The Wall Street Journal - 17.08.2019 - 18.08.2019

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. **** Saturday/Sunday, August 17 - 18, 2019 |D9

GEAR & GADGETS

S

OON AFTER its 1979 launch, Sony’s

Walkman was already seen as much

more than a trendy audio player.

Crucially, it became an escape hatch.

Whenever I cradled my Walkman

as a kid, it transported me to new worlds. It

made five-hour cross-country flights bearable

and took the sting of loneliness out of the once

ultimate injustice of strolling somewhere unac-

companied by music. While my brother and I

could agree on blasting Green Day’s “Dookie”

from a bright yellow boombox when poolside in

Miami, our Walkmans allowed us to find our

BYPAULSCHRODT

SONY’S WALKMAN is basically an

antique curio now, the ca-chunk of

its worn buttons loudly unspooling

magnetic tape that’s somehow en-

coded with Top-40 hits. But the

primitive player was once transfor-

mative, helping music nerds shut

out the world as each played cura-

tor to a personal soundtrack.

“Why does the Walkman mat-

ter? Content control. It individual-

ized entertainment,” said David

Hajdu, music critic at The Nation

and a professor at Columbia Uni-

versity. “That was extraordinary.”

Mr. Hajdu wasn’t as enthusiastic

when he attended the release of the

Walkman in 1979—at the time still

cautiously marketed as the Sound-

about. “I just saw the stupidest

product ever invented,” he remem-

bered telling his girlfriend. “You’re

supposed to walk around listening

to music with headphones on?”

But as soon as he took the new-

fangled player around the block, he

changed his tune. So did everyone

else. Personalized mixtapes with

clever (or, more often, corny) titles

scribbled on “J-cards” blew up into

a mass phenomenon. The act of

consuming music in the confines of

your own brain, once the exception,

now dominates thanks to the digi-

tal evolution of playlists, giving rise

to a headphone culture that helped

propel the popularity of introspec-

tive artists from The Cure and

Frank Ocean to current moody

teen-pop queen Billie Eilish.

That isolating habit has, of

course, also created social distance.

It’s easier and more convenient

than ever to shut out humanity,

whether that’s the small-talking co-

workers surrounding your cubicle

or a man on the street hoping to

get directions. In submitting to a

solo experience, we necessarily re-

cede from the possibilities of physi-

cal person-to-person interaction.

“We’ve never gone back,” Mr.

Hajdu observed. You can thank (or

blame) the Walkman for that.

Turn On,

Tune Out

1979
Sony’s first Walkman ar-
rives following cofounder
Masaru Ibuka’s suggestion
to design a small personal
audio player that could be
optimized to play tapes,
which surpassed 8-track
sales by the mid-’70s. Ap-
parently he was tired of
lugging around a jumbo
SONY (BLUE WALKMAN, CD WALKMAN, MINIDISC); ALAMY (CASSETTE, IPOD, WALKMAN WITH ORANGE HEADPHONES), EVERETT COLLECTION (‘PRETTY WOMAN’, SONY ADVERcassette recorder.

TISEMENT); SAMSUNG (GALAXY S10)

1963

Electronics brand Philips

introduces magnetic cas-

settes, marketed to jour-

nalists and secretaries for

transcribing interviews and

taking notes. In 1977, Sony

invades the market with

its Pressman, a clunky re-

cording device that serves

as the basis for a Walk-

man prototype.

2019

Just about everyone listens

to Adele on smartphones

in between responding to

emoji-filled texts. A dwin-

dling number of music

worshipers still seeks out

products like the iPod

Touch, Mighty Vibe and

Walkman, which allow you

to enjoy one specific thing

reasonably well.

1992

Sony unveils its idiosyn-

cratic MiniDisc format, al-

lowing for recording, data

compression and customi-

zation that surpasses CDs.

Sony manages to sell only

about 50,000 players in

the first year, but the Mini-

Disc Walkman would have

a brief moment in the sun

at the end of the decade.

2001

Apple ships its iPod, ensur-

ing the primacy of MP3s.

Its vaunted success pro-

vides a road map for the

transformative arrival of

the iPhone in 2007. Sony,

busy playing catch-up with

MP3-based Walkmans af-

ter misguidedly sticking to

its proprietary ATRAC for-

mat, falls woefully behind.

PRESS REWIND /HOW SONY’S FIRST WALKMAN LED TO THE SMARTPHONE

Ghostbusters II (1989) Bill Murray

and the squad ride a slimed Statue of

Liberty through Manhattan while

blasting “Higher and Higher” on a

Walkman patched to a P.A. system.

