October - November 2001

Engineering and Popular Culture:

The Electric Prunes posing in front of high voltage insulators, 1967 Photo from www.electricprunes.com

Rock and Roll Goes 'Electric'

by David Morton, Ph.D.

While completing a book on the history of sound recording several years ago, I noticed how prevalent electrical technology was in popular music lyrics. In fact, this has been the case since at least the late 19th century, when the telegraph, telephone, and electric lamp served as the subjects of numerous popular tunes. As electricity was changing the very essence of living, inspired songwriters put pen to paper in an attempt to capture the feelings engendered by these dazzling new inventions. These earliest lyrical efforts have largely been forgotten, but today's music carries on the tradition.

What's the Buzz?

While 'electric themes' continue to be found in the songs themselves, a large number of bands and music albums have paid tribute to electrical technologies in their names. While the title of a ditty might not be much of a statement, the name chosen for one's band or album is a more important commitment. So in some sense, the fact that so many rock bands are including electrical technologies in their names is a reflection of the importance of technology in popular culture.

This trend seemed to take hold in the 1960s. At that time, it was somewhat fashionable for bands to chose absurd names; many of them chose to include the word 'electric.' My favorite was the Electric Prunes, one of the classic psychedelic bands of the late 1960s. There was also Electric Flag, Electric Banana and Electric Junkyard, not to mention a Blues Magoos album titled Electric Comic Book.

One of the most important albums of the era was Jimi Hendrix's 1968 classic Electric Ladyland, which was named after a recording studio in New York. Interestingly, this title spawned dozens of tongue-in-cheek imitators over the next three decades, including Electric Voodooland, Electric Lizardland, and yes, even an Electric Landlady.

Rocking and Rolling With the Changes

As technology has changed, so has the way pop music culture has incorporated it. What the word 'electric' was to bands in the 1960s, 'computer' has become to bands in the past couple of decades. From Radiohead's recent OK Computer to the more obscure Little Computer People Project, this technology tool has appeared in dozens of names during the last few decades. Special honors go to the German experimental band Kraftwerk, whose 1980s album Computer World included the classic song Pocket Calculator.

Power Rock

The engineering terms that apparently make the best band names tend to cluster around certain types of technology. As a result, certain IEEE technical areas have been better represented than others. Power engineering is clearly one of the popular favorites. From the 1960s group Edison Lighthouse to the Electric Light Orchestra, Battery, and The Generators, power engineering evidently inspires some pretty cool imagery. Other such bands are 30 Amp Fuse, Van Der Graaf Generator, and Pacific Gas and Electric, not to mention a recent album called Rural Electric. And when acoustic concerts by rock bands were all the rage in the 1990s, a host of albums were touted as being 'unplugged.'

The "A-D-Cs" of Rock and Roll

Electrical components and devices also hold great appeal to rockers. The band Synergy, for example, recorded an album it titled Audion, while other albums by various artists have such titles as Diode and Cathode. The band Transistor was pretty well known at one time, as were The Tubes, although this one is a bit of stretch, since they were not actually named after vacuum tubes.

Wire and Transformer also comes to mind. And in the 1980s, a little-known band called Mister Resistor. Solid State was one of the great Jazz labels of the late 1960s. A few bands have called themselves Electronic, while dozens, if not hundreds, of albums include the word 'elecronic' in their titles. Oh — did I mention Electron Love Theory? No, well I haven't heard of them, either...

Another cluster of names revolves around circuit theory. Feedback is used in a huge number of songs, band names and album titles. It's probably safe to assume, though, that the musicians using this term were less interested in the scientific aspects of feedback than they were in making their guitar amplifiers scream. Speaking of which, amplifiers and amplification are, not surprisingly, also extremely popular. Bands named Amp, The Amps, and Lil Amp are obvious, and Muddy Waters' Electric Mud alludes to the electrification of music and instruments.

I could go on and on: The Toasters, The Robots, The Frigidaires, Tesla. The list is long, and I have barely touched on the many hundreds of song titles and lyrics that mention electrical technologies. I also have a separate list of names that I cannot mention without offending people (beginning with Electric Vomit and going downhill from there). Despite these omissions, one thing is clear: electrical engineering rocks!

David Morton, Ph.D., works at the IEEE History Center at Rutgers University. Visit the IEEE History Center's Web page at: www.ieee.org/organizations/history_center/.