Dark times in the farmyard

I almost want to apologize for this. Almost. But not quite. I have a love for old recordings that borders on the obsessive, so much so that I wrote a whole novel around it (Bus People! You can read the whole thing here. Just click on the pink link.)

Bus People: quick links to parts 1 - 12

But never mind that. Now that I have YouTube, I don't have to wait for these bizarre old things to come on the radio or appear on a recording. NO! Here they are, millions of them, thick with dust and outmoded thinking, things you never wanted to hear but are going to hear anyway. 

The first two are - strange - novelty recordings, I guess, with a lot of barnyard stuff on them. But partway through the Farmyard Medley is a shock so unexpected that it literally registered in my gut. You'll know when you get to it.

That leads to the third recording. It's the same song I heard on an old record - so old it had grooves on only one side, and was about 1/2" thick - which I listened to with my friend Nancy, one day in the musty attic when it was raining too hard to do anything else. We found a trove of ancient records that probably hadn't been played since the 1920s, and some of them were far older than that. Cornfield Medley is shocking because of the language, and in particular the casual use of one of the worst words that exists, but the version we heard was even uglier because it involved a "Massa" ordering his slaves around.

Old and horrible, but how far have we come? Things are dark, these days, and the only way around it is to keep going. We're still fighting battles around ugly words, even uglier racism, the ruthlessness of it, the way it diminishes humanity. Back then, it was simply called entertainment.

(Never mind what's on this one. I don't know myself. But there IS a connection to Bus People, in that nobody is quite sure who this is.)

Howard Dean Scream

Every day, and in every way, I am learning more and more about things that are of no use to me whatsoever. I learn most of it from that torrent of misinformation, the internet, and from YouTube in particular, just cuz it's such a great source of distraction.

I stumbled across the Howard Dean scream some time ago - I didn't even know who he was, and am still not sure, but that sound he made was enough to end his political career. But then I became aware of the Wilhelm Scream. A character in a Western (presumably named Wilhelm) from some time in the 1950s was shot, and gave off this sound, this highly-unlikely, high-pitched, strangled male scream, not unlike the squeal of an injured dog. Sound technicians across Hollywood must be in a special sort of union, because the Wilhelm Scream has been dubbed into countless other movies, and is still being used today as a sort of sly auditory in-joke.

But my theory is that Howard Dean somehow got rigged up to the wrong sound equipment, so that a  Wilhelm Scream issued involuntarily out of his own capacious, seemingly-sincere, highly political mouth.

Sounds a bit like a rebel yell to me, but being a Canadian, how would I ever know?

Creepy, creepy stuff

I just realized that throughout my adult life, I kept trying to forget about "Sonovox", the miraculous sound phenomenon of the 1940s. Until just now, I didn't know exactly how it was done, maybe because I didn't want to think about it at all.

But now I just found out. 

Here is what it said on a music site dedicated to sound aberrations: "You could make just about any musical instrument 'talk' with Sonovox.  The sound of the instrument was fed into two small speakers placed on the sides of the throat. Those sounds were transmitted to the larynx, so that they came out of the throat almost as if they were produced there." Thus if you shoved speakers blasting the sound of a clarinet against your larynx and mouthed the words "scoobie doo", you'd have a "scoobie-doo-saying" clarinet. The miracle of the ages.

I don't know why this didn't seem to bother people then, but the Sonovox produced the most ungodly spectral whining sound.  Really, it's impossible to describe, except to say that it is not quite like anything else you've heard, or would want to hear again. The only thing it remotely resembles is the robotic vocal effect of autotune. Most of the instruments don't sound like themselves at all. They just sound weird.

I've been here before, I know I have. I've suffered from Rusty poisoning. This was the recording I was required to listen to ad nauseam as a child, so that I could be indoctrinated into the Joys of Classical Music. I listened to it again recently (for old recordings never die - they just keep getting reissued), and it was, if anything, worse than I remembered. This recording was probably the first widely-known use of the Sonovox, and it became a sensation. Or at least, it wouldn't go away. The different instruments whined and gulped and sounded like bees trapped in a bottle. Most of what they said to Rusty was unintelligible, in spite of the slow robotic way they said it.

I don't know why the people who invented this didn't realize, or perhaps care, that their invention was incredibly creepy and that they would be scaring little children and making it impossible for them to sleep. (Or was it that Civil Defense "this is only a test" thing on TV?)

But to find out that others had used or abused Sonovox - or their listeners - was quite a revelation to me, a painful one, because then I sort of had to listen to some of it. It gave me flashbacks. 

This must have been some kind of fad. People must have gee-whizzed over it. There is a talking guitar on YouTube that is so bad, I won't subject you to it here (except for the silent gif above), but people loved it back then. They loved it so much that they completely dropped it a few years later. Disney used Sonovox as the voice of Casey Junior, the circus train in Dumbo, but he only says "all aboard" in a not-too-obnoxious way. 

All the same, trains aren't supposed to talk.

(Rusty outtakes)

Rusty: the REAL story!