Sound Recording Technology and American Literature: From the Phonograph to the Remix

Jessica Teague’s monograph on how sound recording and playback machines impacted modernist and contemporary American writing since the twentieth century is a remarkable synthesis of sound studies and literary criticism. It’s a safe bet that Teague’s book will become required reading for other research scholars investigating the convergences between literature, sound studies, and the history of technology.In her book Teague provides compelling formalist analysis of a wide range of American writers, representing a variety of literary genres (John Dos Passos, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Amiri Baraka, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Kevin Young, Chuck Palahniuk, Anne Washburn), and incidentally touches on and illuminates the work of scores of other writers, musicians, DJs, and visual artists (the Beatles, DJ Spooky, Chuck D, William Gibson, Gil Scott-Heron, Questlove [Ahmir Thompson], among many others). Along the way, Teague provides her readers with concisely written narrative histories of twentieth- and twenty-first-century sound recording devices and playback machines including the phonograph, the stereo LP, magnetic tape and tape recorders, as well as digital recording practices such as sampling, mash-ups, and the remix. Teague’s compact but richly detailed sketches of the history of these recording devices are among the highlights of the book. I’m sure I’ll return to Teague’s book to reference her pioneering conceptual arguments about media and her insightful analysis of literary works, but as someone who teaches in the field of music and literature, I know I’ll also turn to this book for its useful overviews of sound technology and encourage my students to reference the book as well.While Teague’s study ranges widely over different research areas and fields of study, her aims are both concise and impressively ambitious. Her chief subject is the close interconnection between twentieth- and twenty-first-century experimental writing and the invention of new sound recording and playback devices. Gertrude Stein’s writing and its initial reception provides a convenient starting point for Teague’s narrative. Stein’s strongest critical supporters were at one in insisting that understanding her writing required active listening as much as attentive reading. Stein scholar Georgiana Goddard King characterized Stein’s Three Lives (1909) as the literary equivalent of a “stubborn phonograph” (1). King alludes here to the experience of hearing a phonograph needle get stuck in the groove of the record, an event familiar to anyone who has ever used this equipment. The moment breaks the spell of listening, reminding us that listening to recordings means dealing with sound at a remove, a recorded sound fabricated in our absence. For King, Stein’s linguistic repetition reveals to discerning readers—and listeners—that language is a copy, a mediation of the thing and not the thing itself, an insight that might escape us were it not for Stein’s skillful formal devices.For Teague, Stein represents an inaugural moment in what became a momentous “reciprocal relationship between the literary arts and sound technologies that continued to evolve over the twentieth century” (3). Teague’s contention that the interrelation between American literature and new sound technology is both reciprocal and continues to the present-day is both her central argument and chief provocation. Provocative, because most studies of literary modernism and media (Mark Goble’s Beautiful Circuits: Modernism and the Mediated Life [2010] and Katherine Biers’s Virtual Modernism: Writing and Technology in the Progressive Era [2013] to name just two examples) focus almost exclusively on early twentieth-century sound technologies without addressing our multimedia present. Similarly, recent sound studies of remix culture in literature and popular music (like Mark Amerika’s Remix the Book [2011] and Eduardo Navas’s Remix Theory: the Aesthetics of Sampling [2012]) restrict their attention to art in the digital age. Within this scholarly context, Teague’s insistence that modernist literary experiments continue to reverberate in phenomena like the current-day literary remix, and that a truly satisfactory literary historical account must encompass both modes of cultural production, is bold and bracing.King’s critical insight into Stein’s writing provides Teague not only with a point of origin, but also with a salient example of the practice of “resonant reading” (a term Teague takes from Katie Dyson) that Teague wishes to pass on to scholars (3). She wishes to restore, in her words, an “active, empathetic, and reciprocal” listening to our concept of literacy (15). More specifically, Teague describes resonant reading as an “ear-oriented approach to reading texts.” Given that American writers have been exploring the “intermedial spaces between texts and recordings” since the beginning of the twentieth century, contemporary readers must first “tune in” to alternate reading practices if they want to catch up with the artists.Judging by Teague’s practice in the book, resonant reading is not a singular thing but a flexible, pluralistic approach to textual analysis. In the case of John Dos Passos, resonant reading requires reading his novel series, the USA trilogy, against the grain. Contrary to a scholarly consensus that holds that Dos Passos’s “camera eye” view of American life aims to sharpen our visual perception of that world, Teague underscores how the novelist reimagines writing as a new sonic technology: a virtual “microphone, amplifying and recording sounds” (34). For Teague, Dos Passos’s fiction is built on the new insight that sound is “something repeatable and amplified,” a perception that became apparent to all in the era of the phonograph. In the case of Alan Lomax’s Library of Congress recordings of the legendary jazz pianist Jelly Roll Morton, recordings that circulated the story of Morton’s life as well as his music to mass audiences, resonant reading requires close analysis of the new, hybrid literary genre of jazz autobiography that emerged along with jazz itself. In the case of the autoethnographic sound recording, resonant reading attends to how writing is remediated, and how transcription practices evolve alongside new recording technologies.Often Teague’s resonant readings demonstrate how novel ways to playback sound help disclose new concepts. Teague’s case studies of Langston Hughes’s book Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz (1961) and Amiri Baraka’s album It’s Nation Time (1972) detail how the sonic space of the stereophonic record “became an important imaginative forum for both political and social thought” (119). More