Customer Reviews

Recorded Music in American Life: The Phonograph and Popular Memory, 1890-1945

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I've observed that a common mistake that contemporary observers of popular music make is to equate the industry which has developed to sell recorded music with the subject of music itself. For someone whose time horizon is bounded by the period after WWII, this equation makes some amount of sense. After all, the story of music between 1945 and say.... 2005 is the story of the recorded music industry itself.

But it wasn't always the case, especially when you consider that the phonograph and recorded music itself did not exist prior to 1890. People had to learn the relationship between recorded sound, music and their own lives. It's an interesting subject, and quite a pity that it has been so thoroughly neglected- to the point where this was the single book I could find on the subject. In the first chapter, Kenney defines the significance of recorded music in American life during this period as follows:

The phonograph and recorded sound served as instruments in an ongoing process of individual and group recognition in which images of the past and the present could be mixed in an apparently timeless suspension that often seemed to defy the relentless corrosion of historical change. (Introduction XIX)
Unfortunately, the ten page introduction is the high point of this book. What follows the introduction is occasionally interesting, such as the chapter focusing on the marketing and sale of recorded music prior to the depression. Kenney points out the development of an industry focused on "hits" was something that arose only AFTER the depression brought the recorded music business to its knees. Prior to the depression, companies sought to sell and stock the widest possible range of types of recordings in an effort to achieve something like corporate omnipotence.

Kenney includes chapters on the African American and Hillbilly experience with the recorded music industry that sounded like they had been lifted from other books- nothing new there. If I have to read one more description of how African American recording artists were stripped of their copyrights and cheated out of money owed them, I will scream. To his credit, Kenney notes that to a man, all of the artists who are now seen as "victims" were beyond eager to offer up their services- often willing to be recorded for free just to get their music "out there." Huh- does that sound familiar to anyone in the audience?

I've been doing my best to read about the history of the recorded music industry in an attempt to find some reassurance that the recent cratering of the sale of recorded music is an anomaly. Honestly, I do believe that to be the case. Recorded music sales in the US have cratered on multiple occasions: the introduction of radio in the 1920s, the great depression in the 30s, the ban on recordings during World War II in the 40s and the rise of the mp3 in the 90s. Recorded music has survived all of these traumas, because, at a very basic level recorded music and the purveyors of recorded music help audiences deal with the confusion, displacement and anomie that seem to characterize modern life. Record companies may go bankrupt, specific artists may live and die in poverty, but recorded music serves an important function in society as a preserver of collective memory, and that function is stronger then the destruction allegedly wrought by Mediafire and Napster(or the Great Depression, World War II or the invention of Radio.)

Kenney's book offers many intriguing insights that are accessible to those of us who are not experts in the history of the phonograph and American culture. I was fascinated to read about the early industry's angst over whether to offer popular music "to the masses" or to uphold a highbrow musical aesthetic for "the classes" through opera and Western art music recordings. The marketing of phonographs both as furniture and as a means of freezing sound memories reveals that this was complex technology of great cultural and psychological significance. We find that phonographs were marketed to women because women were seen to have more time for frivolous entertainment than their stoic working husbands. Description of phonograph arcades (early jukeboxes) where people could pay to hear a tune reveal the first instance of private audio entertainment--perhaps the precursor of the later Walkman and ipod worlds. The confluence of business interests among companies like Victor Talking Machine with the musical interests of consumers yielded unique American sounds, namely the blues (race) and country (hillbilly) music. Kenney's analysis convinces me that recording technology both opened the door to creative expressions in those genres and also froze the genres into financially viable forms of such expression.

As the previous reviewer makes clear, the book is not an exhaustive history of the phonograph technology, American music history, or the history of recording. I'm not sure such a feat would be possible or even readable. But the reader is well rewarded with insights that will enhance his or her listening to historical recordings and those of today. The reader can tap into academic arguments if so desired (and find places with which to disagree), but can also read this simply for the "gosh, I didn't know that" factor. I enjoyed the book on both levels.

This is a very disappointing book, in part because the promise of the topic is so great. We really lack a full history of early American recorded sound. We have some excellent monographs, but a comprehensive history would combine the histories of (1) the development of the technology of the phonograph, (2) the companies that developed to sell recordings, and (3) the music as it was produced in that technological/institutional context. Such a combination would allow that early American recorded sound was shaped BOTH by corporate initiative and the lived cultures of the people who made and listened to the recordings.

Alas, Kenney is of the "powerful white corporations control our minds" school of bad academic writing. Thus his book reaches the following conclusion: "And so, with bebop, as with 1920s jazz, blues, hillbilly, and big band swing of the 1930s and 1940s, the recording industry...presented[ed] the sounds of the country's ethnic groups - but only in ways that reflected the companies' economic and political motives." [p. 201]

Anyone with even a passing knowledge of the diversity of pre-war recording knows (a) corporations did try to channel music and musicians into recognizable (and in that sense limited) categories, and (b)they were only variably successful.

Kenney denies the complexity of this dynamic and makes some conclusions that could only be written by a contemporary American academic. For example, "[W]hites also shaped the creation of blues records, and they created a distinctive, structurally rigid style..." [p. 134] Whites created the blues? Really? By the 1950s, then, Chicago was filled with black southern migrants listening to the "rigid" sounds of Muddy Waters, Howling Wolf, and others, because white corporations had put the zap on their minds. This is of course silly and paranoid.

So, skip this academic exercise and hold out for a history that allows for the hardships and triumphs that mingle in American music.