David Futrelle

Instead of the retro dance grooves of the British band Propellerheads, Poon had come across a Swedish company called Propellerhead Software that has created an ingeniously crafted software emulation of three classic music machines — two drum machines and a bass synthesizer — that virtually define the techno sound.

The Roland 303, the bass synth, was first brought to market in the early ’80s. Designed to provide a rudimentary bass backing for guitarists jamming alone at home with their drum machines, the 303 produced a not altogether convincing emulation of an electric bass — and it didn’t help that bass lines had to be laboriously programmed into the machine note by note, using a one-octave keyboard that couldn’t even be played in real time. And so Roland pulled the machine off the market in two years, and it was more or less forgotten — except by musicians too cash-strapped to load up on the newer (and presumably better) gear.

It wasn’t until the late ’80s that budget-conscious musicians in search of a cheap bass box discovered that the 303 could sound pretty good if you twiddled the knobs just right — if, Spinal Tap style, you turned all the knobs up to the proverbial 11. In 1987, a Chicago artist known as Phuture released his first 303-based “Acid Track” — a stripped-down dance groove with a trippy hypnotic sound that would soon come to define what was then known as acid house. Other musicians soon discovered that the sub-bass sounds of the kick drums in the Roland 808 and 909 drum machines could produce sonic booms powerful enough to literally shake the room. And in no time, aspiring acid house musicians began clamoring for the machines that produced those wonderful buzzing bleeps and booms. Electronica artists give shout-outs to their favorite gear: Fatboy Slim titled one of his compositions “Everybody Needs a 303″; Daft Punk has its “Revolution 909″; and then, of course, there’s the band 808 State. And the price of the discontinued machines went through the roof — and has remained there.

But a new generation is discovering the joys of the Roland machines — this time as software. Propellerhead Software’s aptly named ReBirth is an emulation of the 303 bass synth and the 808 and 909 drum machines, which has caught on with people around the planet. And a devoted community of musical hackers has created thousands of alternative sounds that can be played with software.

“I thought acid was dead,” says Paul O’Reilly, a San Francisco plumber, who first ran across the software while hunting for software to produce some serious “chill-out” ambient music. “I was overwhelmed by the sounds that I was making with this software five minutes after downloading and have been hooked since.”

When it was first released in 1997, ReBirth seemed to exude a certain nostalgic charm — much like the emulations of “vintage” video games that have caught on with older Gen-Xers eager to relive the glory days of their teen years. But some early adopters thought it would be too limited to become a “serious” musical instrument itself. At a time when professional music software offers literally dozens of tracks and a seemingly endless array of sounds, ReBirth only offered three tracks, with no sampling capabilities — and its synthesizers couldn’t even play chords.

So, a number of ReBirth musicians began hacking their way into the core of ReBirth’s code, figuring out how to use the software in ways it never was intended to be used — much like the original acid house pioneers had done with the real 303 a decade earlier. They replaced the machine’s drum sounds with sounds of their own — and shared their hacks with other fans. Soon others, armed with graphics software and a lot of patience, began modifying the look of the machine as well, providing new “skins” for the graphic interface along with new sounds.

Before long, an entire community of musical hackers began to grow up around these ReBirth “mods,” as these custom-built Rebirth sound modules came to be known — and the software began to inspire devotion among several hundred fans.

“ReBirth and the ReBirth site are the promise of computers and the Internet fulfilled,” writes ReBirth fan Fred Stesney in a post on Propellerhead Software’s message boards. “When I see this much creative potential delivered to this much talent in a supportive community where that talent can invent purely for art’s sake, it makes me happy to be alive at the end of the 20th century.”

The second version of ReBirth came with an extra drum machine — an emulation of the 909 — in part to allow potential mod-makers more flexibility in adding their own sounds, which range from sampled drum loops to bouncing house chords and even jazzy-sounding horns, all ingeniously shoehorned into the software’s drum sequencers. The mods are designed to produce Rebirth songs in distinctive flavors — from dark Industrial dissonance to trippy, sitar-laden ambient trance. Some mods duplicate the wails of famous divas or other soundbites from the early days of acid house. There are no restrictions on the sounds you can stuff into a mod: one recent addition to the Propellerhead archives, BadRat, is based on samples of a pet rat scampering in its cage, which makes for a unique percussive effect, to say the least.

