Tompkins certainly picked an interesting topic to cover in his first book. There isn’t a wealth of material out there on the history of the vocoder, an interesting piece of equipment if there ever was one. I was certainly on board with the subject matter, and when someone like Jeff Chang, one of my favorite critics, tells me that Tompkins is the best hip hop writer born, I certainly take notice.

Upon finishing this book, I wondered if Chang and I are reading the same author. Not that Tompkins is a bad writer, but this book is certainly flawed. It’s wildly unfocused and suffers from bad editing. It never succinctly defines what a vocoder is, how it works, and its development as a musical instrument. I got short anecdotes on early use in WWII and the Cold War and historical applications in pop music, as well as how talk boxes and Auto-Tune aren’t exactly the same thing.

But the book is so muddled, it’s hard for someone without prior knowledge to sort everything out. When Chang wrote Can’t Stop Won’t Stop, he wrote a book that clearly outlined a history and connected the pieces in a way that demonstrated cause and effect. If someone asked me about the development of hip hop in certain regions or time periods, I could use the knowledge I ascertained from that book to link new knowledge and draw all sorts of conclusions. If someone asked me about vocoders after reading this book, I could only give snippets of information and hope it would suffice.

It’s a shame, because this book could have been great - a must-read amongst music history books. Instead, I can only recommend it because there aren’t other books written on the history of the vocoder.