good vibrations: ambience and alienation in the twentieth century

JOIJRNAL OF POPIIL AR MUSIC STUDIFS, I4 115-137. 2002 Copyright 1 2002 laylor (li Francis 1524-222b~U2 ‘61200+ 00 DO1 10 IUX0~IS242220~90055074

Good Vibrations: Ambience and Alienation in the Twentieth Century

Stephen Nunns New York University

n October 4, 1986, CBS news anchor Dan Rather was strolling on Manhattan’s 0 Upper East Side when a highly agitated man confronted him. He recognized Rather, but was incoherent, shouting a slew of gibberish at him. Although these kinds of intrusions are part of daily New York life, it became increasingly obvious to the television journalist that he was actually in physical danger, so he retreated into the lobby of a nearby apartment building. The man followed Rather into the building and knocked him down, kicking and pummeling him. As he attacked, the man yelled a stream of incoherent sentences, including-so Rather later claimed- “Kenneth, what’s the frequency?” Eventually, the building‘s superintendent appeared, and the assailant dashed off into the Manhattan night.

The event quickly made the press and became a piece of American popular folklore. Some of Rather’s critics suggested that the event was just another odd episode in Rather’s already idiosyncratic career. Others claimed that the attack was in some way fabricated by the television personality, and that Rather’s injuries were inflicted by the jealous husband of a woman with whom Rather was having an affair. Still others, citing the journalist’s on-air antics (such as storming off the CBS Evening News set in mid-broadcast, leaving 10 minutes of dead airtime), suggested that the newsman was losing touch with reality. Eventually, the episode became fodder for a pop song by R.E.M.-”What‘s the Frequency, Kenneth?” Un- der a dirge o f Peter Buck‘s grunge-inspired guitars, vocalist Michael Stipe attempted to capture what he supposed was the alienated hysteria of Rather’s attacker:

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“What’s the frequency, Kenneth?” is your Benzedrine, uh-huh I was brain-dead, locked out, numb, not up to speed I thought I’d pegged you an idiot’s dream Tunnel vision from the outsider’s screen

I never understood the frequency, uh-huh You wore our expectations like an armored suit, uh-huh

Perhaps the most surreal moment occurred in 1995, when The Late Show With David Letterman played a 20-second clip of Rather, adorned in sunglasses and a black t-shirt, singing along with Stipe during the band‘s sound check for a performance at Madison Square Garden. New York Daily News media colum- nist Erik Mink, writing about the segment and Rather’s usual on-air “stiffness,” commented, ”There’s a difference belween appearing loose and looking like a buf- foon . . . it certainly doesn’t reinforce his credibility or authority” (Mink, 1995, p. 58).

For years, the episode was written off as one of those weird, haphazard hap- penings of the modern world-the combination of late-twentieth-century urban crime and the pitfalls of celebrity. However, the story took a bizarre twist eight years later. In late August 1994, a man named William Tager climbed into his pickup truck and drove from his home in Charlotte, North Carolina, to New York City. He parked the vehicle out\ide of the NBC studios at Rockefeller Plaza, grabbed an AK-47 rifle out of the truck bed, and attempted to gain access to rhe studios where the Today Show is broadcast. After being turned away by a security guard, Tager fired his gun into the back of Campbell Theron Montgomery, a stagehand who had emerged from the stage door. Montgomery died almost instantly, and his death was caught on tape by both surveillance cameras and the video cameras of tourists who were in the vicinity.

When the police captured Tager, he claimed that the media-specifically the national television networks (CBS, NBC, and ABC)-had had him under surveillance and were “beaming hostile messages at him constantly. He says that the networks were watching him for 20 years,” Assistant Chief John J. Hill, commander of Manhattan detectives, said at the time. “He claims that they’ve been bugging him foi 20 years. He claims that they tap his phone, they send rays on top of him, vibrations come out of the television. These are the terms he uses“ (McFadden, 1994, p. B l ) .

Finally, in 1997, over a decade after the original attack, Tager admitted that he was Rather’s mysterious assailant that evening on Park Avenue. Dr. Park Dietz, a well-known forensic psychiatrist who had helped build cases against Jeffrey Dahmer and Joel Rifkin, was brought in by the prosecution to establish if the assailant was legally sane when he shot Montgomery in 1994. During the interviews, Tager admitted that he had stumbled upon Rather by chance 10 years before. The one- time Navy Seal believed at that time that the media was broadcasting signals directly into his brain and, when he realized who Rather was, demanded that ihe anchor tell him the frequency being used to transmit the messages. When Rather didn’t respond, Tager attacked him. “He knew what he was doing,” Dietz said. “He knew it was wrong. And he contemplated doing worse harm than he did“ (Mink, 1997, p. 3) . For his part, after years of enduring ridicule about the incident, Rather

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had a sense of vindication. “Everybody’s had their guess about what happened,” he said, “and some have had fun with it. Now the facts are out. My biggest regret is he wasn’t caught before hc killed somebody” (Mink, 1997, p. 3).

Common sense suggests that Tager was insane at the time of the shooting. However, upon the suggestion of his council, Tager waived his right to a trial and instead pleaded guilty to manslaughter and weapons charges. (He currently is serv- ing a 12%- to 20-year sentence.)

Clearly, Tager is disturbed, but his insanity-in its peculiar twentieth-century manifestation--proves telling, revealing interesting links between madness, technology, and art. For any journalist, the William Tagers of the world are newsroom stereotypes-the source who calls up with a vaguely plausible story of institutional or government corruption and blows it by mentioning the steel plate that was implanted in his head, or the surveillance that his enemies have him under, which can include anything from bugs in the light fixtures to cameras in the walls. Yet, nearly every stereotype has its basis in reality. And the seeds for these “insane” fears are germinated in our everyday world, where private moments can be moni- tored both for the sake of the safety of society at large (police surveillance cameras posted throughout New York’s Washington Square Park, cameras at ATM ma- chines, cameras watching babysitters), for monetary gain (“reality” TV), or for personal legal issues (landlords who put surveillance cameras in the peepholes of their apartments so they can track the comings and goings-or lack thereof-of tenants in rent-controlled apartments).

Obviously, modern advancements in technology-particularly sonic technologies-have had a huge effect on the human psyche: The basic temporal and spatial rhythms were altered as soon as the half-deaf Thomas Edison shouted, “Mary had a little lamb!” into the bellmouth of his brand new phonograph machine in 1877. But the changes started before that specific event. As the painter Fernand LCger once remarked, “A modern man registers a hundred times more sensory impres- sions than an eighteenth-century artist” (Kern, 1983, as cited in Chanan, 1994, p. 225). Modernization, spurred by the industrialization and urbanization that took place during the nineteenth century, created a brave new ambient universe. As it did, some basic tenets about how, where, and what humans could experience in space and time were thrown into complete disarray. People’s basic relationship to architecture was altered via technical advances in height (tall buildings, particularly the unveiling of the Eiffel Tower in 1889, for example) and the usage of glass (an extreme example being the crystal palaces of the late nineteenth century). Changes in speed and mobility-thanks to the railroad and, eventually, the auto- mobile-altered the human sensorium as well. In urban areas, gas and electricity allowed for a new relationship to darkness and a renegotiation of how cities could be used at night and changed everything from mating rituals to the length of the workday.

