July 15, 1989.

NOTES 121

3 Ibid. 4 Vic Sussman, “Changing My Tune About the Walkman,”

Washington Post, February 15, 1987.

5 N. R. Kleinfield, “Toys the Big Kids Are Buying,” New York

Times, December 1, 1985.

6 Stuart Auerbach, “Smugglers Thrive in Protectionist India,”

Washington Post, July 21, 1982.

7 Fred Hiatt and Margaret Shapiro, “Foreign Journal; All the

News That’s Fit to Eat,” Washington Post, July 16, 1990.

8 Popham, “The Creator of our Private Universe.” 9 Arnold E. Katz, et al., “Stereo Earphones and Hearing Loss,”

New England Journal of Medicine 307 (1982): 1460–61.

10 Hans Fantel, “Sound; Warning Lights Flash for Earphone

Users,” New York Times, July 24, 1983.

11 Nick Rufford and Max Prangnell, “They’re Just Craving for a

Walkman,” Sunday Times (London), October 18, 1987.

12 Hans Fantel, “Sound; Listeners Pay a High Price for Loud

Music,” New York Times, March 18, 1990.

13 Joyce Purnick, “Council Bill Seeks Headphone Curbs,” New

York Times, August 19, 1982.

14 Iris Schneider, “Just an Aspect of Inner Tripping: Headphones

Make World Go Away; Boredom Cited,” Los Angeles Times, February 11, 1982.

15 Purnick, “Council Bill.” 16 Ann Morris, “How One Town’s ‘Don’t Walk(man)’ Message Is

Faring,” Christian Science Monitor, November 5, 1982.

17 Ibid.

122 NOTES

18 Leon Wynter, “Train Kills Bike Rider in Headphones,”

Washington Post, November 5, 1983.

19 Michael J. Spataro, “Evils and Dangers: Stereo Headphone Sets

Stir Concern,” Los Angeles Times, November 21, 1982.

20 William Stockton, “On Your Own: Fitness; Taking Precautions

for Outdoor Exercise,” New York Times, March 13, 1989.

21 Alice Digilio, “The Best Books You’ve Ever Heard,” Washington

Post, February 10, 1983.

22 Ruth Robinson, “Sound Travel Advice,” New York Times,

March 27, 1983.

23 Andrew J. Bottomley, “‘Home Taping Is Killing Music’: the

Recording Industries’ 1980s Anti-Home Taping Campaigns and Struggles Over Production, Labor and Creativity,” Creative Industries Journal, 8, no. 2 (2015): 6. See also, Copyright & Home Copying: Technology Challenges the Law, United States Congress, Office of Technology Assessment, 1989, 171.

24 Bottomley, “Home Taping,” 1. 25 William Dawkins, “Music Industry Faces Far-reaching

Changes,” Globe and Mail, February 20, 1984. For US attempt, see Gold (note 27).

26 Bottomley, “Home Taping,” 1. 27 Gerald Gold, “News of Records: Cassette Sales Booming Amid

‘Pirating’ Dispute,” New York Times, August 26, 1982.

28 RIAA US Sales Database: https://www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-

database/, accessed December 17, 2016.

29 Gary Gumpert, quoted in Andrew Williams, Portable Music and

Its Functions (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 2007), 58.

NOTES 123

30 Bob Levey, “Wanted: Industrial Strength Earphones,”

Washington Post, October 31, 1988.

31 Quoted in Paul du Gay, et al., Doing Cultural Studies: The Story

of the Sony Walkman, 2nd ed. (New York: Sage, 1997, 2013), 164. He is referred to as Vincent in the book, but in other sources he is referred to as Vince.

32 Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in The

Blackwell City Reader, eds. Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson (Oxford, UK and Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2002), 12.

33 Quoted in Walter Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life: Essays

on Charles Baudelaire, ed. Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2006), 68. Benjamin is quoting Baudelaire quoting Guys.

34 Rainer Schönhammer, “The Walkman and the Primary World

of the Senses,” Phenomenology and Pedagogy 7 (1989): 130.

35 Ibid., 133. 36 Shuhei Hosokawa, “The Walkman Effect,” Popular Music 4

(1984): 177.

37 Rick Horowitz, “Our Tuned-in World Is Tuning Out,” Chicago

Tribune, August 16, 1981.

