I’ve been reading the autobiography of Akio Morita, the co-founder of Sony, who passed away last year. This guy is a giant. You know it had to be hard, it had to be incredibly hard to rise up as Sony did. And from what I can gather in this book, Sony’s a class organization, a real, genuine innovator. This guy is the inventor of the walkman. You imagine this kind of invention as inevitable, don’t you? You can’t imagine your life without the walkman, can you? Of course, in today’s climate of electronics, the walkman’s obvious, but it’s Sony that brought us to this juncture. Morita writes that no amount of market research could have even hinted at the massive success of the walkman. And so it is with Sony. As a policy, the company didn’t ask the public what they wanted, because how could the public know what was possible? And so Sony led. Morita writes about the original walkman, the first prototype, which came with two headphone jacks. They paid fashionable couples to walk around fashionable districts of Tokyo listening to the walkman.
But we all know by now that if the world was really a logical place, none of us would have VHS. Everybody knows. Everybody always knew that Betamax is so much better. For someone deep inside Sony, responsible for the development of Beta, it must be absolutely heartbreaking to play a VHS tape.
The amazing thing about Morita’s book is the dignity of it. You know it must have been hard. He must have had hard times, times where he questioned himself, the choices he made, periods of his life where his confidence was badly shaken, but there seems to be no trace of self-doubt. He seems so solid, so sure, and it all seems so effortless. And what’s more, there doesn’t seem to be a single trace of vice about the man.
Something that occurred to me is that the issue of vice is what separates the artists from the businessmen. The latter are the former without vices. These strange thoughts began to form themselves while reading the book and listening to Marianne Faithfull at the same time. Now, Marianne Faithfull, she’s the epitomy of the wild side. Her own autobiography follows her early success with “As Tears Go By” through her marriage to Mick Jagger, her descent into drugs, and then her comeback with “Broken English.”
The stars to the abyss. The highs and the lows. You know?
The question needs to be asked though. Who’s the real star — the singer, the one who made the headphones, or the one who wears the headphones? I’ve always felt that in the case of the best pop music, you take the place of whoever’s singing, or you become the one the song is devoted to. Pop music needs to preserve some of its anonymity as it did in the days of radio’s primacy.
Maybe Hideo, Akio Morita’s son, said it best, when he said: “All jobs are basically the same. You have to apply yourself, whether you are a record A&R man, a salesman on the street, or an accounting clerk. You get paid and you work one hundred per cent to do the job at hand. As an A&R man, I was interested and excited and happy, but naturally as long you are satisfied with your work and you are using your energy, you will be happy. I was also very excited about the accounting division. I found out something every day, struggling with a whole bunch of invoices and the payment sheets, the balance sheet, the profit and loss statement, and working with all those numbers. I began to get a broad picture of the company, its financial position and what is happening day to day and where the company is heading. I discovered that that excitement and making music in the studio are the same thing.”
Anyway, whose wine am I drinking?