Ultimately, the question we have to ask ourselves is whether these techno- logical advances-along with the sonic discoveries of Edison, Bell, Marconi, and Berliner-have overtaken our relationship to existence itself; whether our senses have been inexorably altered by the “frequencies” and “vibrations” Tager was talking about; and whether that kind of adjustment can have a psychopathological effect not only on individuals but on society as a whole. One doesn’t have to be a Luddite

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to think that these technologies might have a dark side. And perhaps William Tager had a point after all?

This is, in part, what both Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno were grappling with during the 1930s and ’ ~ O S , each having the vantage point of one foot firmly planted in a nostalgic and (fictional) antiquarian preindustrial world, and another lodged in a new, highly mechanized, modernistic iiber-capitalistic society. If Benjamin was concerned about “the decay of aura,” his worries were all but squelched by a humanistic faith in the process of democrati~ation that he believed follows suit (Benjamin, 1968). For his part, however, Adomo was skeptical. He cynically suggested that the freedom that mass-produced work can represent to us is illusory at best and nothing more than a form of containment and control. Just as important, at least when considering issues relating to the modern ambience, are Adorno’s ideas about the different kinds of listeners. Ailhough he acknowl- edged that there are a variety of different types, Adorno suggested that a majority of the population falls into the “entertainment listener”-a completely passive vessel who, as Michael Chanan put it, “uses music merely as a background to cut off silence and kill time” (Chanan, 1994, p. 102).

Although at first glance this kind of cynical representation of the average music listener might seem patronizing (after all, isn’t there a choice involved in drop- ping out?), this depiction also could be seen as the logical end result of technologi- cal advances, specifically in forms of sonic reproduction. Edison’s wax cylinder and Bell’s telephone (two devices that, despite their initial differences-notably one being mechanical and the other electrical-are inexorably conjoined) actually changed how people heard, and they permanently altered human beings’ temporal and spatial relationships to sound. For example, a sound no longer had to have any sort of real physical relatioilship to its creator, causing what R. Murray Schafer called a form of “schizophrenia” in which sounds are “ventriloquized” and divorced from their natural sources (cited in Lanza, 1994, p. 12).

Recorded sound also created a gulf between performer and audience. Whereas once the creation of music had been a participatory event-the piano was a necessary piece of furniture in most middle-class homes during the nineteenth century-thd all changed with the advent of new technologies. (The piano was re- placed by I he Victrola and, later, the radio.) As Lawrence Levine pointed out, these changes coincided with the general disciplining of audiences. As he wrote, “Noth- ing seems to have troubled the new arbiters of culture more than the nineteenth century practice of sponianeous expressions of pleasure and disapproval in the form of cheers, yells, gesticulations, hisses, boos, stamping of feet, whi\i ling, crying for encores, and applause” (Levine, 1988, p. 192). Performers who seriously believed that such boisterous reactions would destroy the integrity of a performance of a Chopin Nocturne could now rest easy; thanks to both recording and broadcasting, the distance between the player and her pesky audience was wider than ever. It was now an abyss that encompassed both time and space.

Still, there were benefits. As Benjamin pointed out, mechanical reproduction radically renegotiates the issues of access and ownership. He claimed that the pos- sibility of reproduction “enables the original to meet the beholder halfway. . . . The cathedral leaves its locale to be received in the studio of a lover of art; the choral

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production, performed in an auditorium or in the open air, resounds in the draw- ing room” (Benjamin, 1968, p. 221). Whereas art was available to a privileged few (the aristocracy and the religious elite), reproduction allows access for the masses; this, is turn, has a democratizing influence that can only result in a subjugation of specialization-particularly when it comes to art-which (it is hoped) will spur a politicization of the entire process. “[Wle see,” Benjamin wrote, “that the vast melting-down process . . . not only destroys the conventional separation between genres, between writer and poet, scholar and popularizer, but that it questions even the separation between author and reader” (1998, p. 90). In Benjamin’s so- cialist utopia, the new technology could actually bridge the gap-and blur the distinctions-between artist and audience. This new apparatus could actually be used as an effective tool for creating solidarity among the proletariat and causing rapid social, political, and-the implication is-psychological and spiritual changes. It is basically an extension of the strategy laid out by Marx and Engels almost 90 years before in The Communist Manifesto:

The real fruit of their battle lies, not in the immediate result, but in the ever-expanding union of the workers. This union is helped on by the improved means of communication that are created by modern industry and that place the workers of different localities in contact with one another. (Marx fi Engels, 18481 1972, p. 48 1 )

However, what Benjamin never really dealt with-and what Adorno addressed both in his own work and in his correspondence with Benjamin-is the new issue of ownership: how the new means of [relproduction had already quickly fallen into capitalist hands-resulting in ruthless patent and intellectual property wars that cropped up almost immediately between Edison, Bell, Western Union, and the Bell Company’s manufacturing arm, Western Electric. These new owners had a vested interest in control over both the property and its consumers. Adorno accused Benjamin of “anarchistic romanticism” and of having “blind confidence in the spontaneous power of the proletariat in the historical process”-a faith that had little historical foundation. Where Benjamin saw audiences laughing at Chaplin’s Modern Times as an example of collective solidarity and political possibil- ity, Adorno saw only manipulation and control. ”The laughter of the audience a t a cinema . . . is anything but good and revolutionary,” he wrote to Benjamin in 1936. “Instead, it is full of the worst bourgeois sadism” (Bloch et al., 1977, p. 123).

