Trash 80
A look to writing past and future, and the strange interregnum between analog and digital creation.
Last week, we considered the nascent literary era that’s augured by tweens, like my son, who are learning to write in text-message apps. Today, we turn to their ancestors, focusing on the Precambrian Era—my freshman year at college—to study primitive man and his use of tools.
This is the forest primeval. A battered carrel. A crowded dorm room. One block from Berkeley’s boulevard of broken brains, Telegraph Ave. Here we find our hominid hunched over his work on the first term paper of freshman year.
Having learned penmanship in grade school and typing in junior high, I compose my startlingly original essay on TheIliad using the era’s standard tools: pen and letter-sized paper, double-spaced to allow corrections. When I’ve finished writing the thing, I tape one yellow page at eye level to the wall before me, and, like Wilma Flintstone at her slate inscriber, begin pecking at a car-bomb-sized “portable” electric typewriter I lugged out from the East Coast.
The fact that it’s electric somehow makes everything worse. None of the old rat-a-tat-tat relished by Tom Hanks and other fetishists. No Ernest Hemingway trip, this, of one man locked in mortal combat with the written word, jabbing and punching the keys of his Royal Quiet Deluxe until, character by character, sentence by sentence, he builds a corpus predictably heavy on short stories. No, this typing happens on a rounded, off-white instrument that looks like a vaporizer, hums like a piece of hospital equipment, and meets the most tentative key depression with explosive, excessive force:
hmmm-CRACK. hmmm-CRACK-CRACK. hmmm-CRACK-CRACK-CRACK.
It may read a bit like a new drill beat, but the ambience is closer to the treatment room of an oral surgeon and, like everything else in the analog age, the tool brings a sense of stakes and commitment to every move. It also imposes distinct phases of creation. First, a looser period of composition, where notes and jottings form into linear arguments; then an editorial phase, where word choices are fixed, dud sentences excised, one or two paragraphs flagged for relocation; and then a typing phase that’s closer to typesetting, locking it in before it ships.
Binding the pages together, the hominid then places the crude assemblage into his backpack, then goes off to present his offering to a tweed-bound tribal elder.
Would any sane person miss this era? My early college years were disastrous enough to leave me free of nostalgia for analog typing, but I recently learned that this isn’t the case for what looks to be quite a sizable market of knowledge workers, judging from the host of typewriter-like products I first started seeing advertised on Instagram ten years ago.
These heavily designed, artisanal, “distraction-free” devices sought to turn the clock back to my college years. With names like iA Writer, Freewrite and, maybe inevitably, Hemingwrite, these learning-disabled laptops do nothing but type, a few lines at a time, thus liberating the user’s creativity from the attention suck of online discourse, shopping, video, texting, and porn. Fixing the creative horizon on a sacred LCD rectangle of half a dozen lines. By such means do they seek an ideal balance between analog and digital typing, and in this, represent one front in an ongoing shadow war between technology and creative practice.
I had two reactions to seeing these ads. The first was, of course, amused disdain for such blocked, benighted fools. The second was something darker and more primal, as it plumbed a whole suite of memories from the weird and forgotten interregnum that came between typewriter and home computer. Seeing one particular Spartan design, I suddenly felt the chills and elevated heart-rate of a freshly-triggered addict, flashing back to the device that replaced my electric typewriter, the one that marked the beginning of my lifelong descent into verbal fixation.
I’ve since located it. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you: the Radio Shack TR-80 100. Street name: Trash 80.
Look at that thing. What a sturdy workhorse. The size and weight of a cumbersome first-year law textbook. That reflective screen above the number keys displays eight lines, 40 characters at a time. And, after a year of use, that horizontal surface was latticed with the scratch marks of razor blades used to chop and divvy out the crystal meth my dysfunctional little crew used—all the better to Write!
Ooh, and write I did: too fast and too furiously, but prodigiously and superficially enough to win A’s from overworked English TAs who likely scanned for phrases that signified that someone had at least read the text—Henry IV Part 1, “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”—and made some effort to rephrase the arguments, notice the tropes, “themes,” etc, and arrange them attractively in a vertical format to produce a “paper.”
