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How to Wreck a Nice Beach: The Vocoder from World War II to Hip-Hop, The Machine Speaks (Gebundene Ausgabe)
http://www.amazon.de/How-Wreck-Nice-Bea ... 1933633883
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The history of the vocoder: how popular music hijacked the Pentagon's speech scrambling weapon
This is the story of how a military device became the robot voice of hip-hop and pop music. Though the vocoder, invented by Bell Labs in 1928, was designed to guard phones from eavesdroppers, it expanded beyond its original purpose and has since become widely used as a voice-altering tool for musicians. It has served both the Pentagon and the roller rink, a double agent of pop and espionage.
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 Manhattan nightclubs to the Muppets.
The result is an amazing chronicle of postwar music and culture, filled with unexpected and surprising encounters. We see the vocoder brush up against FDR, Solzhenitsyn, Stanley Kubrick, Stevie Wonder, JFK, Eisenhower, Neil Young, Kanye West, the Cylons, Walt Disney, Henry Kissinger, and Winston Churchill, who boomed, when vocoderized on V-E Day, "We must go off!" And now the device is a cell phone standard, allowing 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.
PRESS AND REVIEWS
“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 magazine Link
"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
"With verve and humor, Dave Tompkins tells the remarkable story of the vocoder and its secret WWII offspring, which protected the very words of Roosevelt and Churchill as they flashed across the Atlantic. Nobody has ever related this before, and to have a technological tale related this well is a great gift to science and to history."
—David Kahn, author of The Codebreakers and Hitler’s Spies
A "fascinating and entertaining debut."
—Bookforum
"The figures in this story are as compelling as the machine itself.... Seamlessly integrating many stories into a single narrative, Tompkins presents a masterly history of the vocoder.... Fun and informational."
—Library Journal Link
“Truly impressive… The chapter on the great Roger Troutman, master of the Talk Box, is alone worth the price of the book. [Tompkins]’s an obsessive in the best sense of the word. His writing style is a high-wire act that is very funny and entertaining, especially when he is writing about what seems to be closest to his heart.”
—Flagpole Link
“Tompkins tells the vocoder’s story with great relish, as though he can’t believe how mind-blowingly cool the device is, and it’s impossible to read the book without being caught up in his enthusiasm. This one has cult audience written all over it.”
—Booklist
"Detail-obsessed and charmingly tangential... Jeff Chang, a great hip-hop writer in his own right, calls Tompkins 'the best hip hop writer ever born.' This hip-hop writer wouldn’t disagree."
—Washington City Paper Link
"[A] virtuoso new book on the gadget... The same fluid, unexpected prose that has long made Tompkins every rap critic's favorite critic."
—The Village Voice
"[F]ascinating and excellently written... traces the history of the vocoder from its early functions as a spy device to its more contemporary uses in music."
—Time Out New York Link
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dave Tompkins, a former columnist for The Wire, writes frequently on 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.
http://www.mhpbooks.com/book.php?id=309
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