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The Dark Art of Posthumous Music
In the latest SF Weekly, I write about the record industry’s morbid beginnings. And the new Michael Jackson album:
Money and death were on Thomas Edison’s mind in April 1878. Money, as usual, because Edison was the Gilded Age’s favorite boffin. And death, because he had just invented the phonograph. That spring, he explained his new gadget to the Washington Post as if it were the antidote to mortality. “Your words,” he said, “are preserved in the tin-foil and will come back upon the application of the instrument years after you are dead.” On the same publicity tour, a New York Post reporter told Edison, “There is many a mother mourning her dead boy or girl who would give the world could she hear their living voices again — a miracle your phonograph makes possible.” Morbid stuff, for sure. But with his talking machine, Edison knew he had hit paydirt. (READ ON… )
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