A Sequel to “High Fidelity”

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Billboard, bookstore, Borders, Brooklyn, CD, Charlotte Farmer, compact disc, E-mail, Facebook, High Fidelity, iPod, Joey Badass, London, long-playing record, mobile telephone, Nick Hornby, Paper Trails, real estate, record store, Record Store Day, Shoreditch, Spotify, teenager, Tower, Valentinos

Illustration by Charlotte Farmer

Here is how you started a music collection, if you were born sometime between 1940 and 1990: You bought an album, and for the time being, that album was all you had. You liked some tracks more than others at first, but as you only owned eight or ten or twelve of them (maybe a few more, if it was a recently released CD), you couldn’t afford to play favorites, so you listened to your one album over and over again until you liked all the songs equally. A couple of weeks later, you bought another album. After a year, you owned fifteen or twenty, and after five years, a couple of hundred.

Here is how you started a music collection in the early years of the twenty-first century: You gave an iPod to a friend or an elder sibling or an uncle, and you said, “Fill this up for me.” And suddenly you would have a couple of thousand tracks, most of which you wouldn’t ever listen to. If you’re a teenager now, you wouldn’t even bother going to all that trouble, because all the music ever recorded in the history of the world is in your pocket, on your phone. We know, because that’s the way the world always works, that teenagers in ten or twenty years time will be laughing and shaking their heads at the primitivism and inconvenience of Spotify – “You had to wait a few seconds to download?” “Not everywhere had the Internet?” “You had to touch a screen?” But at this point, it’s hard to imagine how music consumption of the future will be much easier or cheaper than it is now.

My first novel, High Fidelity, is about the lost but fiercely snobby people who used to sell us our music, back in the day when music was something you could touch and see and probably smell, as well as hear. (If I had been told, when I was writing it, that within a decade you’d be able to email a song, I’d have presumed that this meant you could also email a sandwich.) The book is now twenty years old, and the technological innovations of the last fifteen years should by rights have made it look like a story about blacksmiths, or milkmen, or some other profession that has been murdered in cold blood by the modern world.

I have, from time to time, considered writing a sequel to the book. Rob and his long-suffering girlfriend Laura seemed emblematic of a certain kind of contemporary relationship – Rob confused and drifting, Laura focused and several years further on into adulthood. Maybe it would be interesting to see how they were getting on as they approached middle age. Did they have kids? Were they still together? What was Rob up to now? The answers to the first two questions were up to me (I reckon yes and no), but I could never come up with an answer to the third, or at least, not one that interested me enough to spend a couple of years of my life exploring. The owner of the independent store where I used to hang out is now a real estate agent; his former partner part-owns the lingerie shop that now occupies the same site. And when I asked Facebook friends from all over the world where their record-store guys had disappeared to, it was hard to see a pattern in the information they provided: postman, vintner, pornography writer, psychotherapist, drummer, bookstore assistant, waiter, tropical fish breeder . . . All one can say for sure is that selling scratched copies of Replacements albums didn’t help anyone lay down a conventional career path.

And yet readers, some of them young enough never to have owned one lonely album, still seem to find the book, and a way of relating to it. This might in part be because some of the old ways have proved remarkably, bafflingly durable – there are even a few signs that ownership and physical manifestations of music are making a comeback. There is an independent record store four hundred yards from my desk; it has, in the last few months, opened a new branch, in Shoreditch, London’s equivalent of Brooklyn. Vinyl sales are increasing, and in the United Kingdom there are now more outlets for CDs and records than there have ever been. True, most of these are supermarkets, but not everyone, clearly, has decided that music is worthless. New vinyl is expensive, and yet Americans bought more than nine million LPs in 2014.

And a surprising number of the old places simply never closed. They have seen off Borders, Tower and Virgin, and they have the place to themselves. They’re not getting rich, but those clerks are still there, still sneering at your bad choices, offering you an understated but supportive raise of the eyebrow for your good ones.

One of the great benefits of digital consumption is that it is democratic: In cyberspace, there’s nobody to judge you. If this fifty-seven-year-old wants to hear what Joey Badass sounds like, I don’t have to run the gauntlet of incredulous stares in cool record stores: There! I’m listening to Paper Trails as we speak! And yet part of the point of culture is that it allows us to demonstrate our tastes publicly – it helps us find our tribe. (Thanks, Joey, but I’m going back to the new Valentinos compilation.) The arts are the most elaborate and most precise social network ever invented, but if it’s going to work properly, you have to get out of the house sometimes and show who you are and what you love. You have to go to shows and galleries and bookstores, you have to ask for what you want out loud. And this expression of taste must involve an impulse that, at its heart, is anti-democratic: Somewhere you have to believe that what you like is better than what all those other losers like.

