The Red Light District
Beatmag’s regular technical columnist James Spectrum (AKA Jai Salo of Pepe Deluxe)
Walt Disney was man who dreamed BIG. By early ‘60s he had created not just an empire but also a land bearing his own name. But he was not ready to rest on his laurels; instead he wanted a whole new world. The problems with the old one and especially its cities were (and still are) the same: pollution, feverish tempo of life, crime and general chaos. He wanted something else for his grandchildren, something that he’d experienced only in his own land. This simple thought led to an idea of almost biblical proportions: a futuristic, clean, organized, self enclosed community where everyone and everything worked smoothly. A magnificent laboratory for engineering buildings, living spaces and their relation to people. All the groundwork had been done at Disneyland, now it was time for Uncle Walt and his Imagineers to really take to another level. This was the beginning of what was marketed as ‘Disney World’, but officially titled ‘Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow’ (EPCOT).
As always, Walt’s vision was far ahead of its time. EPCOT would have ‘Peoplemover’, a transportation based on motors embedded in the track rather than in the vehicles. Main roads for cars and Disneyland-style supply trucks would travel underneath the city core to eliminate the risk of pedestrian accidents. Most of the waste would be recycled. The community would feed itself and keep the residents healthy. There would be no retirees; everyone would have a job. All the people would live in low-density, single-family house neighbourhoods with low rents, vast green areas, paths for electric cars, light recreation areas for adults and play areas for children. The housing would be designed with ease of change in mind: new ideas and products such as brand-new kitchen appliances could be added on the fly. Not bad, eh? To my ears EPCOT sounds almost like a marriage of an American dream with a communist utopian world. No wonder the minute Walt died, the Disney Corporation decided to abandon the one project above all he had wanted to leave to posterity.
Commercial success and high income allows you to develop and tune concepts that benefit the creative capital of the whole world. As no single artist can entertain everyone, I think the most important task of every artist is to inspire others to inspire others to … and that is exactly why we need something like a Rock Star driving license. If you make it to the top, better Carpe that Diem! Like when wasting money, remember it should be done with style and finesse. Consuming is– how to put it politely — god awful boring. For Pete’s sake, Italian sports cars are NOT unique or impressive… but these custom hot-rods are. No worries if you have a so called ‘creative block’: I’ve never ever heard of a person who’s really created something out of void (let’s not get into religious debate here, OK?). Creating is just another word for ‘tuning’, modifying an existing idea.
Take, for example, the Compact Cassette. An audio format introduced by Philips in 1963 and initially designed for dictation and portable use. The key design features were low quality and low price. The format should have died within a few years, but something strange and sinister happened. My guess is as good as any: some people at Sony decided it was payback for years of humiliation after WW II. So they resorted to the dark martial arts of Research and Development (R&D). What started as a format treating audio like Conan handling the members of the wicked Snake Cult, was over the years tuned to the max. The original magnetic material storing the audio was improved many times, dynamic range and frequency response were expanded and various noise reduction systems were employed to bring the background noise down. It still wasn’t nearly as good as the competition, but hey, that’s what they had the Soulless Ones (aka Marketing) for. Like mice among dinosaurs, cassette kept growing and one by one the mighty giants of reel-to-reel, eight-track, Elcaset, etc, fell over dead. This was a historical turning point: by the next big tape battle JVC’s Board of Directors had realized that R&D was pretty much unnecessary and there’s very little marketing can’t handle, as witnessed by VHS’s triumph over the technically far superior Betamax and Video 2000.
In order to do our part in keeping the audio industry ‘bad-meaning-good’ tradition alive and to properly test the famous ‘80s theory “Home Taping Is Killing Music”, we decided a few years ago it was time for us to record the whole new Pepe Deluxe album on cassettes. Now the job is done, and oh boy I can tell those fun-loving, challenge-obsessed Catskills marketing boys are just buzzing with excitement!
