1942

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This is the fourth wartime mix, but it's the first without an often jarring disconnect between music and history. The USA's entry into the war at the close of 1941 may not have had an immediate impact upon the course of the conflict, but the impact on popular culture — and particularly on recorded music — is unmistakable. It isn't just the rough-hewn comedy of Spike Jones and Carson Robinson, or the rapidly produced propaganda films, it seems to be knitted into the fabric of American culture. Characters in songs are either heading off to war or waiting for their man to return, radio serials are awash with Nazi spies, and variety shows now function primarily as drives for war bonds.

At the cinema — still of course the gold standard for culture — this is equally evident. 'Casablanca,' as timeless as it may seem, sits very snugly in this particular moment. The city itself was taken by the Allies as part of Operation Torch in November 1942, just around the time the film was first premiered, so when it went on general release in 1943 the setting was already an historical one. Hitchcock's 'Saboteur' is ostensibly a domestic spy drama along the lines of 'The 39 Steps' and 'North By Northwest,' but with the added context of the war this is shifted into a battle between tyranny and democracy, with speeches written by Dorothy Parker and a climactic final battle on the torch of the Statue of Liberty. The top-grossing film of the year was Mrs Miniver, a subdued yet powerful drama about the effects of the war on a rural English housewife, which once again presented a moral of freedom under threat.

The main business of Centuries of Sound is music, of course, and the effect of these shifts on music is profound, and not always in a particularly positive way. In 1941 we heard the first stirrings of rhythm & blues and bebop, in 1942 the former has a few very notable examples (Louis Jordan and Nat King Cole) but is nevertheless diminished, the latter has disappeared almost entirely. Was this a result of wartime censorship, or of conscription of musicians? A greater cause may be the strike by The American Federation of Musicians, which began on August 1st, after a summer of negotiations around royalty payments broke down. This left almost half the year with hardly any professional musicians — and certainly no big bands — recording anywhere in the USA. As we get into 1943 we will hear how musicians managed to circumvent rules to continue performing, and how this changed the course of popular music.

So these four-and-a-bit hours of sound are a little different to the last few mixes, more integrated in feel, but with more in the way of sound collage and re-appropriated radio (the many hours of recordings I trawled for these clips may partially explain the delay in getting this one out.) It also includes nine minutes of a John Cage radio play, a ten-minute 'Casablanca' montage, the best-selling single of all time (possibly) and a load of other things which I am already forgetting. It has been something of a monster to make, but I think it all fits together.

TRACK LIST

0:00:00 Wilhelm Furtwängler And The Berlin Philharmonic - Beethoven Symphony No. 9 (Excerpt) (Clip from The Hitchhiker) (Clip from Went The Day Well) (Clip from Woman of the Year) (Clip from Let's Pretend) (Clip from Went The Day Well) 0:01:37 Carl Stalling - Orchestra Gag (From 'Hobby Horse Laffs') (Clip from The Major and The Minor) 0:02:10 Gene Krupa - Let Me Off Uptown (Clip from To Be Or Not To Be) 0:05:22 Spike Jones & His City Slickers - Der Fuehrer`s Face (Clip from Wake Island) 0:08:08 Southern Sons - Praise The Lord And Pass The Ammunition (Clip from 1942 News Review) 0:11:33 Louis Jordan & His Tympany Five - Five ...