I had the pleasure of hosting Dave Tompkins as a guest speaker in my class this morning. Dave’s the author of this fat new opus of a book on the history of the vocoder called How To Wreck A Nice Beach — a mishearing of the vocodered phrase “how to recognize speech”. We had a blast listening to vocoder lore and clips from everything from Silly Willy Toothpaste ads from the thirties to Kraftwerk to local hyphy legend Mac Dre (RIP). Dave mentioned that he loved hearing people’s “the first time I heard a vocoder” stories, so I downloaded some Egyptian Lover and came up with this.

I’m pretty sure the first time I heard a vocoder was in junior high, probably 1984, when I was thirteen and going to Claremont Junior High in Oakland. Claremont’s an aberration – a school with primarily African American students and teachers smack in the middle of what later became one of Oakland’s whitest neighborhoods, Rockridge. But the cutoff for the school’s district includes the much more diverse neighborhoods of nearby North Oakland, so everyone piled on the 51 bus to head south after school and all of the stores in the area were plastered with “no students allowed” placards. When I was a student there, there were about 300 kids, maybe eight or ten of them were white: me, plus two hippie girls who wore those long twirly print skirts, a shy blond girl who never talked to anybody, another blond girl who screamed a lot curing gym class, and a couple of guys who called themselves the “Jew Crew” and tried to breakdance battle some guys on the playground at recess. Cardboard sheets and punches were involved. In spite of the fact that I was physically awkward – I shot up to 5’ 10”, my current height, in the space of about a year – I decided to attempt to go to a school dance. Let me just tell you right now that I cannot dance at all. It’s painful to watch me try, but I had no idea of that fact when I was thirteen. I figured I could always cling to a wall. I walked up there from home, a few blocks away, wearing a dress my mom had purchased at the Gunne Sax outlet in San Francisco. It was pink taffeta, and had an asymmetrical ruffled hem in grey, and puff sleeves. This sounds hideous and 80s, and it was. The closer I got to the gym (a typical cavernous, peeling Oakland Public Schools type of building, probably full of asbestos and mice), the more I could hear a pervasive, low rumble that sounded like the cars driven by the older dudes – always wearing sunglasses — who’d pull up to Claremont at the end of the day to pick up the foxier eighth grade girls. I’d been told by a couple of friends that one of these girls had had sex with our cute substitute teacher in the janitor’s closet. But those cars had the same asshole puckering rumble as the gym where I was regularly humiliated during gym class when I failed to vault a pommel horse, lob a volleyball, run the track without fainting, or walk across a balance beam without getting a concussion. To be fair, I could do twenty consecutive layups at basketball.

My hideous dress and I walked into that pitch black gym and found our way to the nearest wall immediately. The noise was crushingly loud: bass bass bass and more bass. Over it there was the occasional blat blat of an overworked speaker and this disembodied robot voice talking about an Egyptian Lover. A girl I was friendly with grabbed my arm and attempted to teach me a dance called the Smurfette; eventually somebody put on some Prince (Purple Rain had just come out, and my older sister took me to see it in a tiny movie theater in the back of a shopping mall) and a guy who was probably a foot shorter than me shuffled along with me way out of rhythm with When Doves Cry. That’s an impossible song to dance to, seriously. I exited early to find my mom standing cross armed, with a pissed expression in the lobby between two massive guys from Tech – the high school down the street – who were sparking some weed. All the way home I heard the robot voice saying EGYPTIAN LOVER BABY. EGYPTIAN LOVER BABY. Later that night, I bundled the dress up in the back of my closet. That was probably the last time I ever wore pink.

Egyptian Lover, \”Egypt Egypt\”, 1984