So maybe we need those record-store guys; maybe the reason so many of them are still around is that, without them, the whole system grinds to a halt. If you own all the music ever recorded in the entire history of the world, then who are you? Those people queuing outside their local independent on Record Store Day [18 April 2015] want to be known.

Nick Hornby – Billboard

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How Music Works

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Beethoven, bicycle, Bicycle Diaries, Borders, Brian Eno, cycling, David Byrne, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, HMV, How Music Works, Leonard Bernstein, Luaka Bop, minimalism, Mozart, Pink Floyd, popular music, recording technology, rock and roll, Talking Heads, Tim Page, Tom Waits, Tower, Virgin

David Byrne has always resisted easy definition. His long-ago group Talking Heads stood out initially for its geeky, reductive, white-bread minimalism, then reinvented itself as a swinging, latter-day big band, brimming over with influences from North Africa and South America.

In the years since, Byrne has worked in theater, film, photography and many other genres. He founded a venturesome record company, Luaka Bop, which presented many artists then unknown in the United States, and he has continued to make his own albums (with and without his longtime musical partner, Brian Eno). Most recently, he has taken up the cause of bicycling, specifically bicycling in New York, which is the usual way the Scotland native gets around his adopted city and which he chronicled in a breezy series of observations published as Bicycle Diaries.

Byrne’s new book, an ambitious, illustrated 345-page volume titled How Music Works, puts me in mind of what it might be like to run into the author at a bar and spend the next few hours talking about a lot of things. Some disclosure may be in order here: I knew Byrne slightly more than thirty years ago, we have a number of mutual friends, and we lived in the same Manhattan building for a while. Still, as Byrne recalls, he was “incredibly shy at the time and remained so for many years,” and I remember our few meetings as virtually monosyllabic, both of us staring resolutely at the ground.

How Music Works suggests that such anxiety is long past. This is a decidedly generous book – welcoming, informal, digressive, full of ideas and intelligence – and one has the pleasant sense that Byrne is speaking directly to the reader, sharing a few confidences he has picked up over the years. It is part autobiography, part how-to guide, part history and part prognostication – all engaging but none really complete. While those who want an in-depth memoir of Talking Heads, for example, may be disappointed (although there are some terrific nuggets), Byrne touches on so many subjects that few readers with a more general interest in music will feel left out.

Not surprisingly, he is least convincing when writing about classical music and opera. He’s even a little flinty about it: “I never got Bach, Mozart, or Beethoven – and I don’t feel any worse for it,” he acknowledges. “I resent the implication that I’m less of a musician and a worse person for not appreciating certain works.” Such absolute dismissal comes across as intellectual insecurity (really – “a worse person?” What is this, high school?) and tarnishes Byrne’s authority. Still, in fairness, how many classical artists, with the eternal exception of Leonard Bernstein, ever had anything smart to say about pop music?

Byrne has plenty of smart things to say about pop music. For example: “We now think of the sound of recordings when we think of a song or piece of music, and the live performance of that same piece is now considered an interpretation of the recorded version.” True enough, for better or for worse, and a distinct change from even fifty years ago. He points out that some of Tom Waits’s songs “would sound pretty corny, sung ‘straight,’ without his trademark growly vocals. The sound of his voice is what makes them work.”

Writing of the vast traveling theatrical extravaganzas that the leading progressive rock bands of the 1970s, such as Pink Floyd, lugged from arena to arena, he says: “These shows were light years away from any connection to our reality. They were an escape, a fantasy, and hugely entertaining, but they had no relationship to any sense of what it felt like to be young, energetic, and frustrated. Those artists sure didn’t speak to or for any of us, even if they did have some good songs. If we wanted to hear music that spoke directly to us, it was clear that we’d have to make it ourselves. If no one else liked it, well, so be it – but at least we would have some songs that meant something to us.”

Byrne has been around long enough to recognize that music may be an extraordinary art but that it can also be a very tricky business. He examines the history of recording, from wax cylinders to MP3 downloads. He talks specifically, in dollars and cents, about the advances and royalties he has received from various record companies, and then compares the figures with those accrued when he self-produced his recent collaboration with Eno, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today. He notes the irreversible decline of traditional record stores – Tower, Virgin, Borders and HMV – but recognizes that, through the Internet and other venues, “there have never been more opportunities for a musician to reach an audience.”

“I’ve made money and I’ve been ripped off,” Byrne says. “I’ve had creative freedom and I’ve been pressured to make hits. I have dealt with diva behavior from crazy musicians and I have seen genius records by wonderful artists get completely ignored. . . . If you think success in the world of music is determined by the number of records sold, or the size of your house or bank account, then I’m not the expert for you. I am more interested in how people can manage a whole lifetime in music.”

It’s a worthwhile goal – and Byrne and his book make for good company.

Tim Page – The Washington Post