If mechanical reproduction had powerful implications, it is interesting to note how confused the major players were about exactly how to use the new tools. It was as if the creators of modernity were as surprised by the new era as everyone else. And perhaps there’s a bit of truth to that: Edison originally had been trying to extend the range of the telephone when he stumbled upon his early version of the phonograph. Knowing immediately he was onto . . . something, he wrote an article about his new invention that was published in the May issue of the North Amerkan ReviaY entitled “The Phonograph and Its Future.” Obviously, the machine was not ready for general use; it would be another 10 years before he

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would make a “talking machine” that was ready for commercial production.’ In- stead, Edison was left to speculate about what the new machine might be used for. The article makes peculiar readilig, since it’s abundantly clear that the inventor was grasping at straws. In fact, he all but admitted this:

From the very abundance of conjectural and prophetic opinions which have been disseminated by the press, the public is liable to become confused, and less accurately informed as to the immediate result and ef- fects of the phonograph than if the invention had been one confined to certain specific applications, and therefore of less interest to the masses. The writer has no fault to find with this condition of the discussion of the merits and possibilities of his invention; for, indeed, the possibilities are so illimitable arid the probabilities so numerous that he-though subject to the influence of familiar contact-is himself in a somewhat chaotic condition of mind as to where to draw the dividing line. (Edison, 1878, p. 529)

Edison then went on to suggest a number of uses, including dictation; a form of “books on tape” for the blind; the teaching of elocution; the reproduction of music; “family record” (“For the purpose of preserving the sayings, the voices, and the last words of the dying member of the family”); books again-it seems that Edison was running out of ideas, although in this case he was interested in ethnog- raphy and oral documentation (“They would preserve more thdn the mental ema- nations of the brain of the author; and, as a bequest to future generations, they would be unequaled.”); toys and music boxes; clocks that would announce the time, when meals are ready, and so on; advertising (“It is only necessary to call attention to it”); the preservation of famous speeches; and, finally-and to Edison, most importantly (possibly because of his competitive relationship to Bell)-as a connection to the telephone, so that conversations could be recorded and saved for posterity and the level of telephonic discourse might be raised to a higher intellectual (and legal) standard (see Edison, 1878, pp. 529-534).

Although all of the ideas have been achieved in one form or another, it’s interesting to see where Edison’s priorities lie. Music is number four on the list, and Chanan has suggested that is because of the technical limitations of the instrument at the time (Chanan, 1995, p. 3). However, it seems possible that the inventor’s personal handicap (he was completely deaf in his left ear and, by the end of his life, had only 10% of his hearing in the other) may have been a contributing factor. Edison’s deafness obviously affected his musical appreciation; it may well have been the reason why he had such an antagonistic attitude toward vibrato in vocal- ists; he insisted that they sing with a pure, colorless tone when he recorded them. (The slight shifts in pitch that vibrato creates probably sounded “wrong,” and may even have been painful to the inventor; see Holdridge, 2000, n.p.).

Most interesting, though, is the rather pedestrian nature of Edison’s article. There is a certain banality and intellectual ambivalence in his writing; it’s as if the inventor was trying to grapple only with the practical (read, commercial) applications of his subject, demonstrating a good, old-fashioned American anti-intellectual suspicion of metaphysical exploration. It’s almost as if Edison had changed the

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very nature of experiential reality, but then ran away from this abstraction and instead, in a typically American move, embraced a Jamesiarr pragmatism.

If it is a clichC that an American might avoid the deep waters of intellectual discourse, then it’s equally stereotypical to claim that a Frenchman would be inore open to the ontological possibilities. Charles Cros-sardonic French poet, inventor, absinthe aficionado, and friend to both Rimbaud and Verlaine-hand-delivered a paper to the Academy of Sciences in Paris outlining the principles of the phonograph (or, as Cros called it, the palkophone) eight months before Edison screamed into his machine. However, thanks to a lack of funding and the academy’s inexpli- cable tardiness in opening their mail, the American beat him to the punch. In his poem “Inscription,” Cros outlined what his paleophone could have done, had it been given a chance:

Like the features on a cameo I wanted the beloved voice To remain a keepsake, forever cherished, Repeating the musical Dream of an hour too brief; Time wishes to flee, I master it. (Cros, 1908, as cited in Weiss, n.d.)

But Cros’s mastery of time was limited: When his poem was finally published, he had been dead for 20 years. Nevertheless, Cros, a surrealist before the move- merit had a name, deeply understood the metaphysical changes that such a device could embody. Time could be mastered: music could be perpetually repeated; one’s voice could be appropriated, and owned as a “keepsake” by someone else. Others could control our personal frequencies. What we perceived as our individual vibrations might be coming from another source. Our cries, laughs, whispers, and shrieks could be disembodied, seized, and owned by somebody else.

As Cros retreated into an absinthe haze, embittered by the fact that yet another invention had been “stolen” from him (he had found himself in a similar situation a few years before with color photography), he could find solace with his fellow Latin Quarter poets and intellectuals at Le Chat Noir. In the aftermath of the Paris Commune, the famous Parisian cafe was known as much for its “democratic” values-the painterlrestaurateur Rodolphe Salis and his crew of waiters would perpetually insult the customers-as for its modernist bohemian qualities. In 1888, the last year of Cros’s life, he may well have made one last hejira to Le Chat Noir and heard a 22-year-old Montmartre piano player who, over the next five years, would change the course of musical history with three sets of minimalistic pieces titled Trois Sarabandes, Trois Gymnopedies, and Gnossiennes.

In the late 188Os, Eric Leslie Satie was the embodiment of the Parisian bohe- mianflhneur: He changed the spelling of his name and, as Roger Shattuck described it, “grew a beard, adopted a flowing tie, velvet coat, and a soft felt hat” (Shatttuck, 1955, p. 117). The youthful poseur soon turned into the real thing, and over the next 30 years Satie would become an agentprovacafeur against both the bourgeoisie and his fellow artists. His flirtations wilh mystical religion (a flirtation with the Rosicrucians), alcoholism, radical socialism, traditional formalism (return-

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ing to conservatory training at the age of 39) and wild experimentation (he dabbled in practically all of the major art movements of the period, including Cubism, Dada, and Surrealism, although he eventually was shunned by Breton and his acolytes) culminated in a form of eccentricity that bordcred on madness. As early as Gnossiennes ( 1890-1893) the composer was dispensing with time signatures and bar lines, instead writing instructions on the score such as ”arm yourself with clair- voyance” and “open your head.” In 1891, he composed a “sound dCcor,“ and two years later he produced Vexations, an 18-note pattern scored to be repeated 840 times. In 19 17, he alienated much of Paris’s intellectual establishment, including his old friend Claude Lkbussy, with Parade, a collaborative work with Jean Cocteau, Picasso, and Francis Picabia that had a score that called for the glissando of a siren and the rhythms of pistol shots and typewriters (Shattuck, 1955, pp. 113-185; Prendergnst, 2000, pp. 6-8).

