Denning - Noise Uprising: the Audiopolitics of a World Musical Revolution

In the early twenty-first century, the world of music is in constant crisis and flux, but its overall lineaments are relatively clear and appear natural. The internet has emerged as a global jukebox of digital sound files that are uploaded, downloaded, streamed and shared, accumulated as collections, shuffled into playlists, and sampled as raw materials for new mixes. The vehicles of circulation may changeiTunes, Spotify, and YouTube loom large as I complete this bookbut it seems self-evident that the wealth of music in a world where capitalist modes of production prevail appears as an immense accumulation of commodities. These sound recordings exist in an intricate economy of genres, styles, and brands, linked to imagined communities of race and nation, and are adopted by consumers to manage their personal and collective soundscapethe ambience or atmosphere of daily lifewhether through the privacy of earbuds and headphones or the publicity of DJs with sound systems.

At the same time, writing about music takes place on two radically different scales: grand generalizations about the meaning of music in the evolution of the species (its relation to language, to the order and disorders of the brain, to the sounds and songs of other species); and rough guides to the musical marketplace, micro-histories of specific genres and artists. The traditional sense that music is a fine art lives on in the residual culture of classical music, which has lost much of its former glory and occupies a small market niche, while retaining some degree of cultural capital. And the older sense that music-making is a political actwhich led Plato to assert that any alteration in the has also receded to the fringes of the musical marketplace, where the germ of an alternative culture lies in songs of protest affiliated with social movements. It is not that the contemporary world of music lacks an audiopolitics, but rather that it is coded as the politics of the market: who owns and controls the sound files. The politics of intellectual property and piracy have eclipsed the politics of musical form or content.

This musical economy that incorporates arcane sounds and sublime frequencies from every corner of the planet seems new, the product of an era of globalizationthe sound equivalent of the World Wide Web itselfbut when it is given a history and a context, it usually appears to radiate out from the United States, from the postWorld War II explosion of American musics from rock to rap. Elvis Presley, the Beatles, and Bob Dylan are the Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven of a second classical period, and the furious late twentieth-century battles over the hip-hop of Public Enemy and N.W.A. echo the late nineteenth-century furor over the operatic spectacles of Richard Wagner.

In this book, I want to offer an alternative account of the origins of our musical world: not in the rock and pop of the American century, but in a world musical revolution that took place almost a century ago. In a few short years between the introduction of electrical recording in 1925 and the onset of the worldwide depression in the 1930s, a noise uprising occurred in a series of relatively unnoticed recording sessions. In port cities from Havana to Honolulu, Cairo to Jakarta, New Orleans to Rio de Janeiro, commercial recording companies brought hundreds of unknown musicians into makeshift studios to record local musics. Thousands of inexpensive discs made from shellac (a resin secreted by the female lac bug, a colonial product harvested in the forests of South Asia) were released, disseminating musical idioms which have since reverberated around the globe under a riot of new names: son, rumba, samba, tango, jazz, calypso, beguine, fado, flamenco, tzigane, rebetika, arab, marabi, kroncong, hula.

These recording sessions of vernacular musicians in the late 1920s stand out in the history of music like a range of volcanic peaks, the dormant but not extinct remains of a series of eruptions caused by the shifting of the tectonic plates of the worlds musical continents. For five years, more or less, these eruptions took place as gramophone and phonograph companies fought with each other to capture the worlds bubble of the 1990s. The recording boom took off around 1925, as the new technology of electrical recording enabled not only an extraordinary leap in audio fidelity but also a dramatic reduction in the cost of phonographs. It is hard to overestimate the sonic transformation; to this day, we listen with pleasure to reissues of the earliest electrical recordings, whereas the slightly older acoustic recordings are a dead language, a kind of sonic Middle English, the preserve of archivists whose ear training allows them to revisit the archaic soundscape of the Edison cylinders and the hill-and-dale discs.