The people at Propellerhead “were a little slow at first to accept the mod scene,” recalls Dennis Schissler, a mechanical engineer from San Diego and a ReBirth fan, “But eventually [the company] came to see how much the free development increased the value of its product.” Today, there are dozens of “official” mods posted to the Propellerhead site — and numerous other “unofficial” mods posted on other ReBirth fan sites, such as “Computer Controlled.”

Far from being slapdash amateur hacks, most of the ReBirth mods are remarkably slick productions, with tight, clean samples and elegant graphic interfaces that are often a considerable improvement over the relatively straightforward original, which is designed to more or less faithfully reproduce the look of the real-world Roland boxes. According to Kurt Kurasaki, a skilled and energetic mod-maker who goes by the nom de Net of Peff, the toughest thing about mod making is getting the animations of the knobs to work correctly. (He’s got a section of his Rebirth fan site devoted to the fine art of cobbling knobs together.)

ReBirthers have been eager to share their songs as well: The Propellerhead archives now contain well over 1,000 songs sent in by users around the globe; there are countless other songs posted on unofficial Web sites and passed around via e-mail. Meanwhile, a number of ReBirth-only musicians have set up a virtual community of their own on MP3.com, posting dozens of Rebirth-only tracks and releasing three compilation CDs.

“Every which way you care to measure it, it’s big,” says Wing Poon of the ReBirth community. “In age, in geography, in musical tastes, in lifestyle, in professions, in food preferences, in philosophical standpoints. The range is as wide as music’s appeal to people around the world.”

Well, not quite: the Rebirth community is overwhelmingly, even somewhat oppressively, male — you’ll have to look long and hard to find any female ReBirthers. But the cult does indeed span the globe: You can find ReBirth users — thousands of them, judging by the software’s sales — tucked away in nearly every nook and cranny of the world, from Iceland to Saudi Arabia, from Latvia to the Dominican Republic. (In pulling together this piece, I corresponded with a 49-year-old financial controller in Sheffield, England, a computer consultant from Sweden and the San Francisco plumber, among others.)

It’s “like a wet dream coming true,” says Propellerhead CEO Ernst Nathorst of his software’s near-cult status. “Naturally, we’re happy about the fact that so many musicians all over the planet have chosen our creation. But it is even more fantastic to see how active they are, exchanging songs, communicating via e-mail, forming bands, creating mods, supporting each other, etc.”

Much of this activity takes place at the Propellerhead site itself. The company has embraced the mod scene, posting officially sanctioned mods on their home page (only the slickest looking and sounding qualify) and developing free software tools to assist in mod-making. Now would-be mod makers don’t have to hack anything at all — merely replace the default sound samples and graphics with files of their own, using Propellerhead software’s ModPacker or the fan-built ReNovator.

So what is it about this software that inspires such dedication? Much of the appeal can be traced to the almost magical properties of the Roland 303 itself. As Simon Reynolds points out in “Generation Ecstasy,” his recent history of techno music and rave culture, the 303 produces “bass patterns as polytendriled and trippy as a computer fractal, riddled with wiggly nuances, smeary glissandi, curlicues and whorls. Precisely because programming the machine is so complicated, the 303 tends to generate inspired errors and happy accidents, in much the same way that chaos theory generates complex phenomenon out of simple iterated processes.”

But the current cult status of ReBirth transcends acid house nostalgia. Though some ReBirth songs sound virtually identical to the stripped-down acid house of the late ’80s, many of those making the music today have never touched a Roland in the real world — and may not have even heard acid house before they started twiddling the ReBirth knobs.

“One can create very complex stand-alone tracks entirely with ReBirth alone that sound very 1999,” says Schissler. “I suspect that few users have ever seen a 303, 808, 909 and many probably had never heard of such things prior to learning about ReBirth.”

Part of the key to ReBirth’s appeal is that the software not only recreates the sound of the 303 — it recreates the experience of using a 303 as well, and for considerably less money. The interface is a mass of knobs and faders that can be adjusted and readjusted (with mouse clicks) in real time. Like the Roland machines it emulates, ReBirth is built for fiddlers and twiddlers. With just a few quick twists of a knob, you can transform its sound from austere Kraftwerk-style bleeps to skronky, funky bass noodlings; the notes themselves become far less important than how they sound.

