Listening to Resistance: The Walkman, Portable Music Technology, and the Soundscape of Urban Unrest in Post-1992 Los Angeles Literature

Abstract

Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange (1997) and Paul Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle (1996) evoke the act of listening to music as a way to dismantle stereotypical representations of urban resistance and to paint a diverse picture of how communities throughout Los Angeles were impacted by unrest in 1992. From Yamashita’s Buzzworm, a character always tuned into the radio, to Beatty’s Nicholas Scoby, the protagonist’s best friend who is on a mission to listen to every jazz song ever made, these writers render secondary characters who are most concerned with the consumption of music and the act of listening as a form of culture sharing. In fact, these characters utilize portable devices, particularly the Walkman, to bring personal music and media consumption into public spaces. In this paper, I argue that characters like Buzzworm and Scoby facilitate the creation of specific sonic textures that allow authors to break down artificial barriers of racial representation in the aftermath of urban unrest. These writers highlight the act of listening in order to limn the cross-cultural impact that the 1992 unrest had throughout the Southern California region.

1. Introduction

Let me make the songs for the people,

Songs for the old and young;

Songs to stir like a battle-cry

Wherever they are sung.

—Frances E. W. Harper (1895)

“In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.”

—Ralph Ellison (2002)

Hip-hop music takes center stage in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (Lee 1989), a film that foreshadows the 1992 Los Angeles uprising with its tragic denouement that leaves audiences with the image of unresolved urban unrest. Lee’s film provocatively illuminates the complex inner lives of a multicultural cast of Brooklyn neighbors, while he also captures the sound of an era.1 Take, for example, the character Radio Raheem, who walks through the Brooklyn streets playing Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” on his portable boom box for all to hear, whether they like the music or not. If, as Shana Redmond argues, “within the African diaspora, music functions as a method of rebellion, revolution, and future visions that disrupt and challenge the manufactured differences used to dismiss, detain, and destroy communities,” then we can begin to understand that Lee utilizes Radio Raheem’s boom box as a tool for resistance.2 When Radio Raheem falls victim to police brutality by the movie’s conclusion, the neighbors, whom Lee depicts throughout the film as members of a complex multigenerational community, respond in an act of collective violence. Here, Lee seems to suggest that violence functions as a form of mourning. Although the film predates the 1992 crisis in Los Angeles, Do the Right Thing speaks to the social justice issues that led to the later event.3 We can view Lee’s Radio Raheem, whose voice is nearly synonymous with the hip-hop music he plays on his boom box, as a precursor to the characters that appear in Post-1992 Los Angeles literature who are primarily interested in producing their own soundscapes with portable music devices like the Walkman. Those fictional characters facilitate the creation of specific sonic textures that allow authors to break down artificial barriers of racial representation. Now, more than ever, given the closely-watched, constantly evolving political landscape in Los Angeles, an examination of the lessons learned in the aftermath of urban unrest is relevant to our contemporary lives. Attending to the aesthetics of sound and the act of listening, this paper explores the ways that Post-1992 Los Angeles literature grapples with the cross-cultural dynamics of urban unrest through the motif of music. In doing so, this paper begins with a discussion of Lee’s Radio Raheem before embarking on a detailed close reading analysis of Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange and Paul Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle in order to demonstrate that late twentieth-century fiction writers in Los Angeles showcase how cross-cultural listening has the potential to improve collective understanding and thwart misunderstandings that lead to unrest in moments of community crisis.

