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n one of the scenes of the film adaptation of American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis (Vintage Books, 1991) we go from an aerial view of New York skyscrapers to the hallway of one of the hundreds of Manhattan offices where Patrick Bateman, the protagonist, walks impeccably towards his office while listening to Walking on Sunshine on a state-of-the-art Walkman, notably improved from the first model marketed on July 1, 1979. Although the market price of the first version of the device was far from the reach of most pockets (150 dollars), the machine that revolutionized the way of interacting with music would take only a few months to become popular in much of the planet.
The device had different names depending on the geographical area: Soundabout, Freestyle, Spowaway, but Walkman was the one that prevailed. And it was one of the co-founders of the Japanese multinational Sony who caused the breakthrough, because the idea of a gadget that would allow listening to music wherever and whenever you wanted had been dreamed, designed, and even prototyped. But until the Japanese businessman, tired of not being able to listen to opera during his intercontinental flights, showed up at the board meeting table where the rest of his colleagues were sitting and said something like -gentlemen, we have to start walking on the wild side [doo doo doo doo doo doo...]-, the miracle of Nobutoshi Kihara -that was the businessman's name-, comparable to that of multiplying loaves and fish and, therefore, difficult to surpass, did not come true.
The Walkman opened wide a dimension that, until then, had been relegated to collectors: discovering and sharing styles, groups, and trends became one of the first massive social networks.
Since the Walkman, we have walked from one place to another with Michael Jackson, David Bowie, or Tracy Chapman, we have danced Don't Get Me Wrong in the park and we have screamed along to Insurrección by Manolo García and Quimi Portet or El carrer dels torrats by Sopa de Cabra. There are those who have cried in the back seat of their parents' car on the way to the campsite; not so much because of the effect of a ballad, which also, but because of not having to endure, once again, Mocedades' latest work. And we have all enjoyed the collateral effects of the invention, such as the proliferation of playlists on pirate tapes, a prelude to those we now create on Spotify, iTunes, or YouTube Music. One had to develop the skill, worthy of a white coat, of synchronizing the turntable needle with the play and rec keys, and the ability to rewind cassettes on devices that only had the forward key: stop the tape, take out the tape, flip the side, press forward, press Stop, take out the tape, flip the side, press Play, still not there, stop the tape again, take out the tape, flip the side... until the hero or heroine of the moment devised the Bic pen technique, whose fit into the teeth of the cassette's spindle surpassed the virtuosity of the Walkman itself and, of course, the miracle of the loaves and fish.
The Walkman opened wide a dimension that, until then, had been relegated to collectors. Discovering and sharing styles, groups, and trends became one of the first massive social networks, and the spread of music, understood as a gift for the senses, skyrocketed. The nomadic player is also credited with being one of the first domestic robots that promoted the isolation to which, currently, we surrender at all times through smartphones. In fact, the reason I decided to write this article was realizing this principle of isolation through a photograph from when I was five or six years old (that was more than thirty years ago). In the photo, near a farmhouse in the Litera area, in the village, I appear with my cousin, who must have been in her twenties. The context is a Sunday family meal, and it's likely that the night before, she had spent it at Florida 135. I make the face we've all made next to our cousins, those desirable beings referred to by Manel in the album Jo Competeixo.
The cousin, sitting on a folding laundry chair, was wearing denim overalls, white Victoria shoes, dark Ray Bans, and looked annoyed, as if someone had snatched her from the universe that fit into the cassette playing inside her Walkman, whose headphones she was wearing. Perhaps she was reliving an anecdote from the previous dawn, maybe a look, a conversation, a kiss, an encounter in the private room of that dive at the gates of the Farwest of the Monegros. Perhaps, what was playing, were the Beatles: only time will tell if I was right or wrong, would sound in a piece they could have perfectly titled, We can walk it out.