Required Reading: How to Wreck a Nice Beach
A frequent, tired cliche about music writers is that many of them are failed musicians who wish they had the lyrical and musical skills of the artists they support/pan. I imagine there is some truth in that. But I am certain that most music writers would sell their soul for the lyrical gifts and creativity of someone like Dave Tompkins, whose new book is a testament to his gifts as a writer and interviewer. A wide-ranging look at the invention and introduction of the vocoder and the imprint it has left on modern music, How to Wreck a Nice Beach (repeat it a few times) is history, mythology and cultural studies all in one, a mixtape of electro freaks, the Man Machine and Bell Lab geeks that blows minds and bass bins.
Tompkins’ writing, confident and endearing, wraps around itself and hits like the flow of a powerful rapper; it’s reverential, referential, personal and inscrutable all at the same time. He pulls together the sprawling story of the vocoder’s origins in WWII covert communications then boxes in on a telling detail so good it should be fiction, like how a rapper named Silver Fox keeps his mic in a zip-up shaving kit and has to “let the vampire out the coffin and go for blood.” So much is said that you want to dig until there’s dirt under your fingernails to understand all the references and multiple levels of discourse. He possesses the crazy logic and narrative skill to encapsulate Donnie Wahlberg, Ray Bradbury and Afrika Bambaataa (all interviewed for the book) in the same story.
While weaving together disparate strands of modern music, Tompkins talks about a lot of tracks. Here’s a short playlist of some of the artists he talks about:
1. Fearless 4, “F4000″
2. Jonzun Crew, “Pack Jam”
3. Zapp, “I Wanna Be Your Man”
4. Neil Young, “Transformer Man”
5. Egyptian Lover, “Lover, Lover”
Posted: March 28th, 2010 under Broadcast.
Tags: Dave Tompkins, Egyptian Lover, Fearless 4, How to Wreck a Nice Beach, Jonzun Crew, Neil Young, Vocoder, Zapp
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