After all, listening to music in narratives, whether film or literature, echoes how people listen to each other. Sound is a significant modality for cultural consumption. Guthrie Ramsey argues in his discussion of Lee’s Do the Right Thing that the film is “one way to enter into an analysis of the intersection of black identity and musical practice,” and with this in mind, it makes sense to begin to think about how black writers render music in order to explore racial identity (Ramsey 2002, p. 312).4 I am particularly interested in the ways that characters listen to music with portable devices. Lee’s Radio Raheem provides us with a visual image of someone who wants to share his music with everyone around him in the same way that Lee, himself, sets out to create a soundscape in his film.5 In fact, Lee intentionally sought out celebrated hip-hop group Public Enemy to create a song for Do the Right Thing, entitled “Fight the Power.” In doing so, the song became an anthem for the film which Lee hints at when he juxtaposes it early on with James Weldon Johnson’s “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing.”6 Victoria Johnson rightly points out that “the aural explosion created by ‘Fight,’ reinforced by Lee’s exaggerated camera angles, suggests that rap is a potentially totalizing aesthetic system” (Johnson 1993, p. 24). To this, I would add that Radio Raheem intentionally employs “Fight the Power” as an empowering, amplified musical anthem in order to make a political statement that he would not be able to make otherwise. In “Fight,” the lyrical expression of desire, which surfaces in lines like “Got to give us what we want/Got to give us what we need,” illuminates the unmet aspirations of an entire generation of young people who embraced hip hop as a way to gain fulfilment in an era of materialism that sometimes privileged individual wealth over education and community uplift. Nevertheless, hip hop lyrics paradoxically eschewed the materialism that was often visually present in its accompanying music videos as a way to highlight the ongoing sense of political dispossession that many black American experienced in the late-twentieth century United States.

In fact, hip hop music speaks to the film’s audience before the characters do; the music establishes the film’s tone as one that challenges traditional norms and prioritizes innovative voices. Lee portrays the character of Radio Raheem and the music that he plays on his boom box as a form of cultural self-expression, which brings to mind Tricia Rose’s assertion that “Hip Hop developed as part of a collective voice for those who had been condemned to silence” (Rose 1989, p. 37).7 Lee also includes references to various other musical genres like jazz and R&B. If, as Johnson points out, Lee’s film “represents his most coherent use of music as interactive with and an essential component of visual representation and thematic, political concern,” then he does this through the use of myriad genres, especially hip hop, to demonstrate that multiple generations can join together to achieve social change (Johnson 1993, pp. 19–20). In response to Lee’s request for music, Public Enemy’s Chuck D came up with the memorable song “Fight the Power.” When discussing the following lines from “Fight the Power,” “As the rhythm’s designed to bounce/What counts is that the rhyme’s/Designed to fill your mind,” Adam Bradley tells us that Chuck D “spits something like a working definition of rhyme’s reason…He is, of course, speaking of ‘rhyme’ here both as the practice of patterning sounds and as another name for the verse as a whole” (Bradley 2009, p. 54).8 What if the ways hip-hop music is consumed, particularly the types of devices used to listen to it, might also be considered an extension of this practice of patterning sound? Does listening to hip hop on a loud speaker in a communal fashion, rather than on headphones, change the way audiences might interpret the shifts in rhyme’s meaning in the same way that the sound of a poem, when read aloud by its author, seems to change its meaning even in a minor way due to the speaker’s inflection? I believe this is the case: that the way we listen to music has the potential to change our interpretation of the cultural products that we consume. For Radio Raheem, sound functions as a sonic anchor, but the song that he listens to pulls the viewer out of the film by reminding us that it is the same music that is featured at the beginning of the film to accompany the title sequence as actress Rosie Perez dances. When music is shared, it creates a communal experience, and Radio Raheem wants to share the music he loves in order to connect with his community. He also wants to expand that same community by creating a collective lexicon through shared musical consumption.

In narrative, music often functions as a tool for articulating political perspective. As Ramsey tells us, “the repetitive use of ‘Fight the Power’ allows Lee to manipulate audience members of different subject positions to relate to the musical conventions and political message of the piece because they understand what it means cinematically” (Ramsey 2002, p. 316). Lee accomplishes this, in part, by evoking Radio Raheem’s boom box. In this paper, I attend to the role of the Walkman and other portable music technology in Post-1992 Los Angeles literature to demonstrate that writers deploy these devices to denote the various ways characters curate their cultural music consumption. Each character’s listening strategy often tends to mediate exchanges between individuals in these novels that deal with urban unrest. To put it differently, the use of personal music devices that require headphones in these novels denotes an individual’s desire to create a personal listening space within the public sphere that has the ability to block out disturbances in a way that reduces connections between people. This contrasts with Lee’s deployment of Radio Raheem’s boom box, which is used as a tool to share black cultural production with a broad multiracial community.9 Thus, Post-1992 Los Angeles writers render the Walkman and other portable music devices in order to suggest that exposure to different cultures through listening is only an initial step toward harmonizing cultural differences and developing cohesive multicultural communities.

Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange and Paul Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle are two novels that evoke the act of listening to music as a way to dismantle stereotypical representations of urban resistance. In doing so, they paint a diverse picture of how communities throughout Los Angeles were impacted by unrest in 1992. From Yamashita’s Buzzworm, a character always tuned into the radio, to Beatty’s Nicholas Scoby, the protagonist’s best friend who is on a mission to listen to every jazz song ever made, these writers create secondary characters who are most concerned with the consumption of music and the act of listening as conduits for culture sharing. These characters utilize portable devices, particularly the Walkman, to bring personal music and media consumption into public spaces.10 They thus challenge the distinction between the public and private spheres. Through their respective characterizations of Buzzworm and Scoby, Yamashita and Beatty highlight the act of listening in order to limn the wide, cross-cultural impact that the 1992 unrest had throughout the Southern California region, and they shine a light on the necessity of listening to various voices in the search for solutions to social justice concerns that remain relevant today.

The Sony-manufactured portable audio player marketed as the Walkman and its derivatives allow listeners to block out unwanted noise with headphones and create a secured listening space for the consumption of sound. Significantly, it is this sound that has the ability to shape culture and solidify identity. Take for example Michael Robbins’s poem “Walkman” (Robbins 2021) which picks up on the device’s ability to seemingly suspend temporal norms as it provides its listener with a private space to reflect on personal memory and identity formation. Robbins originally published the poem in The Paris Review in 2016, and later republished it in his collection Walkman, which shares the poem’s name. Robbins’s poem grapples with memories of past addiction intertwined with recollections from previous travel, personal interactions, and work experiences. About his Walkman, Robbins’s speaker recalls: “poor. I brought a Walkman /And a backpack stuffed with/cassettes to Oaxaca. I was sick” (Robbins 2021, lines 41–43).11 Robbins uses enjambment to emphasize words like “poor” and “sick.” “Poor” is not a part of the sentence “I brought a Walkman and a backpack,” but it essentially joins the line’s broader sentiment when the poem is read aloud. Therefore, the Walkman becomes a means of cheap entertainment and a companion when money is limited. Here, Robbins’s syntax is one of fragmentation that mimics the way music is consumed on a portable cassette player. When played on a Walkman, a song can be stopped and started while the listener moves from one location to the next. In fact, portable music devices, like the Walkman, allow for the controlled consumption of sound in myriad spaces, especially in locations that are normatively quiet, like libraries and various modes of public transportation. All these spaces are part of urban life. By controlled, I mean that the listener is able to replay a song or fast forward it. Time is of no matter with the consumption of music on a portable listening device. When a character rewinds music in a literary text, such a moment often symbolizes an act of reflecting on the past. Take, for example, the speaker’s assertion: “Today I want to write about/how it’s been almost twenty years/since I owned a Walkman.” (Robbins 2021, lines 273–75). Here, the Walkman exists in the past with the speaker’s other memories. Post-1992 Los Angeles literature asks readers to recall the past, much like Robbins’s poem, but it also illuminates how listening practices—who we listen to and when we listen—have the potential to shift how we remember the past and imagine our futures.

2. Private Listening, Public Lives: Aural Collectivity in Tropic of Orange

Yamashita’s experimental and generically-hybrid Tropic of Orange draws in its reader with an alternative table of contents in the form of a chart entitled “HyperContexts,” which challenges the traditional boundaries of spatiotemporal narrative restraint and allows for multiple readings that mimic the consumption of media across genres. Through this informational chart that is formatted like an Excel document where the columns are labelled with days of the week and the rows list various characters, key moments in the novel fill in the in-between spaces and guide readers to specific chapters. It feels reminiscent of the “choose-your-own-adventure” books that were popular around the time the novel was published, as it offers readers the option of reading the narrative solely through a single character’s perspective. Here, Yamashita provides a roadmap that traces each character’s narrative up to and through the novel’s climactic crowd violence episode, which recalls the 1992 Los Angeles uprising. It is a chart that illuminates how individual experiences converge in a fulcrum event that shifts multiple realities into a single, pivotal moment that brings communities together even as the collective begins to scatter. In Yamashita’s novel, the lives of its multicultural cast of characters collide in a way that elucidates how the many witnesses of urban unrest share in the collective memory of an experience through their individual stories.