38 Bob Greene, “First, Drug Abuse; Now, Earphone Abuse,”

Chicago Tribune, August 24, 1981.

39 Jack Straw, “When Society is Dumped,” Times (London),

January 22, 1990.

40 http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/

primary-resources/carter-crisis/, accessed December 17, 2016.

41 Tom Wolfe, “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great

Awakening,” New York, August 3, 1976.

124 NOTES

42 A. N. Wilson, “As the Walkman Returns After 30 Years, Why

We’d All Be Happier if We’d Never Heard of the Gadget That Helped Break Britain,” Daily Mail, May 14, 2009.

43 “What Happens When Americans Stop Dreaming in Colour?”

Economist, October 16, 1982.

44 Richard Sigal, “Some Thoughts on Disrespect,” New York

Times, May 1, 1983.

45 Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind: How

Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), 82.

46 Ibid., 89. For Christopher Lasch, too, who is hard to categorize

politically but is generally considered culturally conservative, the decline of the family was a key trend of the late twentieth century.

47 Ibid., 68. 48 Ibid., 74–75. 49 Ibid., 81. 50 Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in

an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1979), 4.

51 Marc Stern, “The Fitness Movement and the Fitness Center

Industry, 1960–2000,” Business and Economic History Online 6 (2008): 13.

52 “Vogue’s Point of View: There’s More to Keep Your Eye on This

Month,” Vogue, December 1983.

53 Curt Suplee, “Green Snow,” Washington Post Magazine, August

7, 1983.

NOTES 125

54 John Ehrman, The Eighties (New Haven, CT: Yale University

Press, 2005), 122–23.

55 David Remnick, Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet

Empire (New York: Random House, 1993), 199–204.

56 “A Comparison of the US and Soviet Economies: Evaluating

the Performance of the Soviet System,” CIA Office of Soviet Analysis, 1985, v. (Originally confidential, this report was released as sanitized in 1999.)

57 Alison Muscatine and Caryle Murphy, “KGB Defector

Wages War Against Soviet System,” Washington Post, May 29, 1983.

58 Ken Denlinger, “Soviets Know L.A. Olympics By the Letter,”

Washington Post, July 27, 1984.

59 Andrew McCathie, “West Germans Test Drive the Freedom

Car,” Australian Financial Review, November 24, 1989.

60 Morita, Made in Japan, 3. 61 Schiffer, The Portable Radio in American Life, 203. 62 Morita, Made in Japan, 77. 63 Bailey, Postwar Japan, 142. 64 Robert J. Crawford, “Reinterpreting the Japanese Economic

Miracle,” Harvard Business Review, January–February 1998.

65 Peter Ross Range, “Playboy Interview: Akio Morita,” Playboy,

August 1982.

66 Ibid. 67 “Trade in Goods with Japan,” United States Census Bureau:

https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/balance/c5880.html, accessed December 28, 2016.

68 Ibid.

126 NOTES

69 Curt Suplee, “Buy American; Sayonara, Apple Pie. Auf

Wiedersehen, Detroit: We’re on the Guilt-Edged Road to Deficit City,” Washington Post, August 4, 1982.

70 Michael Bull, Sounding Out the City: Personal Stereos and

the Management of Everyday Life (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2000), 17.

71 Ibid., 1. 72 Ibid., 22. 73 Ibid., 37–38. 74 Ibid., 34. 75 Ibid., 26. 76 Ibid., 36. 77 Ibid., 27. 78 Jaclyn Packer, “Sex Differences in the Perception of Street

Harassment,” in The Dynamics of Feminist Therapy, ed. Doris Howard (Philadelphia: Haworth Press, 1986), 331–32.

79 Eisenberg, The Recording Angel, 136–37. 80 Email to author. 81 Email to author. 82 Marco R. della Cava, “Social Hazards of the Headset Mindset,”

USA Today, June 21, 1989.

83 Correspondence with Sony. Elsewhere I have found that 2000

commemorative Walkmans were sold, but Sony told me it was 200.

84 Elaine Chow, “Tuning in, and Tuning Out: The Walkman Way:

10-year-old Sony Walkman Has Changed American Culture,” St. Petersburg Times, July 2, 1989.