Obviously, Debussy’s description of him as a “gentle medieval musician who strayed into this century” (Shattuck, 1955, p. 121) seems peculiarly off the mark. Sa tie’s minimalism; his reliance on a mixture of trance, mysticism, and parapsy- chology I I I composition; and his embracing of ambience and noisy technology place him directly, arid appropriately, in the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries. Although it is impossible to pinpoint one specific formative experience, it is clear that a trip to the Paris Exposition in 1889 exposed the composer to new, non- Western ae5thetics. One contemporary account of the exposition by an unnamed American journalist related seeing representatives from “Cochin China, Tonkin, Annarn, Senegal, Algeria, and portions of other fractured empires” and listening to Hungarian bands that played gypsy music while “bronzed Arabs” kept step beside “magnificent white donkeys.” However, the attraction of thc Orient was palpable; the writer was particularly impressed with a group of Javanese dancers:

They were pretty, diminutive creatures, like a cross between babies and idols. . . . The dance was a curious performance and a puzzling one, bizarre rather than barbarous; as monotonous as the devotional exer- cises of the Shakers, but graceful and sinuous . . . either the dancers or the musicians, I could not make out which, uttered little cries like the mew of a cat, but the dance did not become more exciting nor appar- ently leach a climax. It seemed like an Oriental tale, full of trivial incident, and ending without crisis or conclusion. (“Loitering Through,” 1890, p. 361)

Like this American writer, Satie quite likely encountered similar presentation\- the influences are apparent in the “Oriental” and Ea\tern European-oriented liar- monie5 that grace the Gnossiennes. Throughout the live pieces, Satie used Hungar- ian and Romanian minor scales to create a melodic base; meanwhile, a steady, almost drone-like pulse is issued from the left hand. The overall effect is trance-like and, to the modern ear, suggests a form of New Age spiritualism. It is not surpris- ing that Satie became fashionable and received a kind of reemergence (if he ever went away) in the 1980s via ambient New Age music-and all of the crystal-gai- ing and trance-channeling baggage that accompanied it. But to lump Satie’s music in with the “muesli set with a positive ionizer in the corner who look at their

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Habitat furniture as they pay off the mortgage on their hi-fi” (Prendergast, 2000, p. 146) is missing an historical point. Satie’s embracement of primitivism, and the question of how to incorporate its aesthetics and values into a contemporary urban milieu, dogged a number of Modernists throughout this period of colo- nial expansion. It is the first baby step of multiculturalism and globalization, and the beginning of an embracelbanish, attractlrepel relationship with the other that was to become a basic modality of art and culture throughout the twentieth century .

As these late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century artists began trying their hands a t such amateur anthropology, they began to explore the shamanistic possibilities in art. Exposure to Eastern and African performance techniques opened up the boundaries of what art could acconiplish and broke down the confines of the audience/performer relationship. Art became a sort of divination. Evans-Pritchard’s description of a Zande witch doctor (”A witch doctor does not divine with his lips, but with his whole body. He dances the questions which are put to him”; Evans- Pritchard, 1937, p. 176, cited in Rouget, 1985, p. 119) could be a metaphor for the new artist’s role. Using this divination of the body as a roadmap, Modernists realized that the experiential qualities of art are tungible-a move away from both the intellectualism of the Enlightenment and the sensual overkill of Romanticism. Leonard Bernstein ( 1959) may have been off-base in calling Satie’s Gymnopidie ”dispassionate,” but he was correct when he called this type of minimalism “Satie’s way of saving tonality“ from Wagnerian excess (pp. 207-208).

Satie’s interest in this minimalistic and nonintellectual musical experience may have been exemplified best in 1920 with his Musique d’umeublement (furniture music). One account of its creation has Satie eating lunch with Fernand LCger in a restaurant where the volume of the house orchestra was so overwhelming that it forced many of the diners to flee. Reacting to the other patrons’ plights, Satie sup- posedly commented:

You know, there’s a need to create furniture music, that is to say, music that would be a part of the surrounding noises and would take them into account.. . . It would fill up the awkward silences that occasionally descend on guests. It would spare them the usual banalities. Moreover, it would neutralize the street noises that indiscreetly force themselves into the picture. (Gillmor, 1988, p. 232)

The composer elaborated on the idea in a later letter to Cocteau:

We want to establish a music designed to satisfy “useful” needs. . . . Furniture music creates a vibration; it has no other goal; it fills the same role as light and heat. . . . Furniture music for law offices, banks, etc.. . . N o marriage ceremony complete without furniture music. . . . Don’t enter a house which does not have furniture music. (Shattuck, 1955, p. 169)

Musique d‘umeublement (arranged for piano, three clarinets, and trombone) had its debut on March 8, 1920, at Galerie Barbazanges during the intermissions of a

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play by Max Jacob. It was not a success. Although the audience had been implored “not to attach any importance” to the music and to “act during the intermission as if the music did not exist,” when the musicians began playing the score-fragments of popular songs and isolated fragments of melody played repeatedly in close rhythmic patterns-the sprctators dutifully returned to their seats. As a result, Satie rushed around the hall imploring the audience to, “Talk, keep talking. And move around. Whatever you do, don’t listen!” (Shattuck, 1955, p. 169).

That was the only public performance of Musique d’ameublement during Satie’s lifetime. The composer’s interest in furniture music continued-he arranged for several private installations and came up with smaller works that were site-specific, such as “Forged Iron Tapestry” (for house vestibules) and “Phonic Floor Tiles” (for both luncheons and marriage proposals). The pieces have rarely been recorded or performed. The three examples recorded by the Ensemble Erwartung are oddi- ties at best; painfully repetitive and rhythmically austere, lacking any of the beau- tifully open harmonies or memorable melodies that one associates with Satie- but, thcu again, I suppose that’s the point. “Tenture de cabinet prefectoral” is particularly somnambulistic, and “Carrelage phonique” consists of nothing more than a four-bar phrase repeated over and over. (It’s interesting to note that aIi three of the pieces fade out on the CD. Evidently, furniture music never dies-it just fades away.) Ultimarely, furniture music is little more than an idiosyncratic footnote in an already eccentric career.

Satie spent the next four years spinning his wheels and preparing for Reliche, a piece of Dada performance in which ballerinas smoked while dancing, a fireman wandered onstage, costume changes took place in full view of the audience, and the music was pointedly-and, to many, distressingly-dull. The evening was en- livened only by R e d Clair’s “filmed intermission” and by the appearance of the composer himself, who drove onstage for a curtain call in a miniature five-horse- power Citroen. In less than a year, he was dead of cirrhosis of the liver. When his friend and furniture music partner-in-crime Milhaud entered the dead man’s sub- urban apartment, among the filth he found Satie’s dozen corduroy suits piled care- fully atop an empty wardrobe, a piano whose pedals had been repaired with string, dozens of umbrellas, 84 identical hardkerchiefs, and a cluster of cigar boxes in which the composer had meticulously stockpiled more than 4,000 scraps of paper covered with his own drawings and cryptic messages. On the wall of the house facing Satie‘s apartment, Milhaud found a chalk inscription: “This house is haunted by the devil” (Shattuck, 1955, pp. 82-83).

If Musique d‘ameublement did not work, it was mostly because Satie was still operating in outmoded modalities. The composer was still composing for the nineteenth-century concert hall with live musicians. It was not until the advent of ”canned” music-when sound really was separated from any form of physicality- that music could truly become part of the furniture. Until Edison’s (or Cros’s, or Bell’s, or Berliner’s, or Marconi’s) invention was completely applied in the production of ambience, the work could never completely slip into the background and become truly subliminal. (There was, after all, the presence of five musicians to contend with during the Barbazanges presentation.) It wasn’t until music became completely disconnected from the physical realm-first on vinyl and then in the ether-that the “vibrations” could have their full effect.

