Personal Stereo (Object Lessons)

It read like a well-researched paper. Moments where the author’s opinion or insight might shine were ignored. It was like taking a class on the history of rock only to come out of it feeling less passionate about music than before.While that’s harsh and I don’t know what the circumstances were surrounding the constraints of the series, it read like what once was a passion project then became an assignment.

Whatever happenedTo Tuesday and so slowGoing down to the old mine with aTransistor radio“Brown Eyed Girl”, Van MorrisonPersonal StereoPersonal Stereo by Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow is a study of what is now one of the most common devices seen in society. Tuhus-Dubrow is a Contributing Editor at Dissent. She was previously a contributing writer for the Boston Globe’s Ideas section, a columnist for the urban affairs website Next City, and a Journalism and Media Fellow at the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability.Bloomsbury Academic Press has released a growing series of object lessons over the last few years. These are ordinary items that usually don’t get a second thought. My introduction to the series was Hood a book covering hoods from executioners to hoodies. In this edition, the book took me back to my discovery of music. I remember listening to music, football, and AM music on a transistor radio with a single ear bud. The mono earphone jack allowed the listener keep one ear on the music and the other on the world around them.The Walkman brought a change. It was stereo and it let the listener chose what he or she listened to. Long before Napster and Pirate Bay people pirated music by copying vinyl records to cassette and trading with friends. This later evolved into the 80s mixed tapes which were given to special friends. Cassette tapes were the MP3s, or rather the removable storage of the day; stereos even had a side by side cassette players to copy music from one tape to another. Music became personal and portable. The Walkman offered another layer of personalization. You could listen to your music anywhere without disturbing others around you. Stereo headphones completed your privacy as you could block out the world around you with tinny sounding headphone speakers covered in a removable foam sock set over your ear.Today, this is all too common with iPods and now with phones taking the place of the Walkman. Just glance around a commuter train or a bus and see how many people have earbuds in their ears. Previously, when trapped in a window seat a simple “Excuse me” was enough to signal to the person in the aisle seat that it was your stop. Today usually a tap on the shoulder is needed to bring that person back into the world.Personal Stereo is the history of a device that had no original market (a cassette player that did not record) yet caught on and changed the way we listen to music. The original Sony Walkman was a hefty 14 ounces (compared to 1.1 ounces of an iPod Nano) but was so portable people used them when running. Today, nearly a pound of extra weight would be scoffed at by most runners. Sony wasn’t alone with its portable cassette player. Soon there were many knockoffs on the market but none better than the original. Walkman, like Xerox, was a product name that entered our vocabulary not only as an original but also as any comparable item. Your photocopy was called a Xerox no matter whose machine made it. Any personal portable stereo was called a “Walkman.”Sony wasn’t alone with its portable cassette player. Soon there were many knockoffs on the market but none better than the original. Walkman, like Xerox, was a product name that entered our vocabulary not only as an original but also as any comparable item. Your photocopy was called a Xerox no matter whose machine made it. Any personal portable stereo was called a “Walkman.”Tuhus-Dubrow takes the reader through the rise and fall of Sony and the era of cassette tapes. A nice contemporary cultural history of something that has become solidly entrenched in our culture. As I am typing this I am listening to Karla Bonoff on my iPhone through Bluetooth headphones. The same artist I would have been listening to doing this at a typewriter with a Walkman thirty-five years ago. Times change, but Personal Stereo shows us that behavior only evolves.Available September 7, 2017

I love music almost as much as reading so when I saw this book I knew it was a must-read (plus the cover is fabulous). I had not encountered the Object Lessons series previously, but after reading this one I plan to seek out more of them. Personal Stereo is a quick and fascinating read that covers both the history of the Walkman and its effects on society. The Walkman’s debut occurred when I was young so I do not remember either the excitement it generated nor the consternation about its potential negative impact on society. Looking back from a time when iPhones exist, at times it was almost comical to read some of the concerns that critics voiced about the Walkman.Personal Stereo thankfully begins long before the invention of the Walkman with a history of Sony and its founders, Masaru Ibuka and Akio Morita. I found this section incredibly engaging and loved learning that Sony began with a staff of eight crammed into a small office in a bombed downtown Tokyo department store in 1945. The company’s initial name was Tokyo Telecommunications Research and was later changed to Sony, derived from the Latin word for sound and a play on the English word “sonny”, a slang term meaning young boy that was common in Japan at the time. The company first began upgrading radios and then eventually produced the first tape recorder available in Japan. Next, Sony produced the transistor radio eventually earning one of its researchers the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the invention. As the saying goes “and the rest is history”.The author also focuses on the shift from only being able to listen to music live to having music available on the radio and later records, cassettes, CDs and finally MP3 players. Again, this was not something I have ever thought twice about and was somewhat enthralled that critics could not “bear to hear a remarkably life-like human voice issuing from a box.” Music suddenly became something in the background frequently instead of the focal point. As I frequently use music to pass the time on car trips, while folding laundry and cooking dinner, and as something to just relax my mind, I was completely intrigued with the concept that recorded music caused such an uproar initially. What a sad world we would live in without easy access to music.While there are several genesis stories for the creation of the Walkman, Sony employees generally felt the Walkman would be a failure. A tape recorder that was not used to tape something seemed absurd, and the fact that no invention occurred but instead Sony teams working together merged existing technologies (and actually removed the taping function) seemed a crazy idea for most people in the field at the time. Clearly, as with many new products, the Walkman was not only an immediate success but changed the way people listened to music going forward.The inclusion of numerous photos and newspaper advertisements add significant value to the book. I loved looking at the old Walkman ads and the focus on taking sound with you. There is so much more to this book, and it is well worth the read. I clearly loved Personal Stereo and highly recommend it. Thanks so much to Bloomsbury Academic and NetGalley for the chance to read this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Personal Stereo is an interesting little book, though not what I thought it would be. It started out as I expected, by describing the origin and history of the Walkman. (The origin of the concept is actually quite murky, with multiple people claiming to be the first to conceive of a personal cassette player). I was surprised to learn that the first portable cassette units were actually recorders, designed for reporters and court stenographers.The tone of the book turns unexpectedly serious during the "Norm" chapter. Some social critics at the time apparently believed that the Walkman would bring about the end of civilized society. This section of the book gets unwieldy, as the decline of etiquette, hearing loss, people getting hit by trains, the rise of the yuppie, music piracy, and even masturbation are all topics of discussion.The third chapter is entitled "Nostalgia," and the tone lightens again. Children of the 80s do feel nostalgic about the Walkman, as evidenced by the spike in prices for a used one after Guardians of the Galaxy was released.This was a quick read, and will bring back fond memories for those of us who grew up with foamy headphones.

Short, informative and fun.