Overview

"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."

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9781612190921

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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. <br> -- Los Angeles Times <br> Dave Tompkins is seven steps ahead of science and several leagues outside of time. <br>--Sasha Frere-Jones, Pop Music Critic, The New Yorker <br> The best hip hop writer ever born. <br>--Jeff Chang, author of Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip Hop Generation, winner of the American Book Award <br> One of the most bugged, brilliant guys I know. <br>--Oliver Wang, NPR music critic <br> 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. <br>--The Fader <br> 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 har

Author Information

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. From the Hardcover edition.

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