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If Edison was confused about what exactly to do with his invention, he was not alone. Alexander Graham Bell’s first patent application for the telephone mentioned nothing about the transmission of speech, but referred specifically to the delivery of “musical notes differing in loudness as well as pitch” (Clianan, 1994, p. 239). Meanwhile, wireless telegraphy was becoming more complicated as well. On Christmas Eve 1906, Canadian inventor Reginald Aubrey Fessenden suddenly put Marconi’s interrupted wave-carrying the dots and dashes of Morse code-to a new and unexpected use. As media historian Erik Barnouw (1990) described it, on that evening, ”ship wireless operators over a wide area of the At- lantic, sitting with earphones to head . . . were startled to hear a woman singing; then a violin playing; then a man reading passages from Luke. It was considered uncanny” (p. 13).

The question now seemed to be whether to be wired or to be wireless, and at this early stage, the varioiis media-telep hone, telegraph, gramophone, wireless, even print-were utterly bound up with one another. Marconi came to the U.S. in order to give up-to-the-minute results of the America’s Cup Race to the New York Herald (“Reported by Wireless!” the headlines shrieked; Barnouw, 1990, p. 13). The American Telephone G Telegraph Company, alarmed by Marconi’s revelations and anticipating by almost a century the advent of wireless telephonic communication, bought up various patents from Lee De Forest, the self-described “father of radio.” De Forest was, among other things, developer of the Audion tube, the glass-bulb detector and booster of audio waves that moved the seizure of these invisible, atmospheric patterns out of the realm of alchemy and into the area of commercial science. (Up to that time the waves were captured and converted into electrical currents via the mysterious properties of certain crystals-a New Ageian concept if there ever was one.) De Forest, however, had different ideas from ATGT; in typically cavalier fashion, he was intent on using this new invention as a “broadcast’’ medium. In the early part of the twentieth century, he was one of the first to play gramophone records and to transmit speeches and election results over the wireless. He even broadcast Enrico Caruso from the stage of the Metropolitan Op- era House. However, the major corporations of the time-General Electric, Westinghouse, and ATGT-saw this as a pointlessly unprofitable exercise. After all, De Forest’s audience consisted of not much more than wireless operators and self-educated radio hacks, who were just as happy to send signals as to receive. Hence, the airwaves were a cacophony in this prewar era: Phantasmic voices constantly drifted through the static; it was a moment when Benjamin’s “author as producer” paradigm seemed almost possible.

Not surprisingly, the moment soon passed. The son of a minister, De Forest certainly had philosophic and epistemological considerations in regard to the new medium; indeed, Barnouw suggested, “he seemed to see himself as a pilgrim, strug- gling upward through severe trials.” De Forest’s own baroque writings bear that out: In one diary entry he demonstrated a Cros-like obsession with time. ”The morning wasted,” he wrote, “bitterly will its hours be craved, but no tears of re- morse avail to bring back one golden moment.” All the same, De Forest understood the sociological, economic, and political possibilities of this new instrument. As he put it, “I discovered an invisible Empire of the Air” (Bamouw, 1990, p. 15), and control of that empire became one of the central corporate and government

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obsessions of the period. Initially, the U.S. Navy wanted control of the ether (the military had all but quashed the anarchy of the airwaves by banning amateurs during World War I), but the U.S. government eventually succumbed to corporate pressure and allowed the creation of a giant monopoly: the Radio Corporation of America.

And that tradition has continued: Certainly. the wireless, placed in the right- or wrong-hands, could be a powerful tool llie disembodied radiophonic voice assumed a new aesthetic construct-or, actually, perhaps the oldest one: the om- niscient narrator. The one who knows and sees all. God. “Hearing voices” was not a new concept, but up to this point the insane and religiously enlightened had a corner on the market. Now, everyone was in the same psychic boat. To put it back into Tager’s terminology, vibrations were being beamed into everyone’s heads, and the question of who or what controlled those vibrations became central. Until the early 1930s, there was a strong inclination in the United States to keep radio out of the hands of commercial interests-after all, radio was broadcast through the air, and who could legitimately claim to own such a natural resource? James Rorty summed up this sentiment in 1934:

The American apparatus of advertising. . . is like a grotesque smirking gargoyle set at the very top of America‘s skyscraping adventure in ac- quisition ad infiniturn. . . . The gargoyle’s mouth is a loudspeaker, pow- ered by the vested iiiterest of a two-billion dollar industry, and back of that the vested interests of business as a whole, of industry, of finance. It is never silent, it drowns out all other voices, and it suffers no rebuke, for is it not the voice of America? (Rorty, 1934, cited in Barnouw, 1990, P. 74)

However, by the time Roosevelt signed the Communications Act of 1934, voices like Rorty’s had been pushed to the margins. Commercial broadcasters were already a mighty lobbying force on Capitol Hill, and the era of noncommercial airwaves was gone. It would not be the last time that runaway capitalism was equated with democracy itself; as the one-time president of CBS, William S. Paley, said in 1937, “he who attacks the American system [of broadcasting] attacks democracy itself” (Worth, 2001, p. B 9 ) .

Advertising became the chief organizational principle behind broadcasting. Thanks to AThT’s early experiments with “toll” stations, the radio became an inte- gral part of what Adorno called “the culture industry,” and its audience assumed the mantle of a homogeneous mass of coi1ciimers, effectively becoming the literal manifestation of Marx’s concept of ”exchdrige value versus use value.” The inevitable domination of exchange value-the triumph of commodity fetishism-played itself out in the changes in the entertainment industry. In the late 191Os, Bushwick Records paired up two little-known vaudeville performers, Billy Jones and Ernie Hare. The result, “All She’d Say Was ’Umh Hum,”’ was a hit, and the boys became stars. According to Tim Gracyk and Frank Hoffman (2000), they recorded for no fewer than 16 different recording companies, slamming out songs such as “As a Porcupine Pines for Its Pork,” “I Wish’t I Was in Peoria,” and “I’m Gonna Bring a Watermelon to My Gal Tonight”:

Good Vibrations 127

When I brought an apple She let me hold her hand When I brought an orange We kissed to beat the band When I brought bananas She hugged me with all her might I’m gonna bring a watermelon to my gal tonight1

However, when they hit the airwaves in 1921, they immediately became a commodity, and an identity crisis ensued. When they made their radio debut on WJZ in Newark in 192 1, they appeared under their own names. They then adopted the moniker “The Happiness Boys” (promoting Happiness Candy stores on WEAF in New York), before morphing into “The Interwoven Pair,” plugging a brand of socks. Inevitably, their material became considerably tamer as they became living, breathing, and singing billboards for their sponsors. (Their record-selling power dwindled as well, probably due to over-exposure on the radio.) Eventually, Jones and Hare were reduced to singing:

How do you do everybody? How do you do? It’s nice to say hello to all of you. I’m Billy Jones. I’m Ernie Hare. We’re the Interwoven Pair. How do you do doodle-doodle-doodle-doodle-do?