The experience of Rebirth can be as exhilarating and addictive as any deeply immersive video game: it’s Daft Punk, the home version.

Larry Sloman, a former National Lampoon and High Times editor who collaborated with Howard Stern on his two bestselling books, has clearly done his research. “Steal This Dream,” which covers Hoffman’s life from his childhood through the glory years of the 1960s and the less-than-glorious years of the ’70s and ’80s, is constructed of thousands of excerpts from interviews with more than 200 of Hoffman’s friends, ex-friends and acquaintances.

Sloman’s various informers are often at odds with one another, but Sloman also seems at odds with himself. In his prologue, he professes to offer inspiration to a new generation of radicals — whom he invites to “steal this dream” as Hoffman had once invited curious Yippie wannabes to “steal this book.” But this is not an inspirational book; though fascinating, it’s actually hideously depressing to read. The deeper you delve into the disaster zone that was Hoffman’s life, the less likely you are to want to emulate it — even if you could.

Hoffman was a charmer, to be sure — a born performer, always on. Even his opponents conceded he was a brilliant propagandist and a master media manipulator, thought by many to be the inventor of the sound bite. But Hoffman manipulated everyone around him as well. From the beginning his audiences had trouble distinguishing his truths and his fictions. In time, Hoffman did too — and his grandiosity got the better of him. He careened back and forth between bursts of manic energy and periods of black depression — with the highs and lows getting higher and lower as the ’60s gave way to the ’70s. Eventually, Hoffman was diagnosed with manic depression, a condition exacerbated by his drug use, the tension and loneliness of his underground existence in the late ’70s and the slow collapse and co-optation of the American counterculture. By the time he reemerged from the underground in 1980, Hoffman was a walking, talking anachronism, and he never quite recovered from his fall from grace. “If there is a political equivalent of somebody who appears on ‘Hollywood Squares,’ that’s what Abbie had become,” book editor Sam Mitnick told Sloman.

Whatever you make of Hoffman’s public life — whether you believe he was a political and cultural hero or little more than a pesky buffoon — his private life was an appalling mess. The man who helped lead a generational revolt against the father figure of the Establishment was himself a terrible father, the ultimate narcissist. During his famous guerrilla assault on the money culture, as he tossed dollar bills onto the trading floor of the Stock Exchange and caused a near-riot, his first wife, Sheila, was on welfare, trying to support their children with only $16.17 in her bank account. Abbie rarely saw his son and referred to “the kid” in the third person even when the two came face to face. Ultimately, he cut his first two wives, and all of his children, out of his will.

Abbie Hoffman was one of a kind. As Sloman’s book makes clear, it’s perhaps just as well.

Hillary could find this story, along with many others, reported in Gail Collins’ new book, “Scorpion Tongues” — an often entertaining account of political gossip in American history, collecting an ample supply of “facts and near-facts about the great and near-great” from Thomas Jefferson to William Jefferson Clinton. It’s not hot dish exactly — since many of the stories are at least several decades old — but it’s tasty dish nonetheless.

Still, it would be presumptuous to call this book “history.” Collins, a former New York Newsday columnist, seems to have immersed herself in the subject — her bibliography alone is more than 30 pages long. (She may be the only person to ever look up the 1908 article “Edith Roosevelt Drives Fast Train” in the New York Times archives.) But she doesn’t seem to have derived any great insight from her varied readings — other than the fairly obvious point that Americans’ interest in scandal has waxed and waned over the years, and that the types of scandal that capture our imagination seem to reveal something about our social anxieties — i.e., you don’t see many white politicians accused of having “Negro blood” these days.

In the 19th century, as Collins notes, politicians routinely faced outrageous allegations, many of them stemming from the fervid imaginations of fiercely partisan newspaper editors less interested in truth than in good-old fashioned mud-slinging. Indeed, presidential candidate John Frimont, the target of some of the nastiest gossip, was rumored to be both a Catholic and a cannibal — and at the time it was the former accusation that really hurt him. Yet by the middle years of the 20th century, the public’s taste for political scandal had died down, and journalists were willing to look the other way when John Kennedy smuggled women into the White House or Estes Kefauver staggered drunk across the floor of the Senate.