NOTES 127

85 Joe Joseph, “Japanese Gift is Music to GIs’ Ears,” Times

(London) December 19, 1990.

86 Michael Schrage, “You Are the Media You’ll Wear; The Tiny

Phone, TV, Stereo and the Computer You Carry Are You,” Washington Post, September 16, 1984.

Nostalgia 1 Fred Goodman, “MP3 Technology Poised to Redefine Music

Industry,” Rolling Stone, March 9, 1999.

2 Lee Gomes, “Napster Alters Its Software in Bid to Appease

Colleges,” Wall Street Journal, March 23, 2000.

3 Tom Lamont, “Napster: The Day the Music Was Set Free,”

Guardian, February 23, 2013.

4 Jaan Uhelszki, “Metallica Sue Napster for Copyright

Infringement,” Rolling Stone, April 13, 2000.

5 Jonathan Sterne, MP3: The Meaning of a Format (Durham,

NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 7.

6 Steven Levy, The Perfect Thing (New York: Simon & Schuster,

2006), 49.

7 Ibid., 9. 8 My husband tells me it was possible to press the fast-forward

button in a certain way—not all the way down—and thereby hear the music at a faster pace and know exactly when to stop. I was unaware of this possibility.

9 Correspondence with Sony confirms that Discman sales never

approached Walkman levels.

128 NOTES

10 Levy, The Perfect Thing, 4. 11 Ibid., 11. 12 Hiroko Tabuchi, “How the Parade Passed Sony By,” New York

Times, April 15, 2012.

13 Nathan, Sony, 1. 14 Ibid., 2. 15 Ibid., xi. 16 Ibid., 2. 17 See Sohrab Vossoughi, “Strategy, Context, and the Decline of

Sony,” Harvard Business Review, April 25, 2012.

18 Tabuchi, “How the Parade.” 19 Brian Hiatt, “Firms Play Both Sides of Napster Case,”

MTVnews.com, August 25, 2000. http://www.mtv.com/ news/1123445/firms-play-both-sides-of-napster-case/, accessed April 30, 2017.

20 Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (New York: Simon & Schuster,

2011), 407.

21 Dan Graziano, “Sony Reports Record Annual Loss of $5.7

Billion, BGR, May 10, 2012: http://bgr.com/2012/05/10/sonyannual-loss-sets-record/, accessed April 24 2017. The company continued to struggle for several years, but has recently reported increased profits again, due to cost-cutting and the success of its PlayStation and mobile phones.

22 “Cell Phone Subscribers in the U. S., 1985–2010,” CTIA—

The Wireless Association, http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/ A0933563.html, accessed December 22, 2016.

23 pocketcalculatorshow.com/walkman/museum, accessed

December 22, 2016.

NOTES 129

24 walkmancentral.com, accessed April 19, 2017. 25 Alexander Harris, “Price for ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’

Walkman Skyrockets on eBay,” StackStreet, August 12: https:// stackstreet.com/price-guardians-galaxy-walkman-skyrocketsebay, accessed December 22, 2016.

26 Marc Hogan, “This Is Not a Mixtape,” Pitchfork, February 22,

2010: http://pitchfork.com/features/article/7764-this-is-not-amixtape/, accessed January 2, 2017.

27 Jeniece Pettitt, “This Company Is Still Making Audio Cassettes

and Sales Are Better Than Ever,” Bloomberg.com, September 1, 2015, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-09-01/ this-company-is-still-making-audio-cassettes-and-sales-arebetter-than-ever, accessed May 20, 2017.

28 Related to this point, Jonathan Sterne writes, “While

a damaged disc or magnetic tape may yield a little information—it may be possible to hear an old recording through the waves of hisses or crackles of a needle as it passes through damaged grooves—digital data have a more radical threshold of intelligibility. One moment they are intelligible, but once their decay becomes palpable, the file is rendered entirely unreadable. In other words, digital files do not age with any grace. Where analog recordings fade slowly into nothingness, digital recordings fall off a cliff from presence into absence.” (“The Preservation Paradox in Digital Audio,” in Sound Souvenirs, Bijsterveld and van Dijck, eds., 64).

29 David Sax, The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They

Matter (New York: PublicAffairs, 2016), 114.