“A commodity is . . . a mysterious thing,” Marx wrote,

simply becau$e in it the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour. This is the reason why the products of labour become commodities, social things whose qualities are at the same time perceptible and imperceptible by the senses. ( 18671 1972, p. 320)

Indeed, radio commodities are particularly mysterious, due to their ubiquitous qualities-a voice on the ether is perceptible and simultaneously imperceptible. And that omniscience, as Adorno pointed out, is particularly dangerous because of the illusory nature of its objectivity. ”Chesterfield is merely the nation’s cigarette, hut the radio is the voice of the nation,” he wrote.

In bringing cultural products wholly into the sphere of commodities, radio does not try to dispose of its culture goods themselves as commodities straight to the consumer. In America it collects no fees from

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the public, and so has acquired the illusory form of disinterested, unbi- ased authority which suits Fascism admirably. (Adorno, 1969, p. 159)

One of the common criticisms of Adorno’s theories is that they presuppose an inevitable sheep-like nature of the people, they suggest d general incapacity to distinguish between true and false needs, and they are generally based on an as- sumption that technology inevilably equals control over the masses. Of course, Adorno’s ideas were, at times, both a bit paranoid and a bit simplistic. Although it may be true, as he suggested, that we cannot turn the ambient culture industry off and resistance rarely enters into the picture, the interesting point about coininodification-and something that he did not acknowledge-is that it “works” only as long as your specific agenda continues to be advanced When the question of contingency enters the picture, things become considerably murkier. Although it may seem efficacious to have missives beamed into the heads of the population, you‘d better be sure the message being relayed is the one you want out there.

Contingency can play itself out in a myriad of ways: A store manager might assume that playing up-tempo radio music makes shoppers buy more goods, but that idyllic scenario can be ruined with a commercial announcement of a sale happening at the competitor’s store down the street. The soothing jazz on a “lite” FM station being played in a dentist’s office might calm a patient into a sense of security, but the moment the broadcast is interrupted with the story of an airplane crashing into a building, that illusion of tranquility is smashed. If you assume that playing music makes your workers happier, and thcrefore more productive, you’d better make sure it’s the right kind of music-not so interesting that it takes too much focus, and not so somnambulistic that it puts them to sleep. Add in the fact that popular music in the twentieth century has taken on a three- to five-minute format, and that until relatively recently radio relied on the sometimes-idiosyncratic tastes of individual DJs, and you have & I recipe for a disciplinary disaster.2

In 1922, an answer to these problems caiiie from a retired military man named General George Owen Squier. Recognizing that the wireless world had anarchistic tendencies, Squier decided to create a disciplined alternative-Wired Radio, 1nc.- that used telephone lines to pipe music into hotels, restaurants, and elevators (es- pecially elevators-ihose newfangled boxes that shot nervous riders a t high speeds through the bellies of buildings). By the 1930s, when the frenetic hustle and bustle of contemporary city living was becoming the norm, something was needed to give the illusion of continuity and order. Squier’s concept, eventually renamed Mtizuk, was the answer. No commercials, no patter, no individuality-only music. It’s no accident that Squier’s inititdl interest in the world of elevator music happened almost concurrently to the publication of Taylor’s PrincipZes of Scimtflc Mun- agement; after all, it was a moment in which industrial productivity and consumer confidence were key. Soon, behavioral scientists began to look into the issues of sound and worker performance and statistically track what the Modernists had figured out already; that is, ambient music had a spccific effect on people’s internal rhythms, on their mood, on their psyches. In Muzak terminology, that meant [hat “the use of music in an ever-rising stimulus curve to combat fatigue was very desirable” (Lanza, 1994, p. 43).

Good Vibrations 129

By the 1940s, the stuff was being piped in everywhere, and soon the line between music and Muzak was becoming arbitrary and irrelevant, thanks mostly to hits such as David Rose’s zippy perennial favorite, “Holiday for Strings” ( 1943), and Percy Faith’s slushy success from 1960, “Theme From A Summer Place.” People offered an appropriate Pavlovian response to Muzak: According to one of the company’s surveys, 83% of the workers polled claimed they preterred the piped-in ambience to a music-free work environment (Lanza, 1994, p. 48). In the ensuing decades, Muzak has conducted countless studies: observing the eating habits of diners in cafeterias while music of various tempos was piped in, scrutiniiing the healing time of patients exposed to soothing sounds, and watching the productivity of assembly-line workers as they listened to the sanitized versions of popular tunes of the day. Eventually, Muzak was everywhere: in restaurants, grocery stores, shopping malls, hotel lobbies, swimming pools, and, most predominantly, on tele- phones when edgy customers were put on hold. As the company’s website sooth- ingly-and rather forthrightly-puts it, they create “audio architecture.”

Our art is to capture the emotional power of music and put it to work for your business. Crafted by a talented group of audio architects, our music programs are designed to create experiences that are both powerful and persuasive.

One thing we’ve learned over the past seven decades is that music in all of its incarnations is wondrous and wild. When harnessed properly it can be an extraordinarily persuasive tool. (“Audio Architecture,” n.d.)

Muzak added a whole new meaning to the RCA motto, “His master’s voice.” Persuasiveness was all-important, and so Muzak’s audio architects put together “genres” for different locales and different target audiences. For instance, the “en- vironmental” genre consists of “Contemporary instrumental versions of popular songs with a ‘moderate’ energy” recorded “exclusively for Muzak for malesffe- males 35+, traditional business environments.” That means being treated to almost smoothed-out instrumental versions of Sheryl Crow’s ”All I Wanna Do,” Luther Vandross‘s “Always and Forever,” and-oddly enough-Green Day’s ”Time of Your Life” (“Popular Contemporary Instrumentals,” n.d.). Or, if you’re more interested in ”light classical’’-”a passionately intimate mix of classical styles with contemporary interpretations of vocal arias” with a target audience of “females/males [note the reversal compared to above] 30+, upscale urban lifestyles”-you’ll be treated to the strains of Schubert, Grieg, Puccini, Chopin, Debussy, Tchaikovsky, Ravel, Mendelssohn, and, in an example of-what? inspired irony? utter appropriate- ness?-Erik Satie (“Classical,” n.d.).

