"It was very hard to get any records, so the only source for us to really hear what was happening was listening to the Voice of America. We would be taping all the broadcast and then sharing the tapes and talking about it"
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Smuggled sound is never just about music; its about permission. Jan Hammer is describing a world where culture arrives with static on it, where records are scarce not because the market failed but because access was managed. In that setting, Voice of America isnt simply a station. Its an aperture: a way to eavesdrop on a different tempo of life, a different set of assumptions about what art can do and who gets to hear it.
The detail that lands is the DIY infrastructure: taping broadcasts, circulating cassettes, then talking. That trio turns passive listening into a social practice, almost a seminar held in private. The subtext is that scarcity sharpens attention. When every minute of signal is hard-won, you dont treat music as background; you treat it as evidence. Whats on the tape becomes a shared artifact, something to interpret, argue over, and build taste around. In other words, community forms not in spite of limitation but through it.
Hammer also quietly reframes the myth of Western cultural dominance. This isnt consumerist osmosis; its active excavation. People arent being "influenced" so much as they are assembling a parallel education, one broadcast at a time, in the cracks of official life. Theres a political edge here, but it comes through the emotional reality: curiosity with stakes. The act of recording is both a technical workaround and a small claim to agency - the choice to keep, replay, and distribute what wasnt meant to be easily possessed.
The detail that lands is the DIY infrastructure: taping broadcasts, circulating cassettes, then talking. That trio turns passive listening into a social practice, almost a seminar held in private. The subtext is that scarcity sharpens attention. When every minute of signal is hard-won, you dont treat music as background; you treat it as evidence. Whats on the tape becomes a shared artifact, something to interpret, argue over, and build taste around. In other words, community forms not in spite of limitation but through it.
Hammer also quietly reframes the myth of Western cultural dominance. This isnt consumerist osmosis; its active excavation. People arent being "influenced" so much as they are assembling a parallel education, one broadcast at a time, in the cracks of official life. Theres a political edge here, but it comes through the emotional reality: curiosity with stakes. The act of recording is both a technical workaround and a small claim to agency - the choice to keep, replay, and distribute what wasnt meant to be easily possessed.
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| Topic | Music |
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