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NEW FROM STOP SMILING BOOKS
Tuesday, February 09, 2010
We're pleased to announce that Stop Smiling has launched a new book imprint, Stop Smiling Books, in partnership with Melville House Publishing.
We will post most information about our first book as the release date approaches. Here is the latest:
HOW TO WRECK A NICE BEACH
THE VOCODER FROM WORLD WAR II TO HIP-HOP
THE MACHINE SPEAKS
BY DAVE TOMPKINS
Stop Smiling Books, Chicago / Melville House Publishing, Brooklyn
Color, 336 pages. $35.
The history of the vocoder: how the Pentagon’s speech scrambling weapon transformed into the robot voice of pop music.
The vocoder, invented by Bell Labs in 1928, once guarded phones from codebreakers during World War II; by the Vietnam War, it had been repurposed as a voice-altering tool for musicians and soon became 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 the morning before 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.
“A fascinating and entertaining debut.”
— Bookforum
“Dave Tompkins is seven steps ahead of science and several leagues outside of time.”
— Sasha Frere-Jones, Pop Music Critic, The New Yorker
"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
How to Wreck a Nice Beach includes interviews with:
Afrika Bambaataa, Ray Bradbury, Florian Schneider of Kraftwerk, Peter Frampton, Laurie Anderson, T-Pain, Teddy Riley, DJ Quik, ELO, Rammellzee, Arthur Baker, Michael Jonzun, Midnight Star, Lester Troutman of Zapp, Holger Czukay of Can, Donnie Wahlberg, Egyptian Lover, Fab Five Freddy, Forrest J. Ackerman, Man Parrish, Cybotron and Wendy Carlos, composer of A Clockwork Orange and The Shining.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dave Tompkins, a former columnist for The Wire, writes frequently about hip-hop and popular music. His work has appeared in Vibe, The Village Voice, The Believer and Wax Poetics. As a child growing up in North Carolina, he wrote stories about Mud Men, shot football cards with his dad’s .38, and was forced into speech therapy. His grandfather ate the microfilm, somewhere over Moscow.