Conference Agenda

The arrival of long-playing records (LPs) in 1948 sparked a wide range of technological, economic, and cultural changes that revolutionized the music industry (Osborne 2012). This shift coincided with a period of profound change in global Jewish culture following the Holocaust and the founding of the State of Israel. At a moment when the meanings and representations of Jewishness were unsettled, the LP offered musicians, producers, retailers, and consumers a powerful new platform for articulating Jewish identity, history, and culture.

This paper examines how these developments reshaped the postwar recorded Jewish music industry, arguing that LP technologies played a decisive role in shaping how Jewish music was heard, valued, and culturally positioned in the postwar era. To demonstrate this role, it focuses on a revealing case study: the album Olives, Almonds and Raisins, featuring pop arrangements of Yiddish and Hebrew folk songs by Jewish musician Ray Martin (1918–1988). It was released in multiple versions for European and American markets in 1957–58, each featuring the very same music, but accompanied by markedly different packaging and advertising campaigns that highlighted, downplayed, or effectively concealed the music’s Jewishness. These divergent framings generated markedly different histories of listening, reception, and creative reuse. For instance, in the United States, critics celebrated the album’s Jewish musical authenticity, while in Britain its cover art was repurposed by film producers as an emblem of youth rebellion in the film Beat Girl (1960).

By tracing these contrasting trajectories within the broader contexts of postwar Jewish music and the recorded music industry, this paper extends scholarship on the reshaping of postwar Jewish identities (Adler and Jelen 2017; Gordan 2024) into the domain of music and sound media. Building on recent debates concerning album covers and musical paratext (Borgerson and Schroeder 2017; Vad 2021), the paper further examines the interplay of sound, visual and textual representation, and ethnic identity in the proto-“world music” industry of the early postwar period.

The archetypical account of stylistic periodization in early Hip-Hop music goes a little something like this: in the mid-to-late 1970s, break-looping DJs inaugurate an artform which found commercial fixity in “Old School” releases (Toop 2000); in the mid-to-late 1980s, “Golden Age” producers picked up the bricoleurs’ baton, (mis)using samplers for insurrectionary montages incorporating both breaks and other indexes of Black creative expression (Gilroy 1993; Schloss 2000).

The intervening member in this relay—a “drum machine era” (Kajikawa 2015) with fewer breaks, samples, or re-renderings of disco grooves—goes comparatively unsung. It’s not hard to see why. Absent this awkward interloper, the story of Hip-Hop’s first decades is uncomplicatedly one of repurposing, subversion. Presumably for this reason, some stress that occasional “electro” productions from this period, such as “Planet Rock,” sustained the interpolation practices of the Old School (Patrin 2020). Moreover, the durable association of drum machines with genres like Detroit techno generates thematic friction with certain aesthetic ideals: the popular account of how producer J Dilla “humanized his MPC”—though a sampler—illustrates perceived antagonisms between digital grids and desirable “feel” in the Hip-Hop imaginary (Vox 2017; Charnas 2022).

Attention to Hip-Hop as a live performance practice troubles both claims: this era was not one across which the repurposing spirit was largely deferred, nor one in which human hands stopped furnishing Hip-Hop with its rhythmic feel. Specifically, live performances reveal that machine-made beats were as much tools for turntablism as foundations for studio singles. Pressing beats to vinyl and placing identical records across turntables allows for “beat juggling,” a performance strategy introducing variations, improvisatory flourishes, and shifts in groove; as a case study, I consider Run-DMC’s live performances of “Sucker MCs” (1983) and analyze DJ Jam Master Jay’s juggling of the sparse instrumental.

Despite recapitulations of Hip-Hop’s intertwined elements being commonplace, then, I argue that live performance seems easily forgotten—Hip-Hop was not interred in the studio and entombed in wax by “Rapper’s Delight.” Beat juggling thus serves as yet another welcome reminder that music is lived, made, remade; not constituted by fossilized sonic objects.

In 1983, Pete Shelley—initially of Buzzcocks fame—released his second solo album XL-1. Though the record may not have been an immediate commercial success, it was nonetheless a successful experiment in the multimedia use-potential of vinyl discs, with the album’s final track, “ZX Spectrum Code,” encoding computer instructions as audio data. These instructions were separated from the album’s other sonic material and “hidden” behind a locking groove, trapping the stylus and sparing human listeners from the screech of computer-code-as-sound. Ripping this track from the vinyl record onto tape, however, enabled a listener with a Sinclair ZX Spectrum and a suitable cassette deck to access a series of computer-generated graphics and accompanying real-time lyrics. Although the ZX Spectrum could not play the album’s audio, a timed pressing of “play” on both computer and record player would offer a multimedia album experience.
This paper situates XL-1 within the broader ecology of home-computing and software distribution practices—most of which are now obsolete or obscure—while accounting for the manifold techniques and technologies which allowed Shelley’s experiment to succeed. Once accused of “killing music,” for example, home taping here becomes actively encouraged as a constituent step of fully realizing the LP and enriching the listening experience. Likewise, the storing of binary instructions on vinyl, differentiated as long and short pulses for “1s” and “0s,” illuminates the interoperability of pitch and rhythm at registers which extend far beyond human capacities for hearing (Chua and Rehding 2021); so too does XL1 exemplify the intermedial potential of vinyl discs while calling into question absolutist intuitions about the analog-digital binary (Sterne 2012; 2022). Shelley’s encounter with the ZX Spectrum thus not only enacts a form of musically-grounded, do-it-yourself computer creativity—speaking to the same homebrew sensibility within early personal computing that stimulated the widespread popularity of magazine flexi discs—but also serves as fertile ground for essential music- and media-theoretical reflections.