There have been naysayers, of course-Jacques Attali wrote that in Muzak’s hands music becomes “akin to castration” (Attali, 1989, cited in Chanan, 1995, p. 17). Rock star Ted Nugent offered to buy the company for $10 million just so he could erase the tapes.3 In the late 1940s, some grumpy commuters in Washing- ton, DC, even attempted litigation to halt piped-in music onto public buses and trains, citing the Constitutional rights of free speech (the music and talk were loud enough to interfere with conversation) and privacy. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court-and the passengers lost. The Court found that the music wasn’t

130 Stephen Nunns

loud enough to hinder normal human discourse, and, more importantly, it pointed to a survey that indicated that 76.3% of the commiiters actually liked the music. In a classic turn of Tocquevillian tyranny of the majority, the Court stated that the complainants’ argument “would pcrmit an objector, with a status no different from that of the other passengers, to override . . . the preference of the majority.” It went on to state that the Fifth Amendment does not “[secure] to each passenger on a public vehicle . . . a right of privacy substantially equal to the privacy to which he is entitled in his own home” (U.S. Supreme Court, 1952).

The lone dissenter to the Court’s opinion was Justice William 0. Douglas. A classic New Deal liberal, Douglas was a long-time opponent of the death penalty (and faced formal charges of official misconduct in the early 1950s when he granted a stay of execution to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg), an abortion-rights supporter, and a critic of U.S. involvement i i i Southeast Asia. In this case, the justice saw the problematic ramifications of thc (!i-5sion when it came to questions of rontrol and consent:

The case comes down to the meaning of “liberty” as used in the Fifth Amendment. Liberty in the constitutional sense must mean more than freedom from unlawful governmental restraint: it must include privacy as well, if it is to be a repository of frvedom. The right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedoni. . . . A man loses . . . privacy of course when he goes into the streets or enters public places. But even in his activities outside the horne he has immunities from controls bearing on privacy. . . . To think as one chooses, to believe what one wishes are important aspects of the constitutional right to be let alone. . . .

The government may use the radio (or television) on public vehicles for many purpose",. Today it may use it for a cultural end. Tomorrow it may use it for political purposes. So far as the right of privacy is concerned the purpose makes no difference. . . .

When we force people to listen to another’s ideas, we give the propa- gandist a powerful weapon. . . . Once a man is forced to submit to one type of radio program, he can be forced to submit to another. It may be a short step from a cultural program to a political program. . . .

The right to privacy, today violated, is a powerful deterrent to anyone who would control men’s minds. (U.S. Supreine Court, 1952)

However, Douglas was a lone voice in an ambient, noise-filled wilderness. In this case, Adorno was right: We can’t turn it off.

I am walking the aisles of a Pathmark grocery store in Brooklyn. Something called ”Pathmark Radio” is being piped in over the tinny speakers that hang over- head. Songs like The Police’s “Every Breath You Take,” The Eagles’ “One of These Nights” and Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” take on a whole new ontological signifi-

Good Vibrations 131

cance when you’re wheeling a cart through the frozen food section-particularly when they’re interrupted by announcements for bargains on toothpaste and Pathmark-brand breakfast cereals.

Suddenly, 1 am broken out of insensate consumer psyche by a high, tenor voice on the speakers above:

I, I love the colorful clothes she wears And the way the sunlight plays upon her hair I hear the sound of a gentle word On the wind that lifts her perfume through the air

I’m pickin’ up good vibrations She’s giving me excitations I’m pickin’ up good vibrations She’s giving me excitations Good, good, good, good vibrations She’s giving me excitations Good, good, good, good vibrations She‘s giving me excitations

“Good Vibrations,” indeed. Even walking down the fluorescent-lit aisles of Pathmark, it’s clear that you‘d have to be half dead not to be affected by the sunny surf music of the Beach Boys. Their songs evoke the upside to America-girls, beaches, cars-a kind of optimistic outlook that’s hard not to buy into, even for the most hardened East Coast cynic. It’s not the kind of Hollywood/Frank Capra-esque, small-town, Americana-style manipulation that verges on emotional blackmail. (”Look Daddy! Teacher says that every time a bell rings an angel has gotten his wings!”) No, this is the real thing-the example that makes issues regarding the culture industry and our alienated society so complicated. It’s the positive byproducf of a commodity culture-the kind of case that makes a critic like Adorno sound shrill. As Greil Marcus (1975) wrote, it’s a little too easy to dismiss this kind of American exuberance.

and call it hysterical, too easy to quote Thoreau and pronounce that ’the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,’ and think that you have told the whole truth . . . no one can tell me that “Fun Fun Fun” is a lie. (p. 103)

Similarly, you can’t listen to Brian Wilson’s soaring harmonies, the beguilingly cheesy organ, the way that trembly Theremin darts around the lead vocal line or the structure of the song sneaks up and inverts itself during the last chorus, and claim, as Adorno did, that this is nothing more than an issue of control-that whatever liberatory effect there seems to be is simply illusory. You can’t say,

Anyone who allows the growing respectability of mass culture to se- duce him into equating a popular song with modern art because of a few false notes squeaked by a clarinet; anyone who mistakes a triad

132 Stephen Nunns

studded with “dirty notes” for atonality, has already capitulated to bar- barism. (Adorno, 1969, p. 127)

Because if you do, you‘re just not listening. This is, after all, contemporary popular music-that strange moment when the culture industry eats itself. It is a byproduct of the evils of capitalism, the madness of modernity, the alienation o l life in Benjamin’s age of mechanical rcproduction. And yet, by possessing elements of all of these things, it is also democracy in action-real democracy, with all of the messi- ness, dissent, and possibilities of anarchy that word implies. It is a moment of liberation, freedom, and insubordination that sneaks under the controlling corporate and political radar of the oppressor. All of this in spite of (or is it because of?) the fact that it’s an actual product of runaway capitalism and the alienated, technology-burdened world. And, best of all, it accomplishes all of this in 3 minutes and 37 seconds.

This is not to say that we, as listeners, are necessarily in control: The culture industry has an immeasurable ability to water down and blunt anything that might truly upset the balance of social or political power. But, as Susan McClary (1994) pointed out, one of the virtues of the market “and its greed-motivated attention to emergent tastes [is] that music has broken out of officially prescribed restrictions and has participated as an active force in changing social formations” (p. 34). The freedom of “Good Vibrations”-best exemplified by the piles and piles of multitracked harnionies-is, in and of itself, an act of resistance. It is a resistance for both the artist and the audience-a moment when, as Michel de Certeau put it, “the ordinary man b~~comes the narrator, when it is he who defines the (common) place of discourse and the (anonymous) space of development” (de Certeau, 1985, P. 5 ) .

