Another review of Vinyl has appeared. Writing in the journal Rock Music Studies, Carey Fleiner likes my book. She calls it ‘a
fine introduction to both the history of recorded sound and the cultural impact of
the physical object that is the vinyl’. She also praises it for explaining
‘clearly and in compelling arguments the dichotomy between the mass production
of records and our personal relationship with them’.
She
does have her reservations, stating that that ‘Osborne’s wide-reaching scope is
hampered, however, by the concise nature of the book’. In particular, she feels
that my work on Eldridge Johnson, the original head of Victor Records, and on record
collecting and gender could have been developed further.
She’s
right. These subjects are worthy of books of their own. And there are other
topics in Vinyl that could have generated
separate works, including record shops, jukeboxes and the charts. What makes
the difference with her choices is that they fail to fit in with the style of
the book.
To
have spent more time on Eldridge Johnson would have been to introduce a
biographical element that is missing elsewhere. I am nevertheless in agreement that
he is a figure who should be more widely known. Only Thomas Edison and Emile
Berliner are of comparable importance in the history of the analogue disc.
Amongst many other things, Johnson was responsible for the development of
shellac records and the record label (in relation to both meanings of the term).
He was also the first record company head to see the full potential of recorded
music.
Record
collecting is a different matter. To have developed an exploration of
collecting and gender would have been to draw upon skills in psychology that I
do not possess. That’s not to say that I don’t have my own pet theories, and
perhaps here is the place to sketch one of them out.
A
strand of thinking amongst academics is that a love of music (and of the arts
more generally) is associated with qualities that society considers to be more
female than male. As a consequence men have developed coping mechanisms to
render their enthusiasm more masculine. One method is to fiddle with hi-fi
equipment. Susan J. Douglas argues that ‘For men who loved music but were eager
to avoid [effete] associations, technical tinkering was one way to resolve the
contradictions’. Another is to systematize their appreciation. Will Straw
argues that record collecting ‘reflects
a masculine need to order the world’.
While
there’s something in this, I think there is another reason for the great male
cover-up. Men can have an excessive reaction
to music. The broadcaster and journalist Robert Elms has frequently argued that
men are more romantic than women. It is men who are more likely to make grand
gestures, whether in love or war. This can also be witnessed in the male
reaction to ailments: it is men, after all, who get man flu.
Oscar
Wilde captured this aspect of maleness in ‘The Critic as Artist’. The following
passage could be regarded as condescending: it looks down on a ‘commonplace’
man who should not be worthy of grand emotion. On the other hand, it could be
regarded as inclusive: Wilde has keyed into the romantic longing that resides
in all men. He writes that:
After playing Chopin, I feel as
if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed, and mourning over
tragedies that were not my own. Music always seems to me to produce that
effect. It creates for one a past of which one has been ignorant, and fills one
with a sense of sorrows that have been hidden from one’s tears. I can fancy a
man who has led a perfectly commonplace life, hearing by chance some curious
piece of music, and suddenly discovering that his soul, without his being
conscious of it, had passed through terrible experiences, and known fearful
joys, or wild romantic loves, or great renunciations.
Men don’t necessarily collect records to hide their
femininity, this ordering also prevents them from unleashing something terribly
male. I’m not alone in needing to keep my great renunciations in check!
