how white is the walkman®®®® ????
on ROLLER-SKATES!
Or, casually biking...
(the implied Subject of the ad, the real walkman is, as you might expect, not the woman who listens but the man who gazes at the woman listening, vulnerable in her inattention to the noise around her. you could imagine the sunbathing ad to be a scene from Jaws. Sony, selling the inattention of privatized listening via the old visual-sexual tropes of paying (predatory) attention to the female body. the device might cost only a small sum. but what, if we take seriously the economic connotations of "paying attention," are the real costs of buying [into] the subjectivity on sale to the would be walkman?)
"get lost on your way to work" in other words means literally the opposite: "find your self on the way to work, draw the world in to your 'individual' narrative, project your mood onto every building, spew your guts all over the sidewalk, etc." the cultural imperative - BE YOURSELF - fully commoditized and tucked in your pocket. no longer conform to the group, but conform to yourself, be the center of your universe, score your own film. so we isolate, become docile, inattentive, individual, little white cables stretched from coat pocket to ear: the perfect citizen.
notice the tagline in the bicycle ad:
"THE ONE AND ONLY" Who? The brand, Sony? The woman on the bike? The male subject of advertising? the magic of marketing would have us believe simultaneously that we should "BUY THIS! for it is like nothing else, and thus will make you like no one else: personalized, unique, individual, the one and only" while at the same time convincing us to "BUY THIS! for everyone else is using it! IT, the product, is the one and only."
but then, setting the super problematic Walkman advertising archive aside, i want to try to think this from other angles, too. anyone have a less negative spin on the walkman/iPod? i can see how soundtracking your life can be empowering. maybe i've just been working too long with sound design for films and i'm sick of manipulating experience with sound :-/
P.S. this might seem totally unrelated, but i got onto the history of Disco because i read somewhere that the walkman was at one point going to be called the "DISCO JOGGER", but Sony felt it had too narrow an appeal. well, i discovered something else. has anyone ever heard of Disco Demolition Night in 1979 ??? OMG. i was gonna write a whole separate post on that. it is LITERALLY UNBELIEVABLE, the racist and homophobic subtext of rock and roll fans exploding disco records at a baseball game?!?!... so wild:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disco_Demolition_Night
(super white)
BUT,
turns out the walkman is actually a woman, still white, of a certain figure, of course, and not walking at all... on ROLLER-SKATES!
Or, casually biking...
And sunbathing!
🌞🌞🌞🌞🌞🌞🌞🌞🌞🌞🌞🌞
///////////////////////////////////
(the implied Subject of the ad, the real walkman is, as you might expect, not the woman who listens but the man who gazes at the woman listening, vulnerable in her inattention to the noise around her. you could imagine the sunbathing ad to be a scene from Jaws. Sony, selling the inattention of privatized listening via the old visual-sexual tropes of paying (predatory) attention to the female body. the device might cost only a small sum. but what, if we take seriously the economic connotations of "paying attention," are the real costs of buying [into] the subjectivity on sale to the would be walkman?)
^^^
Then, endless white hetero couples basking in romantic sunsets, laughing on their way home from brunch, flying and of course... ROLLER-SKATING
other ads which do show men depict either an older Japanese man in traditional clothing eating lollipops with or just gazing at a younger western woman wearing what can only be described as high-fashion roller-skating attire:::
OR, western men in business attire with an emphasis on escape: 
in the last ad the man in the suit is the focal point of the onlookers. All of them are wearing a walkman, each in their own private soundscape. what exactly is the "revolution in the streets"? the aesthetic colonization of urban space? a totalizing organization of experience via privatized portable sound? what revolution is this? the birth of the "audio flâneur" AKA... the walkman. in place of the tourist's gaze that sanitizes the city and whitewashes its racialized geography, the walkman erases the city's uncontrollable noise completely and replaces it with sound(track), user-defined, that is, user-defining: the playlist. the walkman transforms the unmediated cacophony of the daily commute into an audiovisual hallucination shaped by the rhythms and sounds pumped directly into the walkman's skull, a soloist's soundscape in harmony with his individual mood. like a self-written sonic horoscope, or the soundtrack to a feel-good film, written directed and edited by yours truly... the solipsistic aestheticization of urban experience (Marcuse: to aestheticize=to simplify, to strip reality of its inessentials. what are we stripping? whose noise? what do headphones allow us to avoid? the homeless person on the corner? our own cognition? and what subject is affirmed in the isolation?)