specifically, Teague argues that the new stereo LP served as the chief inspiration for Hughes’s and Baraka’s efforts to “rethink the geopolitical spaces inhabited by Afro-diasporic peoples” (135). For both poets, the possibilities afforded by state-of-the-art sound technologies goad them to “push beyond the constrictions of place and history in order to produce a new, contingent sonic space” (150).Teague’s chapter on Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs details how the two writers incorporated their experiments with tape machines in their own writing practice. The chapter provides a first-rate overview of Kerouac’s Visions of Cody (published posthumously in 1972) and Burroughs’s The Ticket that Exploded (published by Grove Press in 1967) while also situating their investigations of the tape medium within a broader history of a mid-century literary avant-garde, eager to integrate modernist writing with advances in sound equipment (96). Teague has an especially sharp eye—and ear—-for the ways that Burroughs’s tape “cut-ups” compel listeners to become a “producer of new sounds” rather than passive consumers (117).I have mentioned that Teague’s book is full of bold claims persuasively argued. But perhaps her boldest assertion is that writers continue to play a prominent role in the new modes of cultural production associated with the digital age such as the remix. Teague provides satisfying and perceptive formalist readings of literary remixes by Kevin Young (To Repel Ghosts [2001] and To Repel Ghosts: the Remix [2005]) and Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters, 2012), and also presents a substantial body of critical reflection by contemporary musicians and DJs (Questlove, DJ Spooky, Chuck D of Public Enemy) to support her argument that current-day musicians conceive of remixing and sampling in literary terms, as a method of writing and not solely a recording technique. In Questlove’s musical memoir, Mo’ Meta Blues (2013), the drummer/DJ credits Stevie Wonder’s use of a sound sampler during a guest appearance on the massively popular television program The Cosby Show for introducing sampling to a younger generation of sound artists who would later make this recording technique the foundation for hip hop. As Teague notes, Questlove’s commentary on The Cosby Show episode equates sampling both with reading (as a way of engaging words) and writing (as a way to produce new texts from old ones) (168). As Questlove recalls, the Casio SK-1 toy keyboard encouraged young musicians and DJs to “pick a piece of sound, a snippet of speech, or a drumbeat” and “separate that from everything around it.” In Questlove’s memorable phrase, the sound bite or loop then became a “brick” that anyone could use “to build a new wall.”The lesson that Teague draws from testimony like Questlove’s, and from the literary remix more generally, is that contemporary modes of cultural production remain part of the “extended family” of modernist and late modernist intermedial art that she analyzes so capably elsewhere in her book. Teague tacitly implies that a consistent, recognizable arc of creative work extends from Stein and Dos Passos to Questlove and Chuck D in statements like these: “Modernist literature isn’t just remix (or vice versa). It makes remix possible because modernist textual practices have been bound up in and shaped by recording practices all along” (167).Teague makes a persuasive case that knowledge of modernist textual practices is a prerequisite for a historically informed analysis of contemporary remix culture. The case studies that she provides in Sound Recording Technology and American Literature make it abundantly clear that the history of modernist literary work and the history of sound recording technology up to the present day are interdependent, even commingled. I’m less certain that the “reciprocal relationship between texts and recordings” that Teague describes in her book remains vital, and even more skeptical about the power of contemporary writers to “shape the culture of readers, writers, and listeners” (3).Teague offers Chuck Palahniuk’s Invisible Monsters as compelling evidence of the continuing reciprocity between experimental literary work and new sound recording practices. I confess I see the novel as more proof of the increasingly marginal role of literature compared to our dominant contemporary cultures of sound. Teague shrewdly observes that by the time Invisible Monsters was republished in 2011, a mass readership was sufficiently aware of the conventions of sampling and looping that Palahniuk’s experimental novel, arranged in chapter “loops” that require the reader to flip back and forth through the novel in order to navigate the plot, was “already recognizable as a remix, a fact that the new edition was able to highlight through its experimental form” (179). True enough, but the reasons why Palahniuk’s republished novel is instantly “recognizable” as a remix in its new edition has little to do with the power of literary pedagogy, and everything to do with the ubiquity of fragmented sounds—of sampling, looping, mash-ups—in popular music. Furthermore, as Teague concedes, it is impossible to imagine that W. W. Norton would have agreed to publish a new edition of the novel faithful to Palanihuk’s original plan if it weren’t for the enormous commercial success of the film adaptation of Palanihuk’s later novel, Fight Club (1996).The eloquent comparisons between digital sampling and literary writing made by Questlove and DJ Spooky and cited by Teague are perhaps more performative than descriptive, testaments to a residual belief in the power and efficacy of modernist textuality, rather than an indication of a continuing synergy between experimental literature and the new sound technologies. Perhaps Questlove’s assertion that reading and writing are vital components of sampling is a conjuring act, an attempt to summon an old ghost from the new machine. Certainly Kevin Young, Teague’s other chief example of the new literary remix, is preoccupied with chasing specters from the past. Arguably, Young’s Ghosts remix is more a loving memorial to a playback technology that the writer fully realizes is currently in the rearview mirror than a full-fledged experiment in word and sound, and more nostalgia than futurism.My opinions about the current state of American intermedial art are not Teague’s, but they are of course prompted by reading her excellent book. Sound Recording Technology and American Literature is a remarkable accomplishment in every respect, extraordinarily well researched but written so clearly and so well that it will interest any reader who wishes to learn how literary art, sound recording, and popular music intersected in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.