It’s fairly well established that without African-American influence, American music would be, shall we say, different? Professional music companies would have kept foistering last year’s model on the mainstream audience, in the certainty that it sold yesterday, therefore it or something quite like it will sell today. Tack on prevailing racial uncertainty and you have a recipe for musical conformity across generations.
Black musicians always had a small audience, but without larger marketing, and no major outlets willing to help out. So what happened? Jaq is here to tell you. Enter the Soundie!
In the late 1930s, Jimmy Roosevelt, the son of FDR, created a company that would essentially vend music videos. For a thin dime, a mere tenth of a dollar, you could watch a three minute video of the latest bit of music on this jukebox-looking device called a Panoram, shown above. To save money on this new enterprise, J?R did not hire “top” talent, but had to settle for low-rent musicians. No doubt, he was expecting that as money rolled in, he would be able to hire more and more famous players.
Jimmy never got past stage one. Initially fascinated by the new technology, jukebox watchers’ began to be interested in these lower-end musicians themselves. In an early example of the Long Tail phenomenon, the musicians’ markets grew — not to superstardom, but to far more than they had been previously. (Today, youtube fulfills the same function for even cheaper than a dime; who says prices must always rise?) This change in the overall market was among the driving forces that led to Rock ‘n Roll. What was Elvis singing? Nothing too terribly different from what some of these small-time black artists were. Here’s one of the more famous examples of “Sex and drugs and rock and roll music that broke the rules,” by Fats Waller:
There’s this vid that Jaq saw a long time ago, where Frank Zappa explained what happened next. According to Frank, stuffy cigar-munching corporate record executives decided at the start of the Rock era that they couldn’t remotely tell what was going to be popular anymore. Music they personally loathed was selling like the proverbial hotcake. They gave up and hired anybody in the hopes that they would find the next big thing by throwing as much shitake into the fan as possible to see what would stick to the whirring blades. It was only later, when the “hip” and “with it” crowd became music company producers themselves did the business, perversely, get all conservative and closed again.
Television was the death-knell for the soundie. Who would pay for video when you could get it for free? And so the Panoram is today all but forgotten. But think, would the push for civil rights come later, or even much later, without the Soundie? Who can say for sure?
Would Rock ‘n Roll have happened without the Soundie? Without Rock, would have there been anything like hippidom? And hence to the anti-war movement? Did FDR’s son inadvertently contribute to the end of Vietnam? It’s a fun idea to play around with.
Soundies truly rock. But even if you don’t like them, you could mix them into your standard playlists, where they act almost as palette cleansers. If you listen to fairly homogenous music (which probably isn’t good for you anyway) then how do you keep the songs from all blending together into one big mush? Soundies can break the monotony. Imagine if you can, Reg Kehoe and his Marimba Queens (and one very insane bassist) wedged between heavy scream metal and your favorite ’80s power ballad:
Soundies… one more tool in your mental box for stretching the mind through dissonance. And a good piece of history too!