Tropic of Orange offers its readers access to this collective memory through its counter-narrative of the 1992 event in Los Angeles. Yamashita successfully presents her surreal counter-narrative, in part, through her portrayal of the character Buzzworm and the now seemingly anachronistic technology, including the Walkman and Buzzworm’s watches, that he utilizes to simultaneously keep track of time, social service offerings and current events. The author introduces Buzzworm along with his devices as a way to signify that he is always connected to both the past and the contemporary moment: “pager and Walkman belted to his waist, sound plugged into one ear and two or three watches at least on both his wrists” (Yamashita 1997, p. 27). Most importantly, Buzzworm’s persona is linked to his Walkman, pager, and the multiple watches that he wears that are selected from his highly curated collection. These items, particularly the watches and Walkman, call our attention to the cyclical nature of history and memory, thereby illuminating how an event like the 1992 uprising has multiple afterlives.

Indeed, Yamashita’s novel explores these afterlives through its counter-narrative, which features a multicultural cast of characters like Buzzworm, who always wears his Walkman “belted to his waist.” The Walkman gives Buzzworm the ability to remain mobile while he has “sound plugged into one ear” (Yamashita 1997, p. 26). Therefore, he continuously receives information from radio broadcasts, which represent simultaneous temporalities in Los Angeles, and he has the ability to listen to the music of his choice when he desires. The omniscient narrator explains that “you saw Buzzworm walking the hood every day, walkin’ and talkin’, making contact. Had a wad of cards in his pocket,” (Yamashita 1997, p. 26). The cards are adorned with his contact information, which includes his title, “Angel of Mercy,” and the facts that he works within “Central and South Central” Los Angeles and he is available “24 h/7 days” a week (Yamashita 1997, p. 26). In Tropic of Orange, Buzzworm’s availability and apparent mobility illustrate the fluidity of how urban resistance is experienced. The character’s access to an ongoing stream of information allows him to function as a source for other characters in the novel who represent various media outlets in the city. The presence of the multicultural contents on Buzzworm’s radio speaks to the often-compartmentalized dimensions of social life in Los Angeles that Yamashita is interested in exploring. In the novel, each individual character essentially listens to a different soundtrack. For example, Buzzworm is tuned into a multicultural soundtrack that he finds useful to begin to understand the many diverse aspects of his community.12

Buzzworm is constantly receiving such diverse information through his Walkman, which explains his name, a nomenclature that recalls the sound of bees, as well as “buzzword,” a word that has the ability to define a zeitgeist. Yamashita’s novel insists that Buzzworm’s experience as a Black man whose point of view is informed by his position on the streets of Los Angeles differs from that of the other characters, like Gabriel, a reporter, or Emi, a television executive. In addition to his Walkman, Buzzworm’s many watches signify his role as a timekeeper of sorts. He knows what time it is on the streets that he travels daily. The watches he wears highlight his role as a community timekeeper, and each of his analog watches has been picked for its keepsake value. In fact, these devices symbolize the way individual memories are stored for future recall. Due to the extensive nature of his watch collection, it makes sense to take a close look at the detailed way that Yamashita describes it:

The Buzzworm Watch Collection included so-called priceless pieces like one of the first Seiko just-shake-me-up-no-winding watches, a solar-powered watch, a genuine 1961 Mickey Mouse original, a glow-in-the-dark with fluorescent green numbers, a square LCDer with big half-inch numbers, case you had trouble seeing. Stuff like that. Picked out at flea markets. Buzzworm swore by the swap meets where life and death meet, he liked to say.

(Yamashita 1997, p. 27)

This litany of watches symbolizes what was then cutting-edge technology; these timepieces are collector’s items that recall a past era. From the “no-winding” to the “solar powered” to the “glow-in-the-dark,” these features represent the technological transformation of the watch from its basic analog wheels, screws and springs into something new. In this way, Buzzworm’s watch collection recalls both futurity and the past. In the same way, Tropic of Orange seems to ask its readers to think about how the 1992 Los Angeles uprising mirrors those events that occurred in 1965 that sparked the Watts Rebellion. In the aftermath of a clash with police, Angelenos at that time ventured into the streets to protest not only police brutality in their community but also other inequities that continue to persist today, including access to housing and education. In many ways, it makes sense that Buzzworm finds his watches at “the swap meets where life and death meet” because these found items, taken as a whole, symbolically function in Tropic of Orange as collective memory. They represent the memories of their past owners. The infinite nature of life is made up of many beginnings and ends; Buzzworm is like the town crier of yesterday because he possesses the knowledge of the births and deaths, so to speak, in his community. He also collects and keeps other people’s memories in the form of his used watches.