And yet, walking down the grocery aisle among the cans of soup, I realize that nothing is ever quite so simple. Listening to those layers of voices, it’s easy to be reminded that “Good Vibrations” was supposed to be part of Wilson’s rock-and- roll triumph, a concept record entitled Smile that was left unfinished-a casualty of Wilson’s decent into schizophrenia. It’s difficult to listen to Wilson doing four- part harmony with himself and forget that, as he was putting the finishing touches on “Good Vibrations,” he himself was being possessed by the multitracked vocals in his head: “Loud, terrifying screams that darted past me like goblins in a haunted house” (Wilson, 1992, p. 86). It‘s difficult to listen to the presynthesiier Theremin-a byproduct of the ambient age and a wonderful metaphor for electronic “vibrations,” if there ever was one-and not be reminded of how the instrument was used to underscore Ray Milland’s delirium tremors in Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend, or that Leon Theremin was kidnapped by the KGB and sentenced to work in the Russian mines. Listening to “Good Vibrations” brings up other im- ages as well: Dennis Wilson’s flirtation with Charlie Manson (the man responsible for one of the worst critical misinterpretations in the history of popuiar music): vocalist Mike Love’s embracing of the authoritarian Maharishi; the various band members’ descents into drugs: Dennis Wilson’s idiotic and unnecessary death; the band’s relegation to “oldie” status, banished to playing county fairs, race tracks, and casinos-a perfect reduction to commodity status, if there ever was such a thing.

Good Vibrations 133

And, finally, there‘s Brian Wilson himself, lost to his demons, sitting barefoot in his bathrobe at a piano in a specially constructed sandbox, and writing-but never really finishing-one of the great psychedelic paeans to lost childhood: “Surf‘s Up.” It’s a minor-key lullaby which, ironically, is about as far away from surf music as you can get.

The glass was raised, the fired rose The fullness of the wine, the dim last toasting While at port adieu or die

A choke of grief hard hardened I Beyond belief a broken man too tough to cry

Surf’s Up“

When he was asked by a collaborator to explain where the idea of “Good Vibrations’’ came from, Wilson claims that he replied:

My mom told me dogs discriminate between people. . . . They like some because the people give off good vibrations. They bite others because they give off bad vibrations. I have a feeling this is a very spiritual song, and I want it to give off good vibrations. (Wilson, 1992, p. 138)

He did. But he also did the reverse with inany other songs from Smile. When he listened to the playback of the eerie, ambient sounds he had created in the studio, he realized that ”the chords were weird, sick,” and that they “created a disturbing picture that mirrored the screams that had filled my head and plagued my sleep for years.” He added:

It was exactly as I feared. Instead of positive spiritual music, I’d tapped into a dark source, an extremely powerful fire music that emitted bad vibrations, which I decided were too dangerous to release into the world. (Wilson, 1992, p. 156)

Wilson rcfused to release the tapes, and for the next 25 years he was lost in a haze of paranoia, delusion, and fear. Rut before that, in this moment in late 1966, he-like Edison, Cros, Satie, De Forest, Jones and Hare, Squier, Douglas, and, yes, even Williani Tager-came to realize a basic truth about our modern world: In this technology-driven, ambient, noise-filled, commodity-propelled, electronically oriented age, the lines between good and bad vibrations, the clarity between coniniodified and noncommodified cultures, and the separation between madness and sanity are no longer clearly drawn. What once seemed to be basic ontologic, sociologic, and spiritual truths can no longer take hold. The new frequencies and vibrations are everywhere-and we can’t turn them off.

134 Stephen Nunns

NOTES

1. The prototype was finished July 16, 1888, after a grueling 72-hour session.

2. This is changing, thanks to the Telecommunications Act of 1996. As a result of this legislation, the limits on how many radio \tations a company can own in a single local market has doubled from four to eight; and, whereas once companies could own no more than 40 stations nationwide, there now is no limit. As a result, only a handful of companies own the airwaves, with one, Clear Channel (purveyors of the infamous logo KISS FM), being the clear leader-with more than 1,200 stations nationwide. The idea of “live and local”-individual DJs spinning their own choices of songs-is quickly becoming a thing of the past; instead, many stations arc run on autopilot, with “air- personalities” (who may well be in another city) cranking out preprogrammed “virtual” programs for national markets. At a 1999 broadcasters’ conference, Randy Michaels, the head of Clear Channel’s radio division, responded to criticism this way: “People are walking around saying, ‘Ci rr. Bullshit satellite disk jockeys. Grrr. Virtual radio. Grrr. Bullshit change. Bullshit owning 600 station ownership [sic]. HEY GUYS, WAL-MART IS OPEN!’ Yo11 can’t do anything about it!” See PBS’s “Now With Bill Moyers,” 2c ;)ril, 2002 (transcript available at http://www.pbs.org/now/transcript/transLript 1 1 5-full. html).

3 . As Joseph Lanza (1994) pointed out, Muzak had the last laugh, when a film crew for a British docuiiientary presented Nugent with the company’s easy- listening arrangement of ”Cat Scratch Fever.” (pp. 203-204)

4. A rendering of ”Surf’s Up” eventually was officially released on the 1971 Capitol album Surfs Up. However, the unfinished bootleg version is stranger and more beautiful.

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DISCOGRAPHY

The Beach Boys. 1966a. “Surf’s Up,” on Smile (unreleased recording). Available on bootleg recording Unsurpassed Masters Vol. 16 (1966-1967). Sea of Tunes, 1999.

The Beach Boys. 1966b. “Good Vibrations.” Originally released on Capitol single 56761966. Available on Smiley Smile. Emd/c .apitol, 5ABX0, 1967.

Faith, Percy. 1960. Theme From “A Summer Place” (soundtrack). Ranwood, B6W,

Jones, Billy, and Ernest Hare. 1924. “I’m Gonna Bring a Watermelon to My Gal Tonight.” Available on Comic Songs by the Happiness Boys, Vol. 1 (1923-26). Vin- tage Recordings. Originally released on Columbia 8 1754-6.

Jones, Billy, and Ernest Hare. n.d. “How D’You Do?” Available on Remember the Golden Days of Radio, Vol. 1. The Longines Symphonette Society, SY 5183 (LW 447).

R.E.M. 1994. “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?” Monster. WEA/Warner Brothers Records, 2MU3.

Row, David. 1943. “Holiday for Strings.” The Very Best of David Rose, E 41 55.

Satie, Erik. 1954. Parade (Ballet after Jean Cocteau) on Homage to Igor Markevitch, IZolner

Satie, Erik. 1979. Piano Works. Daniel Varsano, Philippe Entremont, piano. Sony

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Rundfunk-Sinfonie-Orchester. Originals, SH 840.

SBK, 48283.

Good Vibrations 137

Satie, Erik. 1990. TheErikSutieShow. Peter Dickinson, piano. Conifer, 75605-51 5 12-

Satie, Erik. 1994. Socrate: RelGche. Lepikge deMedlrse. Musiqlred'ameublement. Ensemble

2.

Erwartung, FNAC Music, 592292.

good vibrations: ambience and alienation in the twentieth century

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