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On Listening To Dead Voices

I've spent a good part of the past week collecting the voices of dead people. Before you dismiss me as a ghoul or a madman (or both), let me explain. I suffer from an incurable aversion to contemporary pop music. I haven't listened to any new stuff, other than what I've overheard on stray radio stations or other people's boom boxes, since the Beatles broke up. You have to admit that's practically an eon in dog-years or any other kind of years. Why have I rejected the vast and gaudy pageant of recent popular music? Why have I deemed it unfit for my sensitive cynical ears? Well, let me be blunt: most of it strikes me as relentlessly ugly. After you've listened to Bach or Beethoven or even Bing Crosby, you'll understand. Worse yet, much of it is not only ugly but deliberately obnoxious, like cow-patties hurled at poster of Mister Rogers.

I dislike attitude for the sake of attitude -- all that self-conscious cool-guy strutting in addition to the electrified testosterone of the music itself. (Why do music fans love unsmiling long-haired men who strut?) The whining of slurred notes and extra syllables in rock-related music has always offended my ears, too; why can't they just sing it straight, the way normal people talk? And why the need to affect that pretentious rock accent? That's right, a rock accent. Guess what, folks -- the word 'baby' is pronounced 'bay-bee,' not 'bay-beh.' Above all, the music leaves me cold; I search in vain for recognizable emotions that make me feel I'm among kindred spirits. Even the more listenable songs are generally fine-tuned to death by overzealous sound engineers, so that any remaining traces of an authentic human imprint are successfully expunged. It all comes out sounding like something produced by petulant androids.

Let me explain why I started collecting the voices of the dead. Given my distaste for the recent parade of pop, I've turned to the past for solace and musical exploration. My parents grew up in the thirties with songs you could not only hum in the shower but savor for a lifetime. Those songs became part of their mental and emotional furnishings -- an overstuffed easy chair here, a charming end-table there. It all added up to a place you could call home. The music of the past three decades has left me feeling essentially homeless, so I've taken refuge amid the abandoned relics of past lifetimes. I enjoy the exuberant and unapologetic nasality of Al Jolson, the sultry summer notes of Billie Holiday and the eerie drone of Rudy Vallee, who sounded like an ancient Roman hermaphrodite but still managed to make the ladies swoon; he was the first crooner, the first man to introduce intimacy to pop music. I marvel at the heft and heat of the early Louis Armstrong and relish the musical mischief of Fats Waller. I love a Gershwin tune, how about you? Of course, every one of these good people is dead. That's the downside of a preference for the past.

Now let me tell you HOW I collected those dead voices. It seems that a certain prominent music-swapping website was condemned by the courts and might shortly be shuffling off this mortal coil. I had never visited that renowned site, having assumed it would trade primarily in today's debased musical currency: I imagined breathless teens downloading the latest masterworks of Britney Spears or the Backstreet Boys. But I'd finally give it a try. Once aboard, I did a search for Al Jolson -- just for fun, you understand -- just to see how the site worked and whether they carried any vestiges of primitive music from the pre-MTV era. My jaw dropped as I watched the screen fill up with communally available Jolson songs -- well over a hundred of 'em! This was phenomenal. I found and downloaded 'Waiting for the Robert E. Lee,' which I had heard as a boy but never managed to collect on disc or tape. Granted, the thing took half an hour to transfer onto my waiting hard drive, but then I played it: vintage Jolson, good as gold. My pulse raced with the prospect of further wild discoveries. I assembled nearly a full CD of songs by my favorite Jazz Age discovery: the intoxicating and sadly forgotten Annette Hanshaw. I picked up rare tracks by Fanny Brice, Irish lyric tenor John McCormack, a youthful Maurice Chevalier and an even younger Bing Crosby. Then I held my breath and turned the time machine back a few more decades to the early years of the twentieth century, where I searched for and uncovered a genuine buried treasure: the only known recording of Lillian Russell, the belle of Broadway during the Gilded Age, singing her signature song, 'Come Down My Evening Star.' I had heard snippets of it before, but here was the whole enchilada, free for the taking. I downloaded, I listened: here, brought back to transient life, were the lilting, measured cadences of her throaty and barely serviceable Victorian voice (she was better known for her buxom beauty, after all); yet it was a valiant voice, both stately and tender, backed by an ancient orchestra that caressed her words like one of her contoured mauve gowns. Edison's miraculous invention had preserved her voice and soul for the ages while her famous body turned to dust.

Still hungry for more, I drove the time machine even deeper into the past, to the infancy of recorded sound. I came, I saw, I downloaded. Nearly obscured by the rumbling of a wax cylinder, a quavering voice announced a 'beautiful new song' to be sung by Mr. Edward M. Favor for Edison Records. The strains of the tune now emerged ghostlike from the remoteness of 1894, and I heard the familiar old words as they greeted the world when they were newly minted: 'Dai-sy, Dai-sy, give me your answer, do... I'm half cra-zy, all for the love of you.' I was listening to the exact sounds once heard by living men with handlebar mustaches and women with plumed hats and parasols. In fact, I was witnessing the birth of modern popular music, and I confess I was considerably moved. It was like seeing my own grandfather as a baby.

How can a self-proclaimed Cynical Guy be such a sentimental sap, you ask? Have I no pride in my bile? Let's just say that as a staunch anti-modernist, I take immoderate pleasure in visiting the past. Yet, like most pleasures, this one wasn't entirely pleasurable. One of the quirks of downloading music from shared files is that the person you're downloading it from might decide to log off abruptly and feed the cat while you're in mid-download. I'd watch numerous songs grow slowly on my Inbound Transfer screen, like those pod-replicants from 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers.' They'd take fifteen, twenty, twenty-five minutes. Then, with about 90 percent of the song loaded, I'd notice the transfer speed drop from a relatively healthy 1.5 kilobytes per second down to .75, .38, .14, .05, .01. Finally, the dreaded flash: ‘'Transfer error!' Someone had decided to feed the cat, and I had just lost half an hour of my life. Now I'd select another available file for the same song, with the hope that THIS baby might reach full term. (Easily three out of four songs would self-abort while loading.) Yet I'm still downloading songs compulsively even as I write this. Do I feel guilty about pirating the music? Nope, not really. After all, every last one of these artists has gone on to a better world where money can't even buy a cold latte. Meanwhile, I've discovered a wonder of the Web and, like most wonders of the Web, it turns out to be yet another thoroughly mesmerizing time-waster. But I can't argue with a complete recording of Lillian Russell.

© 2001 by Bridget Petrella Media Relations. "Some Cynical Guy" appears here by permission of the publisher.

Profile of a Cynic...

Bayan, who claims to be a "kinder, gentler cynic," currently lives in Allentown, Pennsylvania. His weekly column, "Some Cynical Guy," is published and syndicated by Upbeat Online. 

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