Trash 80 was le mot juste since it was the ’80s and I used it to write trash. The device and drugs guided me to an amped-up hyper-focus that passed at the time for “the zone.” Any originality was a bug, not a feature, since the sole aim was to produce long essays for classes outside my major—officially rhetoric, with an uncredited minor in hip-hop, plus on- and off-campus music-making—which I’d naturally put off until deadline’s eve.
These nights now seem like something close to an AI experience. You sit down at your desk with one of Shakespeare’s histories and a printed assignment. Within two and half hours, you’d have read the play and produced a 15-page paper, and this paper would get an A.
I should add that this worked for me three times at the most, despite countless subsequent efforts to replicate my initial results. After one or two picturesque breakdowns, I found a way to put the relative speed of production toward something more meaningful than processed words, than pure content. But even now I can’t type trash 80 without feeling the acrid sting of crank at the back of my throat and a deep respect for the creative power in keeping your immediate horizon small.
Today, I appreciate a device that feels as humble and beat-up as a construction-site tool rather than a portal, magic carpet, office, prescription medication, best friend, or whatever a laptop is today. And I know that the little LCD rectangle is likely the closest thing I have to a sacred space.
Some philosophers separate cosmologies into two main camps, one of fullness, the other of emptiness. The first philosophy sees a universe that’s sacramental, almost overfull with meaning. The other sees a void at the heart of everything, an equally fulsome emptiness in which human beings are insignificant particles, each one’s only meaning in its cumulative effect on external systems. It’s no secret that it’s the philosophy of emptiness that’s hardwired into every WiFi-enabled device produced in the geological epoch we’re all stumbling through today.
Last week, in an online-only video in its “Diary of a Song” series, the New York Times purported to explain the rap world’s wholesale abandonment of the written word. The headline teased the reason for this change with a reference to “the punch-in method.”
A punch-in, to those who haven’t been near recording technology in the last 30 years, is a snatch of recorded audio placed somewhere within a pre-existing track. It’s usually done surreptitiously—to fix a blown entrance or replace a bad section of a vocal take—masking the artifice to maintain a sense of musical flow. As digital recording made this a standard part of music production, recording artists moved the punch-in technique upstream into composition—a corollary of film directors who prefer to “find the film in post.”
The piece asserts that punch-ins are what moved today’s generation of rappers to abandon pad and pen. Given how long the technique’s been in practice, the claim itself is pretty specious, but the video does track a notable drift that’s due more to new media structures than recording tech. “I think a lot of people picture modern rappers [with] pen and paper in the studio writing down their raps, figuring it out, scratching it out, changing it,” says engineer Angie Randisi. This cuts to a shrug from an exquisitely coiffed, styled, and blinged-up rapper named Doechii: “Yeah no,” she says dismissively. “We stopped writing a long time ago.”
You don’t say.
The last twenty years of hip-hop have wrought many marvels, but if epic long-form rap verses are among them, I missed it. In presenting a process piece on contemporary rap composition, the Times suggests a shift in the artists’ attitudes to something closer to social media than music-making. Several artists in the video piece do make rap with heft and scope, Big Mike the most notable example. Most of the others produce stuff that, to me, sounds like any other track you hear in any AT&T or Best Buy in the city: imprecating, insinuating, whining, droning, meme-ing, shit-talking, flossing, bar after bar after bar.
I know, times change, styles change. If I’m still hung up on the ubiquity of autotune I’ll never vibe with music made by and for 25-year-olds. But the music is so similar to 20-year-old rap, yet such a streamlined, compressed, and free-floating version of it, that it seems worth looking to the point when some turntable’s needle began to skip.