These days, of course, the news from Washington is often little more than a succession of accusations and denials — and for all the talk about the perfidy of the media in all this, the American public seems to have an insatiable appetite for the salacious details. Still, Americans also seem united in the belief that none of these details matter all that much. It would be nice to think that the willingness of the American public to forgive the president his transgressions represents a new sophistication regarding matters of sexual indiscretion. Don’t count on it. Clinton owes his particular brand of Teflon in part to his roguish charm, in part to our rip-roaring economy — and in part to the simple fact that on any given day, “The Jerry Springer Show” features men and women behaving much more badly than anyone in our wayward executive branch. Clinton can only hope that Jerry’s ratings stay in Oprah range.

Leave it to the adult webmasters — who’ve pioneered the use of streaming audio and video and other kinds of interactive entertainment on the Web — to get to the future before the rest of us. “Sharky Live,” webcast from the offices of the Web site Cybererotica, is a twice-weekly, real-time, radio-style talk show devoted to the ins and outs (as it were) of the Internet porn industry. It is, as Sharky himself explains at the start of every show, “the Internet’s premier RealAudio show dead mmpphh that’ll help you get a feet on the pulse of the adult Web.”

Or something along those lines. With RealAudio, it’s often a little hard to tell for sure just what people are saying. But you get the idea. “Sharky Live” is a show dedicated to the fine art of “takin’ care of business,” as the snippet of the Bachman-Turner Overdrive song in the background reminds listeners who may not be perfectly clear on the concept.

The topics range from the vaguely salacious (“Dokk has Phonesex with Marina!”) to the mundane (“How to generate productive traffic!”). Aside from the inevitable detours into technical arcana — like true geeks, those responsible for the show are obsessed with matters of T-3 configuration, retransmission rates and network congestion — the show is mainly a chance for various adult webmasters with fanciful names like Webfather and Fantasyman to shoot the shit about the strange business they’re in.

If you set aside the subject matter, “Sharky Live” resembles nothing so much as a late-night “freeform” college radio show (without all the irritating novelty songs). It’s all inside jokes and technical difficulties. Speakers interrupt one another, callers are cut off, sometimes the sound cuts out entirely for several seconds at a time. The word “bumbling” comes inescapably to mind.

Sharky: We got a guy on line three named Eddie. Do we know who Eddie is?

Fantasyman: Well, let him on. Let’s see.

[Brief succession of beeps]

Sharky: Eddie? Hello?

[Faint sound of voice in the background]

Fantasyman: Hello, Eddie?

[Pause]

Fantasyman: I guess we don’t have Eddie.

When not connecting and disconnecting various callers, Sharky himself has what you might call a low-key interviewing style. He responds to most comments with a murmured “wow” — often preceded by a moment or two of awkward silence — and would clearly prefer his guests do most of the talking. Luckily, they’re more than happy to.

Some like to rant: Fantasyman (Sharky’s boss at Cybererotica and a regular on the show) is happy to let forth half-hour harangues on his least favorite kinds of adult-Web rip-off artists. Others like to tell stories: On one recent show, Sharky’s sidekick, DoKK — a genial sort with a soft Southern accent — described how a certain part of his anatomy came to be known as the “DoKK Ness Monster.” The tale is difficult to summarize; suffice it to say that it involved a stripper with “capabilities that I have never seen again to date,” among them a certain neat trick she could do with a Twizzler. (The punch line: She’s now become a nun.)

Mostly, though, the guests talk shop: how to generate traffic, how to generate revenue, how to keep from getting ripped off. Much of it isn’t any different than the sort of talk you’d hear at any Internet marketing seminar. But adult webmaster shop talk does have some distinct qualities of its own. On one memorable show, an adult webmaster and domain-name hoarder by the name of Webfather (very few guests on this show use their real names) eagerly reported the latest additions to his collection, purchased (presumably) from domain-name speculators who’d registered the names with InterNIC but never used them. To a chorus of “oohs” and “ahs” from Sharky and DoKK, Webfather catalogued his recent purchases:

Webfather: We got one from Grimm today, Webwhores. And we got Nymphos.com. And we got Voyeur.com.

[Pause]

Webfather: And we got Vagina.com

DoKK: Oh my …

Sharky (astonished): Wow!

DoKK: … word! Oh my God!

