Distress signals

It’s an increasingly common lament that computers have ruined everything, and a longing for the days before Google and Twitter, when everything was somehow more organic and authentic, is on the rise. As someone who can remember writing early reviews on an electric typewriter and then going to the library to fax them to a literary journal, I’m partial to this kind of unplugged nostalgia myself. But it can get out of hand.

So it does in this book — ambitiously titled to evoke John Berger’s classic of art criticism, Ways of Seeing — which explains that computers have wrecked music along with everything else. Early on, Damon Krukowski rails against the soulless practice of recording to a ‘click track’ (a totally regular electronic beat), saying that this began in the late 1980s. In fact, though, mechanical metronomes provided click tracks in the studio long before computerised drum machines existed. According to Ian MacDonald’s definitive account of the Beatles, Revolution in the Head, the recording of ‘Penny Lane’ began with the piano parts being laid down one over another, and Paul probably played them to a click track to keep in time.