30 Michael Bull makes this point. 31 The Snout Bag, September 4, 2010: http://rubbersnout.

blogspot.com/2010/09/walkman-nostalgia.html, accessed December 22, 2016.

130 NOTES

32 “Letters: Appreciating the Virtues of the Maligned Cassette,”

New York Times, December 31, 2015.

33 Fred Davis, “Nostalgia, Identity and the Current Nostalgia

Wave,” Journal of Popular Culture (Fall 1977), 414.

34 Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism, xxvii. 35 John McPhee, Encounters with the Archdruid (New York:

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), 29.

NOTES 131

INDEX

Page references for illustrations appear in italics. 10CC 99 1984 Los Angeles Olympics 76 Abbey Road (Beatles)  104 analog  101–6, 109–10, 111 Apple  92, 95 iPad 109 iPhone  4, 97 iPod  1, 45, 92, 93, 95, 96, 98, 104 Art of Japanese Management, The (Pascale, Athos) 77–8 Asai, Toshio  20 Athos, Anthony G. The Art of Japanese Management 77–8 audio cassette, see cassette Austria  3, 60, 86 automobile industry  75, 77, 78

Back to the Future (Zemeckis) 84, 85 Baker & McKenzie (law firm) 33 Banana Republic  75 Bangles 83 Banjoko, Adisa  42 BBC News Magazine 1 Beat Happening  2 Beatles  37, 104 Abbey Road 104 Beethoven, Ludwig van 97 Benjamin, Walter  17 Beresford, Keith  33 Berlin, Germany  24 Berlin Wall  76 Bernstein, Leonard  19 Beverly Hills, California  57 Blood Sugar Sex Magik (Red Hot Chili Peppers)  85 Bloom, Allan  70–1, 104

The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students 70 Bloomingdale’s  38, 43 Books on Tape  59, 73 boom box  18, 41–3, 53, 54, 64, 98 Bose 25 Boyle, Danny Steve Jobs 89 BPI, see British Phonographic Industry (BPI) Brand, Stewart  91 Whole Earth Catalog 91 Brazil 24–5 Breakthroughs! (Nayak, Ketteringham) 20–1, 22, 35 Britain  33, 34, 66–8 Labour Party  66 British Phonographic Industry (BPI) 60, 61 Brower, David  109 Buggles “Video Killed The Radio Star” 69 Bull, Michael  80–2 California 57 Campbell, Scott  1, 4

Canada 52 Candy Crush 97 Canon 78 car stereo  32, 37, 61 Carter, Jimmy  67 cassette  2, 3, 17, 19, 22, 27, 49, 53, 59, 60–2, 89–90, 91, 100–1, 105, 111 cassette player  17, 18, 20, 22, 35 CBC Radio  101 CBS Records  95 CD  61–2, 90, 91, 93, 105 cell phone, see smartphone Chicago, Illinois  44, 58 Chicago Tribune  40, 44, 65 Chronic, The (Dr. Dre)  104 Clark, Trevor  41–2 Closing of the American Mind, The: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students (Bloom) 70 Cole, December  45 “Coming Audio Revolution, The” (Pavel)  31 compact disc, see CD Connecticut 83 consumer electronics industry  35, 56, 59, 77, 78, 94, 99 INDEX 133

consumerism  22, 53–4, 75–9 Consumer Reports 75 Culture of Narcissism, The (Lasch) 72 Cure, The  6 Depeche Mode  73 Desire (Dylan)  85 Detroit, Michigan  79 digital revolution  95 Dinosaur Jr.  2 Disques 15 Do the Right Thing (Lee) 43 Dr. Dre  90 The Chronic 104 Dylan, Bob  85, 104 Desire 85 earbud/earphone  65–6, 98, see also headphone eBay 100 Economist 69 Eisenberg, Evan  17, 82 The Recording Angel 82 Elizabeth II, Queen of England  3, 87 Encounters with the Archdruid (McPhee) 109 England  23, 56 Esaki, Leo  13–14 Europe  16, 26, 27–8, 52 134 INDEX