Sharky (flustered): Man you got a … Shit!

DoKK: When you make a score like this, do you have a ritual, I mean, do you go out and get yourself a steak?

Webfather: [I] take about 30 milligrams of valium to try to come down.

DoKK: You’d have to. With me you’d need 100 milligrams of thorazine and a polo mallet.

“Sharky Live” is not, to be sure, the only specialized — or even the only weird — RealAudio production on the Net. A quick browse through the RealAudio and Video links at the Timecast Web site turns up any number of oddities — from the CyberAir Airpark Chicago, which features “live transmissions of the Chicago Approach frequency” from O’Hare Airport, to a page promising live “Sunrise Nature sounds from the San Jacinto Wilderness near Idyllwild, CA.” There are 24-hour Internet radio stations for Dittoheads and Liberated Women alike; one slightly overenthusiastic Oasis fan has put his own covers of the band’s songs online. (I couldn’t quite bring myself to listen.)

But “Sharky Live” is more than just a quirky example of Internet “narrowcasting.” The show in many ways represents the cutting edge of computer networking. For “Sharky Live” is not simply a call-in radio show: It’s a virtual schmoozefest. Though a typical episode of the show reaches only 100 or so listeners, Sharky estimates that nearly half of these listeners stop by the “Sharky Live” chat room during the broadcast of the
show — commenting on the topics at hand, asking questions of the guests and chattering away with one another about anything and everything. It’s hard to imagine a show more honestly interactive than that.

In a way, it’s hardly surprising that this sort of networking came first to the adult Web. Adult webmasters are often ahead of the pack when it comes to new technologies; they also network more intensely than practically anyone on line outside of LambdaMOO. The popular YNOT adult webmaster message board fills up with hundreds of posts a night (and YNOT offers live webmaster chat every night as well); inspired by YNOT’s success (and in some cases annoyed by its alleged “censorship”), various adult webmasters have set up other message boards to exchange ads, insults, accusations — and sometimes even practical advice.

Several months back, Wired’s Jon Katz set out to define the “Digital Citizen” — whom he described as an honest and upright character with “abundant energy and knowledge,” one of “the most informed and participatory citizens we have ever had or are likely to have.” Katz forgot only one thing in this vaguely self-congratulatory catalog of digital democracy: The most energetic and participatory of all “Digital Citizens” are the ones distributing dirty pictures on the Web.

So when I first stumbled on to AltaVista’s Translation Assistant, I had a little trouble believing it was real. The Translation Assistant does for Web surfing what “Star Trek’s” translator did for deep-space exploration, translating Web pages (or simply swatches of text) from French (or German or Spanish or Portuguese or Italian) into English and vice versa. The service is quick, free and painless, and though the software is still in beta (as the AltaVistans are quick to point out), the results are nothing short of magical.

In an industry habitually given over to hype, the AltaVista people have been strangely hesitant to toot their own horn. Perhaps fearing an overwhelming crush of visitors, they haven’t actively publicized their service, and they’ve been modest about its accomplishments. “Computerized translations often miss subtle meanings of words and don’t accurately present many common sayings,” a sort of disclaimer on the AltaVista Web site explains. “The AltaVista Translation Assistant provides you with a tool to translate a grammatically correct document into something comprehensible, but not perfect.”

Sure, the software mangles a lot of what it gets its hands on. Some of what it delivers, of course, is utter gibberish: “It would leave his fall in the edge for a minute or two.” “I am funker in a room of assembly and I licked film.”

But as Dr. Johnson might have said, the wonder is that it works at all — and that so much of the machine’s output, however garbled, is at least roughly understandable. The summary of a German mystery story, translated into English: “Place of the action is first New York, later undertakes Van Dusen and Hatch a voyage round the world, while those they are constantly confronted with interesting kriminologischen problems. ” (As you can see, some difficult words remain untranslated — though their meaning is often quite clear from context.)

The automatic translator is likely to prove an unreliable instrument in situations that demand a certain degree of precision in language — like
international diplomacy, or the placing of take-out orders. Perhaps the easiest way to test for possible problems is to translate your request into the desired language — and back again. Though this adds a second level of distortion to the first, it at least will give you a sense as to where the translation will most likely go astray.