Buzzworm’s knowledge of his community’s complex cultural contours, like its collective memories, resembles the novel’s own work of showcasing the multicultural nature of unrest and its aftermaths. Buzzworm’s experience is meant to represent black life in Los Angeles in 1992, particularly because he traverses specific communities with large black populations. Buzzworm moves through public spaces in these areas, but his use of a Walkman allows him to create a private listening experience for himself. In this way, Yamashita engages the dual notion of public and private space through the character’s positioning. Significantly, by the novel’s conclusion, Buzzworm decides to give away his watch collection in an act that symbolizes his desire to settle into his own private space, his home, where he can live away from the noise on the outside streets. Nevertheless, Buzzworm witnesses the public spaces around him during the course of the novel, and he consumes sound based on his own preferences via his Walkman’s radio. As the narrator explains, for Buzzworm, “the radio’s a habit. He went through rehab twice before he discovered radio. When Buzzworm’d unplugged himself from his Walkman, meant he was unplugged from his inner voice,” (Yamashita 1997, pp. 29–30). Much like Lee’s Radio Raheem, Buzzworm finds his voice through radio. What emerges in Tropic of Orange is the idea that, like Buzzworm, anyone has the ability to filter information in the same way that one consumes radio.

Yamashita’s depiction of the Walkman in this way is reminiscent of how Buzzworm’s watches function in the novel. He keeps track of the city’s vibe because he is always tuned into the radio. Of course, the Walkman also offers its listeners the ability to fast forward and rewind a cassette tape, thereby the music of the past, played from a prior moment, can be repeated. Nevertheless, Buzzworm uses the Walkman mainly for its radio capability:

Twenty four hours, Buzzworm was listening to the radio. From station ID to station ID. Unless he meant business, he had it plugged in like supermarket music, just in the background to help you shop, give a little light rhythm to the situation. It was even hooked into his ear when he was sleeping, just whispering like a suggestive dream. And he listened to everything. He listened to rap, jazz, R&B, talk shows, classical, NPR, religious channels, Mexican, even the Korean channel. Didn’t know a thing they were saying, but he liked the sounds.

(Yamashita 1997, p. 29)

In Tropic of Orange, Buzzworm’s Walkman functions synonymously with the radio as a modern technology device that allows the world to stay connected. Yamashita is concerned with the world of diversity and cultural interactions in the aftermath of the 1992 event in Los Angeles. As the narrator observes, “Everybody’s got a timepiece and a piece of time” (Yamashita 1997, p. 29). It is significant that Buzzworm moves around from one station ID to the next, listening to stories from many cultures, even in languages that he cannot understand. Here, Yamashita makes the point that listening is only the first step toward developing more connected multicultural communities. Learning to understand each other after listening, according to the text, is the next step. Yamashita wants to demonstrate, with Buzzworm’s Walkman, that the character is a consumer of various cultural stories, and he functions as a storyteller in the novel simply through his ability to listen and repeat the things that he hears either on his Walkman or from those people whom he interacts with on the street. Like the griots of the past, Buzzworm adopts the role of the storyteller by sharing the myriad stories he encounters. This is emotional work for the individual; Buzzworm must spend hours consuming material on his radio to make aural sense of the complex world in which he travels. Nevertheless, he cannot function on his own, for he needs other people to help him make the connections that build and sustain community; such connections take time.