users report that iPod experience is at its most satisfying when no external sound seeps into their world to distract them from their dominant and dominating vision-Michael Bull, "The Audio-Visual iPod"
"get lost on your way to work" in other words means literally the opposite: "find your self on the way to work, draw the world in to your 'individual' narrative, project your mood onto every building, spew your guts all over the sidewalk, etc." the cultural imperative - BE YOURSELF - fully commoditized and tucked in your pocket. no longer conform to the group, but conform to yourself, be the center of your universe, score your own film. so we isolate, become docile, inattentive, individual, little white cables stretched from coat pocket to ear: the perfect citizen.
notice the tagline in the bicycle ad:
"THE ONE AND ONLY" Who? The brand, Sony? The woman on the bike? The male subject of advertising? the magic of marketing would have us believe simultaneously that we should "BUY THIS! for it is like nothing else, and thus will make you like no one else: personalized, unique, individual, the one and only" while at the same time convincing us to "BUY THIS! for everyone else is using it! IT, the product, is the one and only."
but then, setting the super problematic Walkman advertising archive aside, i want to try to think this from other angles, too. anyone have a less negative spin on the walkman/iPod? i can see how soundtracking your life can be empowering. maybe i've just been working too long with sound design for films and i'm sick of manipulating experience with sound :-/
P.S. this might seem totally unrelated, but i got onto the history of Disco because i read somewhere that the walkman was at one point going to be called the "DISCO JOGGER", but Sony felt it had too narrow an appeal. well, i discovered something else. has anyone ever heard of Disco Demolition Night in 1979 ??? OMG. i was gonna write a whole separate post on that. it is LITERALLY UNBELIEVABLE, the racist and homophobic subtext of rock and roll fans exploding disco records at a baseball game?!?!... so wild:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disco_Demolition_Night
Hey,
ReplyDeleteI have more to respond to specifically about walkmans etc, but what caught my eye was the disco demolition. What is even more wild is how Steve Dahl continued to justify his actions and even frame it as warfare on a cultural movement.
To summarize, for those who don't want to click links, Disco Demolition night was the culmination of an anti-disco movement. A radio announcer named Steve Dahl was fired from his job because he did a rock show in the morning but the station decided to only play disco. In the late seventies there was a strong polarization of rock music and disco, rock music leaning towards white culture and disco being more transgressive. As disco became mainstream, people like Steve Dahl were intimidated. He began breaking disco records on the air and "disco sucks" became a mantra. He teamed up with the owner of the white sox to make a promotion at the cominsky stadium which was already known for zany activities. However, as the night progressed it became evident that something far from innocent was taking place. Unpacking that history is interesting, as it is wound up in the fabric of capitalism that makes music a commodity and performance entertainment rather than expression.
Steve Dahl later said about disco,
“It was all about flash and no substance. You know, like a rock and roll band gets off the bus, whatever they’re wearing they wear for the show. Disco people have wardrobe cases. And they make themselves into totally different people. They’re a bunch of phonies”
“It was just a form of music that was stupid.”
and
“We did a promotion that caused a forfeiture, I regret that. As a cultural event, I’m kind of proud of it.”
I think that it is an extremely good example of what continues to occur when the rising voices of minorities//outsiders//strangers//foreigners is suddenly heard by the mainstream. Defence is seemingly the immediate response which entertains justifications for violence, propaganda and segregation.
One of the links made here as well is about how the suppression of Disco pushed it underground and led to the birth of house music. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUeMFG4wjJw
I'd be interested in continuing talking about this. The documentaries available are all biased in different ways which is also interesting to unpack.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DyBkNpR3_vU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivTzKpbyNSI
those videos are really interesting. Probably not a coincidence that it was happening at the same time punk rock was trending, which had a bunch of condradictory political stances buzzing within it, it could far-left, far-right 'apolitcal' etc. Punks probably would have seen their music as infinitely more transgressive than disco (although with postpunk the styles started to mix together a more, but then again maybe this was more of an ironic white appropriation of disco/funk). The aesthetic difference--something 'diy' vs. something produced with attention to technology, even if this surface difference ignores the actual economic status of the people involved in each movement. And it seems like by the late 70s disco had already been appropriated by white/mainstream culture, and in a way this was part of the same movement of backlash that destroyed it. I'm not sure what my point it but it's interesting that music genres/movements can be vehicles for so many complicated political currents (intertwined freedom and oppression of different sorts) under their usually apolitcal surfaces.
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