Facebook 106 FaceTime 97 fantasy and science fiction 35 Fantel, Hans  56 Federation of German Industries 24 Ferrante, Elena  97 “First, Drug Abuse; Now, Earphone Abuse” (Greene) 65–6 “Fitness Walkout” (Fonda) 72 Florida 57 Fonda, Jane  72 “Fitness Walkout”  72 “Founding Prospectus, The” (Ibuka) 12 Fox, Michael J.  84, 85 France  52, 85 baladeur 52 Gaye, Marvin  27 “What’s Going On?”  27 Georgia 57 Germany  21, 24, 30, 32, 46, 60, 76 Gibson, William  38, 47 globalization  5, 14, 19, 23, 94 GNP, see Soviet Union; United States Goffard, Chris  49–50 Google 105

Greene, Bob  65–6, 109 “First, Drug Abuse; Now, Earphone Abuse”  65–6 Gross, Oscar  58 Guardians of the Galaxy (Gunn) 99–100, 100 Gulf War  87 Gunn, James Guardians of the Galaxy 99–100, 100 Guys, Constantin  63 Hard Rock Café  86 Harris, Thomas Anthony I’m OK—You’re OK 59 Hartley, Marilee The Yuppie Handbook 73, 74 Harvard Business Review 10 Harvard University  70 Harvey, P. J.  91 headphones  2, 5, 17–18, 19, 21, 26–7, 28, 29, 30, 32, 35, 36, 37, 45, 53, 57–9, 62, 63, 68, 80, 82, 83, 98, 99, 109 hearing loss  53, 55–7 hip-hop culture  41–2 Hiroshima, Japan  9, 77 Hitachi 51 Hofer, Johannes  106 home audio  17 home taping  59–62, 61, 90

Honda 78 Horowitz, Rick  65 Hosokawa, Shuhei  64–5 Hungary 60 Ibuka, Masaru  10–13, 14, 18–19, 20, 21, 26, 31, 94, see also Sony “The Founding Prospectus” 12 Idei, Nobuyuki  95 Iggy Pop  47 Illinois 57 I’m OK—You’re OK (Harris) 59 India 52 individualism  54, 67–71, 72, 73 instant gratification  68–70 Italy 30 Jackson, Michael  2, 95 Jackson, Vince  62–3 Japan  9, 10–14, 23, 30, 32, 36, 52, 60, 76–9, 87, 94 economic crisis  94 management style  77–8 protectionism 79 reconstruction  9–14, 79 United States  77–9, 87 World War II  9, 10–12, 77 Jobs, Steve  92, 95 Joel, Billy  95 INDEX 135

Katz, Mark  15 Ketteringham, John M.  20–1, 22, 35 Breakthroughs!  20–1, 22, 35 Kidder, Tracy  59 The Soul of a New Machine 59 Kiedis, Anthony  85 Kissinger, Henry  19 Kleenex 23 Knaussgaard, Karl Ove  47 Koss, John  17 Koss Corporation  56 Kuzniak, Richard  58 Lack, Andy  95 Lamont, Tom  90 Lasch, Christopher  72, 108 The Culture of Narcissism 72 Lauper, Cyndi  64 Lavasco, Mark  41 Lee, Spike  43 Do the Right Thing 43 Levy, Steven  93 liberal vs. conservative  68–9 London, England  32 London Underground  55, 66 Los Angeles, California  36–7, 49–50 loudspeaker  12, 25, 26, 29, 30, 46 LP, see record (vinyl) 136 INDEX

McPhee, John  109 Encounters with the Archdruid 109 Macy’s 38 Madonna 2 Mann, Herbie  27 Push Push 27 Marvel Comics  99, 100 Massachusetts 57 MC Hammer  64 Melody Maker  51 Metal Health (Quiet Riot) 49–50 Mercedes-Benz 44 Metallica 90 “Metropolis and Mental Life, The” (Simmel)  63 Metropolitan Museum of Art 19 Milan, Italy  32, 35 Minnesota 57 mix tape  2, 105, 111 Mix Tape: The Art of Cassette Culture (Moore)  101 Monkees 104 Moore, Thurston  100–1 Mix Tape: The Art of Cassette Culture 101 Morita, Akio  10–13, 14, 18, 19–21, 22–3, 26, 31, 43, 77, 78, 87, 94, see also Sony Morita, Naoko  19