In Tropic of Orange, Yamashita illustrates how time has the ability to transcend the normative boundaries that are measured by a watch’s dial. At a central moment in the novel, Buzzworm experiences a temporal standstill that is manifested by a delay in the sound that is produced via his Walkman. The narrator observes, “Time stood still momentarily. Time stood still eternally. Whatever it was doing, it was standing,” (Yamashita 1997, p. 137). A temporary standstill in the novel marks a moment of reflection; it is reminiscent of a musical break. At this point in the text, I would argue, the characters are about to answer some of the novel’s central questions. It is also a moment when Yamashita reveals additional connections, which bring to light the social fractures within the novel’s urban geographies. Here, the characters begin to realize that the city’s maze-like, barrier-ridden society has limited their movement. Time stalls as Buzzworm begins to understand that not everyone listens to the musical genres that he would predict. For example, a young man whom Buzzworm meets on the street is listening to classical music on his Walkman, which Buzzworm does not anticipate. The role of classical music in the text is significant, but it is also presented alongside jazz. These forms of music denote cultural and class shifts in the text, and they are juxtaposed with the unexpected. These moments of surprise in the novel demonstrate that the interior lives of individuals cannot be simply assumed based on racial identity. In Tropic of Orange, traditional notions of identity are challenged by characters like Buzzworm, and racial barriers are intentionally crossed to demonstrate the fluidity of identity.

3. Sound Barriers: Isolating Headphones in Paul Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle

In The White Boy Shuffle, Paul Beatty crafts a bildungsroman that showcases the myriad aspects of black life in Los Angeles during 1992, thereby offering the viewpoint of a black adolescent experimenting with the contours of racial identity during a moment of urban crisis. Prior to the 1992 Los Angeles uprising, Beatty’s protagonist and narrator, Gunnar Kaufman, moves with his family from the mostly white neighborhood of Santa Monica to a more diverse community in Los Angeles where he struggles to fit in with the other students at his school. His mother initiates the family’s move because she wants her children to have a more racially-integrated experience. The move is meant to bring the characters together, but it also pushes them apart in many ways. Through basketball and poetry, Kaufman inserts himself into his new multicultural milieu, but it is through his best friend, Nicholas Scoby, that he becomes most connected to his new community. Kaufman also experiences the 1992 violence with Scoby.

In Beatty’s novel, Scoby functions as a sociocultural guide for Kaufman, but his ability to process black culture is limited because he has a narrow definition of what it is. He cannot see the many intersectional dimensions that exist within black life. Beatty introduces Scoby as “a thuggish boy who sat in the back of the class, ears sealed in a pair of top-of-the-line Sennheiser stereo headphones and each of his twiggish limbs parked in a chair of its own” (Beatty 1996, p. 66). At the same time, the narrative complicates any over simplistic understanding of the character by noting that “much to the dismay of those who paid attention…Scoby was a straight-A student” (Beatty 1996, p. 66). Clearly, Scoby excels beyond societal expectations that would limit his future options. With Scoby, Beatty deconstructs stereotypical categories of race. In addition to playing basketball with the protagonist, Scoby introduces him to the music of various jazz musicians, thereby he also serves as a partial repository of the history of jazz.

For example, consider the integral moment in Beatty’s novel when Scoby tells Kaufman during their first meeting that “my plan is to listen to everything recorded before 1975 in alphabetical order” (Beatty 1996, p. 67). Scoby is talking about jazz music, and his mission is to listen to his extensive collection in alphabetical order. Unlike the jazz music that he consumes, Scoby’s methodology does not allow for improvisation. He systematically accomplishes his goal by listening to cassette tapes on his portable music device, which provides the option of mobility that resembles Buzzworm’s radio. Nevertheless, Scoby differs from Buzzworm in that he does not consume a variety of media offered via the radio. Instead, Scoby prefers the cassette tapes that give him control over what he listens to and when he listens to it. Scoby curates his music selections based on a desire to listen to the black cultural production of jazz. Indeed, jazz history empowers Scoby to feel connected to his cultural heritage. In his exchanges with Kaufman, Scoby expresses his desire that the protagonist should do the same. For example, when Kaufman asks his friend what kind of jazz music he should listen to, Scoby says, “Do like me, start at the beginning” (Beatty 1996, p. 67). Such a statement suggests that when readers meet Scoby, he has yet to form any serious understanding of jazz music. He cannot articulate an argument for how to consume jazz music other than listening to it in an arbitrary order that does not distinguish one artist from the next beyond their surnames. Scoby is merely experimenting with jazz as a form of culture that he wants to immerse himself into without gaining any real understanding of its provenance. He believes that “true jazz” was recorded only before 1975. In addition, he is only interested in listening to jazz music performed by black artists and mostly male instrumentalists. Kaufman initially sees Scoby as an instructor of other forms of black music culture. For example, he thinks, “I’d have to remember to ask Nicholas Scoby about the blues” (Beatty 1996, p. 68). Nevertheless, Scoby is mainly interested in jazz, not the blues, and his myopic interest in music betrays the restrictions that bind this character’s future growth; he is essentially stuck in the past.

