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How to Wreck a Nice Beach: The Vocoder from World War II to Hip-Hop, The Machine Speaks Paperback – November 8, 2011

by Dave Tompkins (Author)

3.9 35 ratings

The history of the vocoder: how popular music hijacked the Pentagon's speech scrambling weapon

The vocoder, invented by Bell Labs in 1928, once guarded phones from eavesdroppers during World War II; by the Vietnam War, it was repurposed as a voice-altering tool for musicians, and is now the ubiquitous voice of popular music.

In How to Wreck a Nice Beach—from a mis-hearing of the vocoder-rendered phrase “how to recognize speech”—music journalist Dave Tompkins traces the history of electronic voices from Nazi research labs to Stalin’s gulags, from the 1939 World’s Fair to Hiroshima, from artificial larynges to Auto-Tune.

We see the vocoder brush up against FDR, JFK, Stanley Kubrick, Stevie Wonder, Neil Young, Kraftwerk, the Cylons, Henry Kissinger, and Winston Churchill, who boomed, when vocoderized on V-E Day, “We must go off!” And now vocoder technology is a cell phone standard, allowing a digital replica of your voice to sound human.

From T-Mobile to T-Pain, How to Wreck a Nice Beach is a riveting saga of technology and culture, illuminating the work of some of music’s most provocative innovators.

Print length

352 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Stop Smiling Books
Publication date

November 8, 2011
Dimensions

7.08 x 0.88 x 8.5 inches
ISBN-10

1612190928
ISBN-13

978-1612190921
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David Toop
210
Paperback
34 offers from $11.57

Editorial Reviews

Review

"It’s unquestionably brilliant, not only one of the best music books of the year, but also one of the best music books ever written."
—Los Angeles Times

"Dave Tompkins is seven steps ahead of science and several leagues outside of time."
—Sasha Frere-Jones, Pop Music Critic, The New Yorker

"The best hip hop writer ever born."
—Jeff Chang, author of Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip Hop Generation, winner of the American Book Award

"One of the most bugged, brilliant guys I know."
—Oliver Wang, NPR music critic

"No one knows more about the vocoder than Dave Tompkins, not even the dude who invented it. [A]n awesome book about the vocoder and its cultural impact… read it immediately."
—The Fader

“How to Wreck a Nice Beach is much more than a labor of love: It’s an intergalactic vision quest fueled by several thousand gallons of high-octane spiritual-intellectual lust. Outside of, say, William Vollmann, it’s hard to think of an author so ravished by his subject... A hallucinatory stew of Rimbaud, Tom Wolfe, Lester Bangs, and Bootsy Collins.”
—New York

"This one has cult audience written all over it."
—Booklist

About the Author

Dave Tompkins, a former columnist for The Wire, writes frequently on about hip-hop and popular music. His work has appeared in Vibe, The Village Voice, Wax Poetics, and The Believer. Nearly a decade in the making, this is his first book.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Stop Smiling Books; Reprint edition (November 8, 2011)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 352 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1612190928
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1612190921
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.55 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7.08 x 0.88 x 8.5 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,486,135 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #208 in MIDI & Mixers
- #688 in Music Recording & Sound (Books)
- #3,882 in Music History & Criticism (Books)

Customer Reviews:
3.9 35 ratings

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3.9 out of 5

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L. Masters

Sassy, intellectually entrenched writing...a fabulous book

Reviewed in the United States on May 29, 2014

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The issue with the bad reviews IMHO is just this...the book is marvelous for those of us who are old enough to know what this guy is talking about OR who have a really excellent background in world history. This is hard to explain, but just imagine someone making a joke about the boot and pasta...and if you did not know that "the boot" is Italy...you totally miss the amusement. Or Churchill putting one finger down and thus insulting an entire nation (so you have to know about his obsession with the V sign). Every sentence in this book is that way. Very clever. Intensely amusing. Hilarious at points. I am having trouble finishing the book because it is so delicious I often read each paragraph three times just to entertain myself all over again. And the fourth time I have to read the paragraph out loud to my husband just so I can watch him fall out of bed laughing.

6 people found this helpful

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Chris N. Dale

The Vocoder

Reviewed in the United States on March 4, 2013

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A good book but not great.

It features a detailed history of the military interest and use of the Vocoder as a way of transmitting coded information during the Second World War. These information is both great and fascinating to read, as are the discussions regarding variant technologies of the Vocoder sounds, such as the Talk-Box.

Where the book is weak is in certain sections of the authors' discussion of music. There isn't enough discussion of the early embrace and use of the Vocoder by experimental electronic musicians. Instead the author spends slightly too much time indirectly promoting and defending musically weak entertainers in the 1980's that have occasionally used the Vocoder. These entertainers are far from being truly prolific musicians who understand the Vocoder as a true musical instrument. They are merely just people who were in the right place at the right time to become part of a scene, and who are largely just wanna-be's trying to make a name for themselves. This doesn't qualify them worthy of serious discussion in a book about the Vocoder and it's history. The fact that some aspiring rap or pop stars used it only occasionally (and only as a gimmick), is completely irrelevant especially when more important prolific musicians are reduced to sections of paragraphs or omitted entirely. But at least true innovators like Roger Zapp Troutman are given due credit.

