Music was part of Lovecraft’s cultural development from childhood and remained an enduring interest throughout his life. In private correspondence with friends he reflected on his experience
of a wide range of subjects, including cinema, writing and music.
Attracted by the accessibility of media technology, he was an early adopter of the Edison phonograph cylinder recorder and recorded himself singing:
"I once owned an Edison machine of the primitive type, with recorder and blanks; and I made many vocal records in imitation of the renowned vocalists of the wax cylinder. My colleagues would smile to hear some of the plaintive tenor solos which I perpetrated in the days of my youth!"
And he recalled his enthusiastic mimicry of favourite recorded performances, including the effort to "roll my 'rrr...'s most faithfully" (Letter to Rheinhart Kleiner, April 1917).
In his stories, and in descriptions of his work, he identifies himself as an outsider alienated from the 20th century by innate sensitivity to environmental stimuli and a far-too acute cultural sensibility, but when entertaining his friends with informal correspondence, it is clear that along with antiquarian mysteries, pop culture seeded Lovecraft’s imagination as surely as panspermia seeds the universe.
Beyond the antiquarian, old New England, Anglophile persona cultivated by Lovecraft, based almost exclusively on 18th century men of arts and letters, and despite his professed disdain for modernity and a self-narrative of near-immaculate alienation from modern life, his letters show that he regarded contemporaneous US popular culture as one of the foundations of his self-development.
The phonograph industry of the late 1890s and early 1900s was founded on re-working the ’old songs’, popular tunes formerly available only as printed music. Heavy promotion of and consumer demand for the new medium of wax phonograph cylinders marks the first wave of the global music industry’s meta-culture focusing on media replacement, that was for most people throughout the 20th century their main exposure to and way of interacting with new technologies.
The new cylinders’ grooves memorialised re-workings of pop songs sentimental, tragic, delightful and banal, patriotic and profane. Songs about uncharted darkest deep seas; narrating dying sailors’ heartbreaking thoughts of home; time-leaping romantic seaside stories locating lovers’ meetings next to the unpredictable ocean; power of dreams; shame and social alienation; viscerality of lost and unrequited love.
Growing up in Providence, Rhode Island, Lovecraft was well located to observe maritime traditions of the New England coast, including tales of sailors who didn’t make it back to shore. His location at the edge of the Atlantic ocean may explain his primary narrative focus on dark depths and the infinite seas of the cosmos. Lovecraft grew in a global Anglophone culture that thrived on popular narratives of morbid fascination. It is not a great stretch to re-imagine his emotional responses to songs about lonely death at the bottom of the sea, for instance, and wonder about what led him to speculate so precisely and with such clarity on origins of hidden undersea histories and cosmological and macroscopic narratives, and on excavating shameful family secrets, and analysing material conditions of alienation and abjection.
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