HP Lovecraft's Jukebox - Part 4

 Imaginary disc

 

Jukebox content

I had a whole load of words compiled and ready to go on the subjects / contexts of the wax cylinders loaded into HP Lovecraft's jukebox. It's very good writing, chock full of keen observations, connections and insights, not a word wasted.

Then I started reading Paul Morley's A Sound Mind (2020) and decided against giving it to you.

If you want to test the very idea for yourself, listen to one or two of the cylindrical recordings that may have washed the deep past into the shallows of the present for young Lovecraft.

Listening will brings us closer, if not nearer.

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The final part, soon, is about the music of horror written into Lovecraft's stories.

HP Lovecraft's jukebox - Part 3

 

Lovecraft, H.P. (Howard Phillips), "Cthulhu" (1934). Howard P. Lovecraft collection. Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library. https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:926697/

  Not least among its many contemporary uses, ’Lovecraftian’ describes a kind of satire peculiar to pop culture, in which banal expressions - especially those emerging from moribund historical subcultures - are analysed and reconstructed for serious consideration.
  Lovecraft’s great formal achievement was revisioning subjects of sentimental pop songs and composing prodigious, monolithic backstories for these long-lived fictions of the ever-longer 19th century: death narratives, twisted scientific romances, deep sentiment, and speculative histories and anthropologies. Lovecraft’s versions ventured to the origin story of all origins - reverse Darwinism turning evolution ideas inside out - tracing evidence of panspermia and utter antiquity of demonic influence on humanity. Elevating and expanding narrative strands beyond their ability to bear the weight of reworking, he unbalanced the originals and delighted in collapsing these into his own fiction-world. And the originals persist, relieved of the burden of saying what they cannot say.
  In this endeavour Lovecraft was, of course, inspired by alt-history fictions of the English Gothic school and most notably by Bram Stoker, whose writing into being immortal, aristocratic Count Dracula creates a parallel narrative to the blood-fiend that preceded Dracula, the penny dreadful Varney the Vampire. In the 2020s, backstory and character-heavy melodrama dominates fiction, especially in cinematic reanimations of moribund intellectual properties.
  Lovecraft's career as a published writer began in the year after the Titanic sunk, and spanned a period during which horrors of current events were distributed as they happened through global news media: the Hindenburg burning; the Russian revolution and civil wars; the first world war; the flu pandemic; economic depressions; the Spanish civil war; and the rise of fascism. In the early years of the 20th century, it wasn’t just Lovecraft seeking out morbid tales of terror to match real-life horrors.
  Thoughts about unknown ocean deeps, bitter-sweetness of memory and persistence of dreams were established in popular fiction and popular music. And Lovecraft joined a growing gang of writers of tales of terror and the weird milieu continued to flourish in the 1900s, as the influence of the Yellow Book persisted and the revival by Surrealists of the works of Isidore Ducasse (aka the Comte de Lautréamont) got underway.     

  Lovecraft leapt ahead of the Surrealists and sidestepped the trend for revised historicisms and geopolitical long-termism in popular fictions, exemplified by Stoker and HG Wells, for example. In seeking new locations for horror, beyond nations states’ accomplishments in the field of death, he contextualised popular culture within utter history  - from the point of view of a representative of belaboured humanity, the small gathering of more or less conscious specks able only to address the cosmic infinite in imagined speculations.

  
  In the final part, I'll set to loading up the jukebox with the songs that might have attracted his morbid attention, as listed in Part 1. A speculative pop-panspermia soundtrack to horror that began in a teenage boy’s fever dream of a song of a lost, doomed sailor humming to himself, clear-eyed in one last glimpse of life in the grainy murk.

HP Lovecraft's jukebox, Part 2

Image source: http://lovecraft.wikia.com/wiki/The_Music_of_Erich_Zann   

 

    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.

HP Lovecraft's jukebox

 

Coin-operated phonograph cylinder jukebox, c.1908

Image source: https://www.intertique.com/MultiphoneID.html

Abide with me, Frank C. Stanley, 1902

Asleep in the deep, Frank C. Stanley, 1902

At the bottom of the deep blue sea, Frank C. Stanley, 1902

Down Deep within the Cellar, Frank Stanley, 1905

Dreaming, Frank C Stanley, 1910

In the village by the sea, Byron G Harlan, 1903

One hundred fathoms deep, Frank Stanley, 1902

Rocked in the cradle of the deep, Frank C Stanley, 1908

When the bell in the lighthouse rings, Gus Reed, 1910

https://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu/index.php

A brief commentary on context and texts to follow.