MP3  60, 90–1, 92, 94 MTV  53, 69, 81 music, see also Walkman access  14, 17, 53, 90 commodity  17, 90–1 crime and theft  59–62, 61, 90 customization  40–1, 53, 54, 92–3, 104 digital  89–93, 95, 108–10 distraction  71, 82–4 pleasure  82–4, 105 portability  24–8, 30, 38–41, 54, 92–3, 96 private vs. social  43, 45, 46, 53, 54, 55, 62–6, 68, 70, 82–4, 104 quantity 92–3 race and class  41–3 sharing  44, 90

New Jersey  57, 83 Newsweek 73 New York 67 New York City  19, 39, 41, 44, 56, 86, 98 New Yorker  44–5, 47 New York Times  39, 41, 56, 61, 70, 105 Nintendo 78 Legend of Zelda, The 78 Super Mario Bros.  6, 78 Nirvana 2 Nissan 78 Nobel Prize in Physics  13–14 NSA, see National Security Agency (NSA)

Nagasaki, Japan  9, 77 Napster  90, 95 National Audio Company 101 National Security Agency (NSA) 105 Nayak, P. Ranganath  20–1, 22, 35 Breakthroughs!  20–1, 22, 35 New Deal  67 New England Journal of Medicine 55

Panasonic  51, 78 Pascale, Richard Tanner The Art of Japanese Management 77–8 patent 28–34 Pavel, Andreas  24–36, 25, 37, 46, 56 “The Coming Audio Revolution” 31 Stereobelt 30–6, 31 Pearl Harbor  79 Pearl Jam  93

Occupational Safety and Health Administration 55 Oxford English Dictionary  5

INDEX 137

Pennsylvania  57, 58 Perez, Rosie  42 Philips  22, 32 phonograph  11, 12, 15, 16 Piesman, Marissa The Yuppie Handbook 73, 74 Pioneer 26 SE-L20 26 Pixies 2 Plato 70 Playboy 78 Pocket Calculator (website) Walkman Museum  98–9 Pratt, Chris  99, 100 Presley, Elvis  16 Public Enemy  97 Push Push (Mann)  27 Quiet Riot  49–50 Metal Health 49–50 radio  11, 13, 15, 16, 29, see also transistor radio Ralph Lauren  73 Reagan, Ronald  67 record (vinyl)  17, 53, 59–62, 61, 90, 101 record industry  59–62, 61, 90, 95 Recording Angel, The (Eisenberg) 82 138 INDEX

Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA)  90 record player, see phonograph Redbone 99 Red Hot Chili Peppers  85 Blood Sugar Sex Magik 85 REM 2 Revenge of Analog, The (Sax) 101–2 RIAA, see Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) Robinson, Ron  36–7 rock and roll  14 Rolling Stone 87 Rolling Stones  37, 104 Roxy Music  47 Sade 93 Saldana, Zoe  100, 100 sales 50–2 Salvation Army  2 San Francisco, California  44, 45 Sanyo 51 São Paulo, Brazil  24–6, 35 Satie, Erik  104 Sax, David  101–2 The Revenge of Analog 101–2 Schiffer, Michael  18, 35 Schönhammer, Rainer  63 Schrage, Michael  87

Seal 93 Searchterms.com 90 Seattle, Washington  44 self-improvement 72–3 Sessions, Tiffany  58–9 Shakespeare, William  70 Sharp 51 Simmel, Georg  63 “The Metropolis and Mental Life” 63 Skype  35, 107 smartphone  4, 22, 45, 97–8, 103, 104, 105, 106, 108–10 Snoutbagger (blogger)  104–5 Sonic Youth  91 Sony  5, 10–14, 14, 17, 18–24, 26, 28, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 38, 45, 50–2, 56, 77, 78, 86, 94–6, see also Walkman advertising 38, 39, 40, 51 decline 94–6 Discman 93 knockoff  5, 23, 52 My First Sony  56 Pressman  19, 20, 21, 23 sales  50–2, 59, 94–6 Sony Music  95 Tape Recorder Division 20 Trinitron 17 Soul of a New Machine, The (Kidder) 59

