Musikautomat

I wrote a poem this week called 'Danube Blues'. The title is a rather easy twist on Johann Strauss II's waltz The Blue Danube, but I was still quite pleased with it. Of course, checking how many people got there before me, I find 269,000 Google hits for my witticism. Either the news of my linguistic breakthrough spread bloody quickly, or it is a very obvious play on words. I fear the latter.

Nonetheless, one of the first Danube Blues articles to appear was this short music report from a January 23rd 1956 edition of Time Magazine. The author's lukewarm analysis notes that venerable old Vienna has "capitulated to the jukebox", and that the 400 new machines in the city are drowning out the traditional rustling of the newspapers with "mambos, boogie-woogie and other jazz".

"Teen-agers sit for hours, nursing their beers and feeding schillings to the mechanical monsters," laments the article, although the author does concede that some of the old cafe favourites (played live) were rather appalling in their own way. Nothing, not even the benevolent passage of time, can redeem lyrics such as: Like two raisins in a coffee cake/We sit side by side in life.

As something of a technophobe myself, it's sometimes quite instructive to look back at conservative reactions to technologies which we now appreciate or take for granted. The 50s and 60s as they exist in public memory would be inconceivable, and much poorer places, were it not for the jukebox and the revolutionary musical developments it witnessed and assisted.

And it's nice that, no matter how unspectacular the title of my poem is, it has helped me to stumble across this little relic from a bygone era; an era when the democratisation of access to music was greeted in some quarters with suspicion. Which seems especially absurd in a day and age where Strauss has long since waltzed his way onto the iTunes store.