In Beatty’s novel, the personal cassette player emerges as technology that provides access to the past, particularly through the on-demand availability of jazz music produced before 1975. History functions in Beatty’s text as a representation of previous black life, which can be seen in part through the author’s depiction of the 1992 Los Angeles unrest. Such a focus on the past likely also reminds readers of earlier incidents of collective violence in the city, particularly the Watts Rebellion of 1965 that occurred during an era when some of the jazz music that Scoby consumes was created. Beatty’s text is concerned with historic violence in racialized urban spaces, and Beatty employs jazz music as a symbol of an exclusively black cultural production that his character Scoby connects to an authentically black aesthetic. For example, when the protagonist tells Scoby that he listens to jazz music performed by non-black musicians, Scoby is incredulous: “Fool, that ain’t jazz any more than Al Jolson and Pat Boone is soul. That is…fusion. A superficial fusion at that” (Beatty 1996, p. 67). Scoby’s reference to the blackface minstrel performer, Al Jolson, suggests that he sees other forms of jazz music as mere mimicry rather than art. His interest in consuming only “authentic” jazz music highlights Beatty’s own satirical commentary; Scoby has missed the significant point that jazz music is an improvised art form. Through Scoby and his reference to the minstrel performer Al Jolson, Beatty offers an interrogation of the historic fetishization of black cultural production through blackface productions as a kind of “spectacle” deployed to work through the quotidian “racial negotiations” that Eric Lott describes in his discussion of the antebellum era (Lott 1993, pp. 4, 140). Indeed, Scoby’s inability to see across cultural barriers, such as the multicultural history of jazz, is a character flaw that limits his futurity. He cannot move forward in the narrative, in part, because he holds the belief that what he needs—jazz music from the past—is something that cannot be found in the present.

As Scoby’s use of his portable music device allows him to block out unwanted sound, his cassette player also functions as a barrier to his ability to connect with others in the contemporary moment. Sherry Turkle contends that listening in conversations allows people to develop empathy, but our focus on our devices, like smart phones, reduces those important connections. She maintains that “it all adds up to a flight from conversation—at least from conversation that is open-ended and spontaneous, conversation in which we play with ideas, in which we allow ourselves to be fully present” (Turkle 2015, p. 4).13 In Beatty’s novel, Scoby only listens to what he wants to listen to; he blocks out possible interactions with those around him and that creates a barrier to new experiences and the development of empathy for those outside his social circle. When Scoby has on his headphones, he is secure within himself and his own identity. In this way, his private space drifts into the public sphere where he may not feel welcome or comfortable. By cultivating his personal listening space, Scoby is always in his comfort zone. Nevertheless, such private spaces within the public sphere prove to be unsustainable in the novel. When Scoby invites others, particularly the protagonist, to listen to his jazz music, he is asking them to enter his private space and his listening zone. Although dependence on our devices may limit our ability to communicate, Scoby’s use of his personal cassette player provides a safe place for him to move through society without confronting unexpected, unwelcoming outside sounds. By cultivating his safe space with jazz music, Scoby creates an alternative listening experience for himself. Nevertheless, he cannot maintain it. Before the novel’s conclusion, Scoby dies; therefore, the story continues without him or his music.