Give me a paper and a pen, so I can write about my life of sin. A couple bottles of gin, in case I don’t get in. -“Life Goes On,” Tupac
Producer Just Blaze pinpoints the moment things changed: Jay-Z’s confession that he doesn’t write his raps down. That news might had some deep impact within the industry, but the much clearer shift in process and vibe came with Lil Wayne, an early model of the militantly undisciplined, anti-intellectual, high AF rapper whose boundless charm and vibe lets him roll in and flow like Robitussin into a cup of Fanta, and filling 28 mixtapes and 14 albums with his unit-shifting drawl. This was a change in style, affect, and, possibly, meaning.
The Times video suggests as much with a clip from prelapsarian hip-hop: archival video of Tupac in the studio, dressing down an underprepared member of his crew: “We don’t have the luxury to spend all this time doing one song,” he says, mindful of pricey studio time. Here, Tupac stands for Biggie Smalls, Nas, Snoop, Busta Rhymes, Rakim, Public Enemy, NWA, and nearly every recording artist who turned rap into a meaningful art form. They might not have a fabled notebook like GZA or Eminem, but pretty much anyone who filled six or seven verses with witty, inventive, surprising, imagery-filled narratives or full-blown exegeses comes prepared. They don’t just show up at the mike and figure they’ll try a few things out.
As someone who’s actually watched Lil Wayne work in a studio, I can vouch for the fact that this does indeed happen, well-supported MCs do practice an improvisational, beat-first, words-second modes of composition. And I can say it’s mad tedious to observe. You get a glimpse of the workaday reality in a clip of Lil Gotit, seated on an Aero chair and leaning into the windscreened-mike of a ProTools desktop studio in a carpeted room in someone’s house.
“Turn me up,” Lil Gotit tells an off-camera engineer then, listening, starts muttering gibberish. Lest the fact that it’s gibberish escape the viewer, the Times subtitles a subsequent clip, of Veeze, whose watery logorrhea flows across the screen as he finds something to punch in. If you listen as you scan within the block of unbroken text, you can make out words and phrases—greatest evah, made man, money moolah, babymomma—that are presumably the gold nuggets being panned from the mental silt kicked up by Veeve’s audibly stoned dome. Free-floating signifiers drawn from the collected works of everyone from Too Short to Gucci Mane, these will, I assume, be punched-in to create several flowing verses in a song that you may groove to but sure won’t inscribe into your mind.
In the book, Track Changes, Matthew Kirschenbaum talks about early word processors’ promise to streamline editing, to free us from Wite-out, and how they began a mass migration from paper to Microsoft Word to Google Docs to apps like this one, that let you write, edit, surf, and publish within the same screen, and that left more than a few creative people washed up on the shore, disenchanted from a creative act they used to love. Per Track Changes, Ralph Ellison is one notable author who bailed on the only novel he tried to write on a word processor. Martin Amis is one of thousands of (relatively) contemporary authors who wrote longhand until they died.
Maybe it’s a stretch to put contemporary rappers and contemporary novelists on the same continuum, but I wouldn’t have thought so 20 years ago. I remember how hip and in-on-the-joke we figured the person was who, in the late-90s, decided to call all creative online work “content.” That person clearly had the whole McLuhan analysis down, put right there in the term, an awareness that whatever the actual text, the vessel’s real content, its message, is the medium itself. Which was kind of funny until the medium began consuming the content’s creators.
We’re all getting a full-frontal view of the endgame with the dawn of ChatGPT. People who were around before the dawn of copy-paste probably recall the illicit thrill of pushing one key and seeing 200 words blossom on the screen. Now, when a few keystrokes can produce a whole essay, well, let’s say the thrill is gone. Internet-linked writing tools already put everyone at risk of not word-processing, but of word-laundering, plagiarizing, of punching in nothing but content. And content producers of all stripes run a risk when they outsource creative angst to a convenient suite of apps.
“Instead of one song a week, it’s five songs a night,” engineer Jayda Love reports. “Not that artistry isn’t appreciated,” Just Blaze explains. “It’s just that now it’s more like, ‘How fast are we getting this done?’”
If that’s the goal, 19-year-old me has a few suggestions for how they can hit their numbers even faster.
But like she said, these artists stopped writing a long time ago. Most stopped rapping too. But boy oh boy, do they provide content.