Justin Erik Halldór Smith

Monday Recording, #2

Bing Crosby, "Old Man River" (year unknown)

I confess every time I watch this it makes me shiver.  Bing's delivery is simply perfect. Yet, frankly, I cannot help but sense that Bing is inhabiting the role of the person who is inflicting the sweat and pain, not the role of the one suffering from it.  Note the diabolical spirit that overtakes him two-thirds of the way through, with 29 seconds left on the clock: it is a mocking and sadistic slavedriver speaking through him; not a slave. And when Bing sings about his 'aching feet', one can not help but imagine him kicking them up on the club table after a particularly arduous 18 holes. The sort of suffering that brought this song into existence, though, was of an altogether different caliber. What is it about television that, from so early on, facilitated and encouraged this sort of trivialization?

Monday Recording, #1

Arthur Collins, "The Goose-Bone Man" (1905). From the Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

For a long time I thought that close attention should be paid to the first years of recording technology, since it is only in very early recordings that we find captured the sort of things people were singing, saying, and doing quite naturally before they started singing, saying, and doing things self-consciously in front of, and for the sake of, recording devices. Most of the cylinders here show however just how far early commercial music was from ethnographic field recording. It was contrived, affected, and stuffed into available genres, many of which were, like this one, based on embarrassing racial stereotypes. Still, one does get the feeling that there is something that precedes recording technology that is being documented here.