Despite Scoby’s main desire to listen to his personal cassette player, there are moments of transcendence in the novel when the character does share his music on public speakers. These, often emotional, episodes in the novel are important because they mark moments of mourning and crisis in Los Angeles. For example, Scoby plays a Miles Davis cassette tape during the funeral of a neighborhood friend. Beatty’s decision to evoke Davis in this passage is significant because the widely-celebrated trumpet player was known for his highly emotional, experimental sounds that pushed the accepted boundaries of jazz music through person improvisation techniques that collectively inspired generations of musicians. The protagonist tells us that “Scoby removed a tape from his portable cassette player and popped it into the church’s sound system. The mewling strains of Miles Davis echoed off the panelled walls” (Beatty 1996, p. 104). Here, the private jazz sounds that Scoby consumes expand into a public religious space, and that makes sense for this character who seems to believe that the church is a safe space where he can expand his listening environment. Indeed, Beatty limns the unique emotional impact of shared, amplified music consumption to evoke collective memory in this passage that calls to mind Ralph Ellison’s remark that he turned to music for “its magic with mood and memory” as he wrote his seminal novel Invisible Man (Ellison 2002, p. 13). During the funeral in Beatty’s novel, Scoby turns to sound as a way to solidify community with the shared memory imbued in the musical style of Miles Davis. Later in the novel, during the 1992 unrest, Scoby plays Eric Dolphy’s experimental jazz music on his car’s sound system. By playing the cassette on his car’s speaker, he provides a soundscape for the collective violence all around him. In these moments of mourning and crisis, Beatty places Scoby at the center of these scenes where he is able to shift the sound from private listening to a shared experience that brings people together rather than keeping them apart. Yet these brief moments occur infrequently throughout the novel. Scoby’s de facto habit is to keep his music flowing through his headphones. In this way, Beatty paints Scoby as an individual with the ability to share culture on demand, but who chooses mostly to keep his music to himself. Essentially, Scoby’s disconnect from his community is related to his inability and lack of desire to more often share music, and this shines a light on how Los Angeles writers like Beatty suggest that merely listening to music in order to share culture and create better mutual understanding is only a starting point toward developing stronger, more connected communities.

In these novels by Beatty and Yamashita, black male characters utilize portable music devices to cultivate a private urban soundscape in public spaces; thereby they perform listening methods that allow them to gain some control over the crowded milieu that they inhabit. It goes without saying that music technologies, like the Walkman, shift over time and transform in diverse ways to provide individuals with increased listening autonomy. The turn of the 21st century marked a unique, transitional moment in music consumption history that made listening to a Walkman-like device less popular than listening to music via digital sources. Nevertheless, analogue music devices in Post-1992 Los Angeles literature are utilized to cultivate listening spaces that suggest the need for individuals to take the time to listen to each other in times of crisis. At the same time, characters like Buzzworm and Scoby, who claim to be listening to others are only doing so selectively. In fact, when Buzzworm listens to the radio he is in a constant state of presence because he can only listen to one station at a time and cannot stop the radio. Therefore, he lacks the ability to fully participate in a collective Los Angeles culture that he believes he has access to through multiple radio broadcasts. Likewise, Scoby listens to one song on his cassette at a time, carefully sticking to his plan to listen to each jazz artist in alphabetical order. Despite such limitations, these characters generally listen to what they want, when they want. The temporality of listening that these characters illuminate suggests just how significant individual decisions are within the politics of collectivity. At the same time, the key contrasts between these characters offer important take aways.

To return to my earlier point, the ways in which these characters choose to listen to their devices differ. Buzzworm uses the radio as an information collecting source for both news and the aesthetic appreciation of other cultures even if he cannot understand the material that he consumes. Ultimately, Buzzworm finds himself largely disconnected from his community, and he eventually retreats from society. Meanwhile, Scoby’s personal listening device functions as a way to block out unwanted noise. Scoby is solely interested in listening to taped jazz music as a way to connect to his own African American cultural heritage, and he shares this music at key moments in the novel to cultivate connections, albeit only temporarily. Take for example, the moment when Scoby shares his music at the funeral. It is a moment that brings the mourners together for a specific occasion, but Scoby goes back to his private listening habits following the event. His inability to continuously share sounds foreshadows his demise.

With characters, like Scoby and Buzzworm, Post-1992 Los Angeles literature tells us something about how we listen to music in the same way that it sheds light on how we listen to each other, especially during moments of crisis. By focusing on the act of listening, these writers are interested in investigating why the 1992 Los Angeles uprising happened. In contemporary literature that depicts collective violence, sound has the ability to symbolize the many voices that exist in the convergence of the crowd. The stories that we tell ourselves function as roadmaps for how to improve the future. Attending to the ways that writers render technological devices of yesteryear provides us with some sense of how to interpret human interaction in our contemporary digital era.