PRESENT TENSE:AN ICON OF the 1980s music world was widely remembered this week, though the praise was bittersweet, the nostalgia tempered by ambivalence. What was achieved in the 1980s, everyone agreed, revolutionised the music industry, and people's relationship to music. The name was everywhere back then, quickly becoming a byword for cool.
The pop-cultural giant revolutionised at least two industries, probably more, but by this week the heady days of global dominance were long gone, merely a pathetic memory in light of what came after. For the icon’s reputation was greatly diminished in recent years, damaged by bad management, disastrous decisions and erratic behaviour. It was remembered for what it once was, rather than what it had become.
But before you glaze over at the thought of yet another Michael Jackson lament, this is about another 1980s artefact, one which made a bigger, more lasting impact than the late King of Pop – on Wednesday, the venerable Sony Walkman turned 30, but the anniversary was a remembrance of faded glories rather than a celebration of a pioneering technology. The occasion prompted many to reflect on the ailing state of the Japanese megacorporation, which reported losses of 98.9 billion yen (€725 million) in the fiscal year ended March, while others lauded the device as the forerunner of the iPod and iPhone, almost as if the Walkman was the radio to the iPod’s television. But all agreed that while Sony still uses the name on most of its mobile devices, it’s a marque that has become decidedly old-fashioned.
Amusingly, the BBC website gave an original Walkman to a 13-year-old boy, with predictable results. The TPS-L2 (I guess it was the language barrier that resulted in all those unwieldy names), the kid discovered, wasn’t exactly pocket-sized, and had quite the appetite for batteries. Best of all, though, was one of those elementary errors someone born into the iPod generation was bound to make: “It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape.”
This gets to the heart of both the Walkman’s appeal and subsequent decline. Much of the online reminiscing this week involved memories of the Walkman’s idiosyncrasies: the tape-chewing and subsequent respooling; the ritualistic changing of sides; the tell-tale drunken slur of the music as the batteries breathed their last. While there were lots of online commenters protesting that they loved their Walkman and all its hassles more than they could ever love the cool efficiency of the iPod, I doubt many of those would actually swap a Walkman for an iPod, given the chance. (Though here’s my David Attenborough bit – I actually caught sight of a Walkman in the wild within the past 12 months. On a flight in the US, I saw a guy in his early 40s pull a 90s-era model out of his bag, then sort through a few tapes, before settling on his next listening experience. It was like seeing someone write with a quill and ink.)
The Walkman’s legacy, however, will be more than merely making music mobile – in an article Jonathan Glancey wrote in the Guardian 10 years ago after the death of Akio Morita, who along with Masaru Ibuka co-founded Sony, Glancey stressed how in keeping with its times the Walkman really was. “It was . . . the apotheosis of 1980s individualism. Perhaps no other single personal product has so neatly, if noisily, caught the spirit of an age. Just as Thatcher was announcing the death of society by heralding the age of privatisation . . . so the Walkman appeared. From the beginning, then, the Walkman was about the freedom of the individual.”
Ushering in what Sony called “headphone culture” was quite an achievement, but encapsulating an era, as Glancey saw it, was something else altogether. The Walkman didn’t just isolate people in their own little worlds, whether surly teenagers or alienated city dwellers; it was also the tangible manifestation of the great ideological shift of the decade. In addition, it was the logical conclusion to what the cultural theorist Raymond Williams described as “mobile privatisation” – the phenomenon whereby technological advances allow for a greater mobility, while society simultaneously becomes more atomised.
It is accurate to suggest that the iPhone and its ilk are descendants of the Walkman, but as portable music players evolve into smartphones and smartphones into miniature computers, it is clear they are diametrically opposed. For while the Walkman was the epitome of 1980s individualism, the iPhone is symbolic of the socially interconnected 21st century. On the night Michael Jackson died, how many people texted friends with the news? How many of those tweets that brought down Twitter were sent from iPhones? The privatisation that Williams spoke of has been transformed into a social engagement. We have now entered the world of “mobile socialisation”. In the future, this might very well be seen as the Walkman’s unlikely legacy.
Shane Hegarty is on leave