In sum, this book is a good source for information on the Vocoder. But a better book still needs to be done where the irrelevant social scenes surrounding musically weak 'hangers on' don't cause more important relevant information to be minimized or omitted.

One person found this helpful

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Twond

Yessss!

Reviewed in the United States on January 9, 2012

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At first I was giving in to my inclination toward wanting this book to be a straight-forward linear account of the history of the vocoder... like accidentally drinking seltzer late at night when you are going for the milk. A bad taste in my mouth. But once I settled in, got used to the style, I had my mind totally opened and then blown apart. If you aren't a philistine, I recommend this highly. Awesome!

Oh yeah, and who knew Roger didn't use a vocoder, egads!

3 people found this helpful

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Mark L. Warrian

Too Scattered

Reviewed in the United States on April 13, 2011

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As other reviewers have said, the writing "style" -- if it is a style -- is almost incomprehensible. The writer seems to know lots of history and pivotal people of the vocodor world. It would have been great if an editor had stepped in and helped the writer present his thoughts and knowledge in a reasonable way. This book was very, very frustrating to struggle through. Actually painful to read. It's not playful or eccentric, just awful, scatter-brain writing. I had hoped this would be a companion to the book "Analog Days: The Invention and Impact of the Moog Synthesizer," by Frank Trocco -- that book was GREAT, but this book really disappointed me. The only good thing I'll say about it is that the physical production values are good--it's a hardcover and the pages are thick and it's a nice, old-fashion book in a physical way. Just an awful, awful read.

5 people found this helpful

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William Yerazunis

More culture than computation...

Reviewed in the United States on April 12, 2013

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First off, this isn't a book about how a vocoder really works. There's no math. NONE. No pseudocode. Not even a deep discussion in plain English. Nor is it a book about how to use a vocoder, for secure speech or for putting an epic drop into your newest piece of music.

It's more a history of the Vocoder and the people who made it happen and who used it. The characters range from the steely-eyed guys who had security clearances higher than Churchill and Eisenhower, to rappers who spent as much time behind bars as at stagefront. And- it's told in a first-person mode; the author is telling of his experience in researching the book, who he's met, who he partied with, who he got to know, and (spoiler) who he became friends with who are no longer with us.

That said, it's fun and a good read. THAT said, remember it's limitations; it's a history, not an article in a maker magazine.

7 people found this helpful

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P. Cook

Modulation history

Reviewed in the United States on June 19, 2011

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This is the greatest book written on the electronic encoding of the human voice. It has people that worked on this when it was developed in interviews and people that used this technology with music with song titles. Buy it and check out the blog, howtowreckanicebeach.com Support this movement and buy the 2nd installment comming in the fall of 2011 =)

One person found this helpful

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Thomas Parker

Not As Clever As He Thinks

Reviewed in the United States on June 13, 2012

Tompkins nees to spend some time with The Elements of Style and then decide whether he wants to put in the work necessary to become a real writer - someone who can clearly communicate with readers - or is just content to be a self-indulgent vanity scribbler.

3 people found this helpful

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Michael Bertone

a wrecked beach sounds nice

Reviewed in the United States on May 19, 2010

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A hip and cleverly written book. Informative and fun. Dave Tompkins creates a historic vibe of distorted words- How codes became cool.
You would never know how connected we are to sounds until you read this book. A learning and memory recalling read.
I highly recommend How to Wreck A Nice Beach.

3 people found this helpful

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PH3282

How to Wreck a Nice Book

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 16, 2018

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What fellow commentator David Lubich said, really: a great idea for a book, some genuinely fascinating information, beautifully produced and illustrated, but written in the most self-consciously pretentious clever-clever 'hipster' English. The writing style totally ruins the experience: convoluted, fragmented, deliberately obscure. Truly awful.
Despite my love of music technology and vocoders in particular, I found the book a terrible slog: it is definitely NOT "a good read." Like the man said: a missed opportunity.
Embarrassing, really.

4 people found this helpful

HH3

Walking through treacle.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 28, 2020

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I should have paid more heed to the reviews. I was looking for a good history of the Vocoder and its design, but this book turned out not to be it. There is certainly some good information contained in its many pages, but the author is far too much enamoured of his own pseudo-mystical babblings that I was constantly flipping pages to find the next sensible paragraph. The least disturbing pages are those in the early part of the book, which deal with the first 'talking machines' and the military use of the Vocoder for voice compression and scrambling, but when we get to its use in the music biz we leave the rails entirely and are plunged into not only the author's pretentious prose, but quotes from other individuals who speak the same impenetrable gobbledygook. And for a book supposedly devoted to the Vocoder, there are rather a lot of pages about the talk-box, a technology which has only a tangential connection to the Vocoder. I normally keep technical history books for later re-reading, but this one hit the bin as soon as I got to the index.
On the plus side, we have some good photos that would probably never have seen light of day if not for the author's efforts. So I'll continue my search. It's a 2 outta 10.

One person found this helpful

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