Conference Agenda

The cultural turn toward physical fitness in the United States during the 1960s is inextricable from the rise of vinyl. While middle-class Americans focused their buying power on affordable technologies like record players and televisions, government organizations were simultaneously extolling the virtues of a fit society. Former President John F. Kennedy’s call for the nation to physically and emotionally “harden” the “soft” American body led him to restructure the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports (PCPFS) for the health of US American families. Kennedy’s PCPFS would produce and widely distribute records like “Chicken Fat” (“The Youth Fitness Song”) (1961), Romper Room Physical Fitness (1961), and Fitness for All (1964) in schools and workplaces throughout the nation, utilizing vinyl’s inexpensive and portable nature to transform public spaces into sites for physical and moral labor.

But fitness media would also permeate the domestic space. Record companies, employing the voices of popular figures, later turned to communal listening technologies within the home to reach the masses, releasing albums like Yogi Bear’s Wake Up, America (1965) and George Eiferman’s Family Fitness (1963). This inclusion of physical activity in both public and private spaces, I suggest, allowed US society-at-large to envisage a virtuous and formidable public. But for US Americans who fell outside the bounds of “imagined” citizenship through categories of exclusion (race, gender, age, and disability), these recordings often solidified the unreachability of the “ideal” through their lack of representation of marginalized bodies.

This paper traces the circulation of early fitness vinyl in the US and the subsequent listening practices such recordings fostered. Drawing on planning documents, sound recordings, periodicals, and online forums, I argue that vinyl records connected white, middle-class US citizens to national ideals and communicated to listening audiences in schools, workplaces, homes, and beyond, how the exemplary “fit citizen” (Purkiss 2023) could be made. Further, I suggest that these collective sonic practices also worked to abject those the US government and social elites deemed outside the bounds of ideal citizenry. Through this project, I re-historicize existing fitness narratives by illuminating the entangled nature of sound and state-making in the US.

In 1962, jukebox manufacturer Seeburg began producing dance music records in response to the discotheque craze rapidly spreading across the United States. Recorded on little LPs—a jukebox-specific 7 inch vinyl format pressed to be played at 33⅓ instead of 45 rpm to allow for seven and a half minutes of nonstop music—Seeburg’s Rec-O-Dance recordings comprised early experiments with music, “purposely designed for continuous discotheque dancing and listening.” The records were produced alongside new jukebox models with improved sound systems, tablecloths, napkins, posters, and a modular dance floor for the quick conversion of any space into a dance club. Other jukebox manufacturers quickly mimicked Seeburg’s concept, and industry magazines Billboard and Cash Box nicknamed the sweeping industry fad “jukebox go-go” with its new dance music on “juketheque records.” Out of touch with the musical demands of the 60s discotheque scene, the juketheque record and its concomitant discotheque jukebox models would almost entirely disappear by 1969.

By close reading advertisements and press coverage on jukebox go-go from music industry trade magazines, I have found that continuous, silence-free sets of curated dance music were central to discotheque culture as early as 1962, over a decade before DJs would popularize mixing and extending the dance breaks of individual records. My archive-based study of the juketheque record offers new insight into ongoing scholarly debates on how record formats and playback devices have historically shaped U.S. American dance music and communal listening practices. 1960s discotheque compilation albums switch abruptly from one song to the next, with haphazard changes in tempo, meter, and genre. Yet, to listeners accustomed to a jukebox’s long, clunky transition between discs or the dead air caused by a DJ flipping over a record, seamless music afforded new possibilities for improvised social dance. Juketheque records (re)sound on today’s dance floors through the DJing-specific mixer nestled between dual turntables in a DJ’s now iconic setup, developed in the years directly following jukebox go-go. Although juketheque records would disappear as jukeboxes fell out of style, continuous, silence-free music remained essential to the movements and sounds of discotheque culture.

In the mid-2010s, Japanese-influenced cocktail bars with high-end analog sound systems began opening throughout North America and Europe. Early examples include Bar Shiru (Oakland), Fréquence (Paris) Rhinoçéros (Berlin), Shibuya Hi-Fi (Seattle), and Tokyo Record Bar (New York). These establishments are modeled on the Japanese jazu kissa, or jazz cafe, in which music (often 20th-century U.S. jazz) is typically played on turntables and experienced in near silence. These spaces, more broadly described as ongaku kissaten (music cafes) flourished in the decades following World War II, when economic deprivation and the U.S. occupation promoted communal listening and an influx of U.S. popular music. After a period of decline, the 21st century has witnessed a resurgence of interest in these establishments.

This paper argues that although these establishments explicitly invoke the Japanese model (discursively, aesthetically, and technologically), they serve an elite Western perspective that embraces analog technology and communal listening as part of a broader “slow movement” that rejects 21st-century digital solitude. As the owner of a German establishment explained, “The listening bar trend is a part of the big worldwide movement of ‘slow food’ or ‘‘mindfulness’ … and a jazz kissa is a very good place to do things slowly.” Drawing on fieldwork at more than thirty sites in Asia, Europe, and the United States, I identify points of connection and disjunction between the Japanese and Western models. I argue that in the West, analog is more a visual than a sonic phenomenon; that Western cultural expectations limit the embrace of silent listening in U.S. and European establishments; that in the West, digital technologies, though decentered, nevertheless serve a vital role in terms of playback and promotion; and that recently opened establishments in Tokyo seem to emulate the Westernized take on the Japanese kissa more than the traditional model (or represent a blend of the two).

This paper participates in ongoing scholarly conversations about Japanese technoculture (e.g., by Shuhei Hosokawa and David Novak), musical transculturation (e.g., in the new Journal of Music Theory and Transcultural Music Studies) and the 21st-century vinyl revival (explored by Michael Palm, Eliot Bates, and many others).