Pretty Woman (1990) Julia Rob-

erts, impossibly gorgeous and yet

impossibly relatable, sings along to

Prince playing on her Walkman

Sports while splashing in the tub.

American Psycho (2000) Capitalist

sociopath Patrick Bateman tries to

listen to “the new Robert Palmer

tape” but is interrupted by his fiancée

attempting to discuss wedding plans.

Super 8 (2011) A gas station atten-

dant bops his head to Blondie’s

“Heart of Glass” on the original Walk-

man but pulls down his headphones

to investigate a grisly scene outside.

Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) Hero

Peter Quill, a.k.a Star-Lord, cherishes a

mixtape of classics made by his mom,

a plot device that nearly single-hand-

edly revived the cassette industry.

But Why the Name ‘Walkman’?

IF YOU FORGET for a bit that the Walkman grew so omnipresent the

word was added to the Oxford English Dictionary, its name sounds...off.

Virtually all men walk, and the name has nothing to do with music.

The tortured portmanteau is actually an invention of Sony’s Japanese

team, combining “Walky,” the device’s working name that had to be

scrapped because it was already in use and unavailable, and the “man”

from the Pressman, a Sony cassette recorder on which the Walkman

was based, explained translator Douglass McGowan. “The name was

born of necessity rather than based on any sort of market research.”

Sony execs, worried “Walkman” wouldn’t translate outside Japan, first

marketed it as the Soundabout in the U.S., the Stowaway in the U.K. and

the Freestyle in Australia. Sony’s American division even floated another

timely possibility—the Disco Jogger. But chairman Akio Morita nixed it,

fearing it might alienate older customers who didn’t dig Donna Summer.

But when visitors to Japan started buying Walkmans to bring home,

the name stuck and the sales volume cranked way up. Sure, “Walkman”

still doesn’t really make sense. But it’s also impossible to forget.

DAVID URBAN

1984

Sony debuts the Discman

portable CD player shortly

after the advent of com-

pact discs, a format that

would take center stage

in the 1990s as we all ob-

sessed over “burning”

mixes for crushes. Despite

improved sonic quality,

the flimsy player skips far

too often to jog with.

400

million

Number of

Walkman

devices,

from tape

decks to

MP3 play-

ers, that

Sony has

sold world-

wide.

By the

Numbers

300+

Number of various models

and devices Sony has released

under its “Walkman” label.

$3,198

Price of the most expensive

Walkman, the Signature Se-

ries 256GB NW-WM1Z MP3

player, which also weighs

more than a pound.

$199

U.S. price

of the orig-

inal Walk-

man. Or

roughly

$1,347 to-

day—close

to what

one now

costs on

eBay.

2.5

hours

The original

Walkman’s

estimated

battery life.

Enough AA

juice to en-

joy Prince’s

“1999” al-

bum twice

through.

Facts and figures detailing how Sony’s ubiquitous

cassette player made its mark on the world

Breaking

The Sound

Barrier

As the Sony Walkman

turns 40, we scrutinize the

iconic tape deck’s impact

on popular culture: the

way we imbibe our chosen

audio, discover music

and shut out the world

TECH NOSTALGIA

The Walkman’s

Walk-on Roles

own independent grooves. He listened to Tu-

pac, I enjoyed the jazzy flow of A Tribe Called

Quest’s “Phony Rappers” on repeat until I

memorized every rhyme. I was lost inside my

head, somewhere deeply peaceful and far, far

away from wherever my body happened to be.

It’s become easy since then to take that sim-

ple but potent pleasure for granted. We’re all—

or most of us, anyway—locked inside whatever

beat or podcast is snaking through our earbuds

today, distracting us from our morning com-

mute or our struggle on the gym treadmill.

But the idea was once revolutionary, even

shocking. The Walkman, dreamed up by Sony

bigwigs who wanted to entertain themselves

with classical music while jetting across the

globe, was anything but a guaranteed hit when

it debuted. People were fine communally hum-

ming along to tinny transistor radios or parking

in an easy chair while listening to vinyl.

But as Sony’s stocky cassette deck turns 40

this year, its influence is clear. The Walkman

not only presaged Apple’s iPhone; it spurred in-

novative audio technologies like the Minidisc

and downloadable MP3s, helped popularize self-

reflexive styles of pop music (see: anything

once labeled “alternative”) and dovetailed with

a 30% increase in walking as exercise—arguably

making us more fit. For all that and more, the

Walkman deserves to be honored.

WALK THIS WAY Sony’s TPS-L2

model wasn’t branded with the

Walkman name—it was first sold as

the Soundabout in the U.S.