25 Years of the Walkman: what's it done to the music?


It's 25 years since the launch of the Sony Walkman. The current issue of Songlines, the world music mag, quotes a recent article by Norman Lebrecht, in which he argues that the Walkman 'has destroyed any sense of a piece of music having a place in the world, in time, in our personal lives. Music, made portable, is removed from any frame of reference. It becomes a utility, undeserving of more attention than drinking water from a tap. The day the Walkman landed was the day the music began to die'.

I suppose his argument is strengthened with the arrival of mp3 jukeboxes, and the personal playlist. No need, ever again, to listen to an album as the artist intended.

Thinking about this a bit more widely: the way, these days, we are bombarded with so many representations of reality that didn't exist for the average person in, say, 1703. Think of an ordinary home then. Music: no recordings, only what people played or sang themselves. Images: no photos, no cinema, no TV, no art galleries to speak of (the idea of galleries open to and drawing a mass public is a modern thing); few, if any images in the home, the main contact with them being in the local church. Words: with literacy levels low and the vernacular culture being primarily a spoken one, few households were likely to experience words via books; some might encounter cheap newspapers or magazines.

But now we swim in a sea of representations of reality; so much of our daily existence takes place in a virtual reality of words, images and sounds. Take this blog!

[The cartoon is by Tim Kreider, who says about it: 'I've been thinking about some way to draw ... a series of cartoons about the entertainments we're offered to divert us from the little indignities and atrocities inflicted on us every day'. Walkman/iPod as opiate of the masses? ]