FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Vice Blog

LITERARY - WHAT I LEARNED FROM HOW TO WRECK A NICE BEACH

There was a period at the beginning of the zeroes where every other book coming out was a micro-history on freaking salt or napkin rings or TV's the Noid or something. Some of them (like Mary Roach's

Stiff

) were great, obsessive sourcebooks that taught you everything you needed to know about their subject. But way too often you'd crack one open and instead of nerding out about Hitler's napkin ring collection it was clear the author/their publisher just picked a hot-button topic or object to use as a "lens" for viewing boring old regular people history. It was like when Christians use rap or graffiti to try to trick kids into accepting Jesus and it was

Advertisement

infuriating

.

How to Wreck a Beach

doesn't suffer from this same fury problem. It's a history of the vocoder written by a guy who's plainly spent a lot of time thinking about and learning up on the vocoder, as well as interviewing nearly every person involved in vocoding from the last 40 years of amazing black space music. The book traces the device from its early days encrypting FDR and Ike's instructions for D-Day and the atom bomb unto its critical role in Ramelzee's cosmic rollerjam "Traxxstoppers." It is also packed with vocoder-related tidbits and anecdotes that are interesting even to people who don't give a shit about vocoders. Here's four of our favorites:

-Eisenhower's vocoder was the size of a three-bedroom house and followed him on its own barge when he had to take state trips transoceanically. -JFK never got the hang of his vocoder and almost precipitated World War III multiple times during the Cuban Missile Crisis simply because he kept forgetting to hit the "Talk" button when responding. -While he was learning the OVC-3D mouth-controlled hologram generator (seen above) in 1984, Sun Ra had to share studio space with the tween New Kids On the Block, coalesced by vocoder virtuoso Michael Jonzun. -During the vocoder-heavy European tour for his all-time greatest album (

Trans

), Neil Young made his guitarist wear five-pound ankle weights so "he wouldn't bust the noir vibe with his fuckin' girly spins."

The book, despite pointing out that the talk-box and vocoder are completely separate machines and only an asshole would get the two confused, also contains a nice conciliatory section on Talk Boxers containing these gems: -Roger Troutman from Zapp used to dunk his talk-box tube in Remy Martin between songs both to sterilze it and give himself a "taste of the after party," which would have made a good tagline for Remy Martin. -Using the talk-box tube evidently kills your teeth and Teddy Riley would lodge his in the open socket of a removed molar to avoid the pain. -P-Thug from Chromeo once passed out onstage while trying to make the word "baby" last for longer than 30 seconds. We concede that this isn't Led Zeppelin's manager putting a snapper in a girl's crotch, but it's easily the nerd equivalent. Dave Tompkins is doing a reading tonight at the book's

release party

and you should swing by to say "Good work on the book, man" (but in robot voice). TERRY HAND