At Centuries of Sound I am making mixes for every year of recorded sound. The download here is a placeholder to appear on the podcast feed. For the full 3-hour version either see below for the Mixcloud player, or come to patreon.com/centuriesofsound for the podcast version and a host of other bonus materials for just $5 per month.

Mixcloud player with full mix – or listen on the Mixcloud website.

The mid-point of the 20th century feels superficially like its fulcrum. The first half has been an upward struggle (two world wars, a great depression, a devastating pandemic) but also a tale of progress – we have gone from racist parlour songs recorded on cylinders to cool jazz LPs and proto rock & roll singles. Now it’s a smooth ride downhill through the 50s, 60s, 70s, and so on. Culture will become more free and less imposing, the cold war will gradually cool down and end, we will see Fukuyama’s end of history. Of course, for most of you, who lived through the last half of the 20th century, that will immediately ring false. It’s so reductive that it’s essentially nonsense, the joys and the horrors of the late 20th do not form a pattern easy enough to sum up in a page, let alone a paragraph. And so (this is my point, sorry) goes for the first half. Listening through these mixes I hope you’ve been able to feel how society and how art has shifted, not as a smooth process but as a tortuous web being pulled in many directions at once, and any simple narrative is in essence a lie.

So if I were to say “something is in the air in 1950” or talk about the “zeitgeist”, you should know that this is probably nothing more than apophenia  – “the tendency to perceive meaningful connections between unrelated things” – but this is how it is with every story anyway, you pick up a feeling and go with it.

So what is the story this time? In a sense 1950 is a particularly unremarkable year for music. Jazz is stalled somewhere between bebop and post-bop. Rhythm & blues or jump blues seems to be finally winding down from the frenetic energy it had in ’48 and ’49, much as rock & roll would wind down in the early 60s. Outside of Hank Williams, Western swing seems to be taking a bit of a breather too. Even Hollywood musicals seem to be largely spinning their wheels after their golden age, but before Singin’ In The Rain led their revival a couple of years later. But sometimes you need a bit of calm to show the lay of the land around you, and you know what? There’s really something special going on here.

This may still have been a duller than usual mix if it hadn’t been for the work of Michael Daddino’s project “1950: The Bomb in the Heart of the Century” originally from 1950. A playlist, initially on Spotify, but most recently on Mixcloud, it’s a lot more detailed and a lot longer than a Centuries of Sound mix, and demonstrates a good deal more work – I try to get these things out in a month, not that I have really met that goal of late, and naturally my research phase can only go so far. So instead of reinventing everything, I have used the flow of this mix (and around 50% of the music selections) as a framework, and have built everything else around it.

The bomb in the title is not merely a metaphor. 1950 does seem to be the year that the Cold War really set in, especially in terms of the nuclear arms race. The USSR conducted their first nuclear test in 1949, and not long after President Truman announced the plan to develop the hydrogen bomb, which would be ready in 1952. Being confronted by the enormity of this so soon after the end of the war must have felt like whiplash, and the prospect of mutually assured destruction before the foretold 2000 years must have been terrifying to many. A couple of selections here discuss this directly. Others were still excited about this new technology. The cover image for this mix comes from the case of the “Gilbert U-238 Atomic Energy Laboratory” – an experimental kit briefly on sale to children in 1950 which contained genuine radioactive material, a cloud chamber and a Geiger counter. For the makers, they seem to be presenting the new decade as an exciting new phase of technological progress.

Tracklist

(Clip from BBC at Lime Grove)