I had few problems with basic food orders, but trouble multiplies quickly once you wander even a little bit off the beaten track. “Surf ‘n’ turf,” translated into French and back again, becomes “grass of the vague beachcomber.” And a simple request for “a half order of sweet and sour pork, extra rice, with a side order of pot stickers” becomes — after translation into Italian and back — an “order half of sweet pig and acid, additional rice, with a lateral order of the self-sticking papers of the pot.” (“Pot stickers” prove troublesome in nearly every language, returning as everything from “gummed labels of the crucible” to “labels of the potentiometer.” )

Those who hope to use the translator to give their love life an international flavor may want to proceed with some caution. The classic pick-up line “What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?” loses a little of its impact after taking a detour through the Italian language: “Which thing an pleasant girl as you it is making in a place like this?” And I don’t imagine you’d get very far with “Did no matter who ever indicate you that you could be a model?” or the more straightforward “You are a hot breast! You are flavorful pies!” (Of course, the original English here — “You’re a hot mama! You’re one tasty pastry!” — might be no more effective.)

Still, while the translations rarely enhance well-chosen words of love, they might still prove serviceable for initiating more straightforward interactions. “Hello, sailor” loses little in the translation. And though neither “Search of the good time?” or “How much is a job of the blow?” are 100 percent accurate translations from the Italian, it’s not likely anyone will wholly miss their meanings.

The Translation Assistant seems to have the biggest trouble keeping track of pronouns — it’s constantly transforming “hes” and “shes” into “its,” “yous” into “theys” and so on. “Show me the money,” translated into Portuguese and back, becomes, “He shows the money to me.” Bart Simpson’s “Don’t have a cow, man,” becomes, “It does not have a cow, man.”

But if AltaVista’s magic translation machine doesn’t always deliver up linguistic perfection, the translator does give English speakers a glimpse into what all those foreigners out there are saying behind our backs. And it may help us to understand some of the most puzzling mysteries of the global village: why Germans love David Hasselhoff more than “blond chest swimmer” Pamela Anderson Lee, and why French people think Jerry Lewis is l’explosif.

So far, my excursions into the German Web haven’t exactly clarified the appeal of “the man, who speaks with the auto.” But I’ve had more luck with Mr. Lewis. Doing a search for pages in French devoted to the limber-limbed comedian, I quickly discovered a wealth of material, including a lengthy and serious academic exegesis of Lewis’ burlesque genius.

And I was, for a moment, almost persuaded that “The Disorderly Orderly” deserves a second look. Even the stupidest slapstick, infused with the French spirit, takes on a certain grandeur. “Unsuited eternal, unceasingly maltreated or exploited, [Lewis] has for only defense only his own maladjustment: let us reproach him his awkwardness, it becomes more destroying, try to make it conceal so that he howls of more beautiful,” one earnest Lewisite explained, his passion only partially dimmed by the inevitable mistakes in the automatic translation. “Its innocence is not inoffensive, its maladjustment has something of triumphing: that an object resists to him, it will come to end by the destruction, that an enemy threatens it, it will overcome it by the exasperation.”

That sounds about right. And what of the legendary Martin/Lewis combo? Our French expert captures its essence in a single sentence: “Dean Martin, crooner phlegmatic and cynical undergoes the jokes to which delivers itself Jerry Lewis, little runt howling … and persecutes it in return.”

Could any native English speaker have put it any better? I think not. The strangest thing about the AltaVista translation is that the ones that are not too awfully bungled often seem not to have lost, but to have gained from the translation. A routine descriptive sentence from an alt.sex story becomes: “He entered easily, she was ready, virtually cooking to the steam inside.”

The AltaVista Translation Assistant gives us all a glimpse into a world beyond English — and, perhaps even more importantly, can give non-English speakers access to the 70 percent of the Web that’s in English. But it can teach us something even more fundamental about the art of communication.

The Translation Assistant, with its stubborn literalness, forces us to look again at the roots of our own language. Most of the time, we skate across its surface, building our sentences not from individual words but from ready-made blocks of words — common phrases, simple noun-verb combinations, clichis. Our speech, in short, is prefab. The translator, not understanding our clichis, puts words together in its own original way — and thus is able to infuse the most banal of utterances with a certain poetry. As the Translation Assistant itself might put it: That’s some flavorful pies!