sound cinema  31, 46–7 health and safety  53, 55–7 hi-fidelity  26, 29 quality  29–30, 38–9, 90 stereo  6, 17, 18, 21, 29, 32 Soviet Union  52, 75–6 Gross National Product (GNP) 75–6 speaker, see loudspeaker Spheeris, Penelope Wayne’s World 6 Springsteen, Bruce  95 Starbucks 107 Stepp, Steve  101 Sterne, Jonathan  91 Steve Jobs (Boyle)  89 Stevenson, Robert Louis Treasure Island 59 Straw, Jack  66, 68 Sweden  23, 60 Switzerland 27 Talking Heads  37 tape, see cassette tape recorder  13, 19, 21–2, 26, 29, 35, 103 Tape-Worm 59 technology, see also Walkman access  17, 44–5, 71 analog  98–106, 109–10, 111 consumerism  53, 75–6 control  65, 104, 105 INDEX 139

crime and theft  49–50, 52, 58–62, 61 digital  89–93, 95, 108–10 diversity 44–5 gender 82 health and safety  53, 55–7, 72–3, 108–9 limitation 102, 104–5 nostalgia  6–7, 81–5, 89–110 obsolescence  4, 107 on-demand  16, 38–9 private vs. social  15–16, 19, 23, 24, 26–7, 38–9, 45–6, 53, 54, 55, 62–6, 68, 70, 80–4, 87–8, 96–8, 104, 105–6, 108–9 recreation 69–70 social implication  64–70, 87–8, 96–8 sound  6, 14–17, 20, 21, 22, 38–9 trade restriction  52 telephone  15, 22, 35 Thatcher, Margaret 66–7 Third World  52 Tiffany & Co.  87 Tokyo, Japan  9, 10, 11, 12, 19, 24, 36, 55, 87, 95

140 INDEX

Tokyo Telecommunications Research Institute (Tokyo Tsushin Kenkyusho) 12, see also Sony Toshiba  51, 78 Touch 62 Toyota 78 transistor radio  6, 13–14, 18, 29 Travelcassette 59 Treasure Island (Stevenson) 59 Trudeau, Garry  73 Trump, Donald  97 Tufts-New England Medical Center 55 Tupperware 23 TV  17, 31, 75, 88 Ulrich, Lars  90, 91 United Kingdom  30, 32, 60, 90 United States  9, 23, 30, 37, 38, 41, 52, 53–4, 60, 67–8, 69, 75–9, 96, 109 Gross National Product (GNP) 76 Japan  76–9, 87 University of Chicago Committee of Social Thought 70

University of Florida  58 University of Keele, England 56–7 University of Sussex, England 80 VCR  3, 17, 75, 79 Victoria, British Columbia  44 Victoria’s Secret  75 videocassette  17, 72 videotape 72 Vienna, Austria  86, 86 Vietnam War  70 vinyl, see record (vinyl) Virginia 57 Vogue 72–3 Walkman  39, 40, 51, 86 accessory  3–4, 44–5, 73 addiction  45, 46, 47, 51–2, 56, 80, 93, 97, 108 aesthetic  63, 64 automobile use  57–8 customization  40–1, 53, 81–2, 104 cycle/pedestrian use  57–8 distraction  3, 4, 69–71 experience  45–7, 80–5, 93, 102–3, 104 fetishization  101, 108 multitasking  3, 41, 53, 73, 96, 106

nostalgia  6–7, 81–5, 89–110, 111 popularity  59–60, 71 private vs. social  15–16, 19, 23, 24, 26–7, 38–9, 45–6, 53, 54, 55, 62–6, 68, 70, 80–4, 87–8, 96–8, 104, 105–6, 108–9 self-improvement 72–3 symbol  53–4, 75–6, 79 vintage 98–106 Walkman Central (website) 99 Wall Street Journal 42 Walmart 103 Warby Parker  4 War on Poverty  67 Washington 57 Washington, DC  44, 58 Washington Post 73, 76, 87 Wayne’s World (Spheeris) 6 Weiner, Anthony  105 Wenner, Jann  87 “What’s Going On?” (Gaye) 27 Who, The  37 Whole Earth Calatog 91 Wilson, A. N.  68 Wolfe, Tom  67

INDEX 141

Wonder Years, The 6 Woodbridge, New Jersey  57–8 World War II  9, 11–12, 24 Yamaha  32, 78

142 INDEX

Yuppie Handbook, The (Piesman, Hartley) 73, 74 Zemeckis, Robert Back to the Future 84, 85