The Casio VL-1: A Cultural Study

The Casio VL-1: A Cultural Study

Maximilian Shatan

The Casio VL-1 is a slight, oddball thing. Off-white and droll-toned, awkward and diminutively sized, it might be the last thing one thinks of when picturing a “groundbreaking” synthesizer. And yet, with its mixture of programmability and mass-market friendliness, the Casio VL-1 a pioneering archetype of the consumer keyboard, a device that has become a staple of any musically inclined household. Unlike most trailblazing objects, the Casio doesn’t come with a special origin story, or an inspiring moment of invention. It seems to have risen from the endless cycle of bureaucratic development that categorized major Japanese electronics companies in the latter half of the 20th century. In fact, one could say that the most groundbreaking thing about the Casio VL-1 is how “normal” it is, a tabula rasa. But if the Casio VL-1 is such a blank canvas, how do we, as consumers and as observers, come to associate so many of its key attributes with itself? What exactly is it that imbues an object with traits beyond its physical appearance? What determines how we use it in a social setting, or its larger cultural meaning? Namely, just what is it that defines the Casio VL-1 in the context of the wider system of associations that constitutes society?

To get a better idea of what answers this question, we need to look for inspiration at Casio’s next door neighbor, Sony. In 1979, that company released its first model of the Walkman, the stereo cassette player that could fit in your pocket and play tapes on the go. It proved an instant success, selling five times as many units as Sony first anticipated (1). Though the Walkman may have left a stronger mark on the collective imagination than the Casio VL-1, their similarities are more telling than their differences: both are consumer electronics from the same time period in Japan, both are tied to music, and both come from similar companies. Therefore, it’s not a stretch at all to extrapolate an analysis of the Walkman and apply it to the Casio VL-1. One of the most in depth sociological studies of the Walkman out there is Paul Du Gay’s “Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman.” The book takes a “base object” (in this case, the Walkman), and builds a network of cultural, social, economic, and aesthetic associations around it. We can do the same for the Casio VL-1.

According to Du Gay, the most important social asset an object can possess is a solid place in the pantheon of wider cultural knowledge, or being “firmly located on those ‘maps of meaning’ which make up our cultural ‘know-how’. (2)” The Walkman is so ensconced in popular culture, that even non-Sony portable cassette players are referred to by the Walkman brand name in casual parlance. As such, we tend to view the Sony Walkman as the epitome of the portable cassette player, something along the lines of Plato’s theory of thought as recollection of ideal objects. Why is the Casio VL-1 not privy to these rewards? Obviously, the Casio is not as popular as the Walkman, but more importantly, the Casio lacks a set of strong identifiable social practices, and therefore, a strong cultural identity. Social practices consist of the activities that one can engage in with a certain object. For an iPhone, this might be playing a game, or listening to music, or texting someone. These activities, coupled with assumptions regarding the kinds of people who might partake in them, as well as the kinds of places they might take place, build up a kind of cultural identity around an object. We ascribe a certain “awkwardness” to the Casio VL-1 simply because we cannot picture its use in a regular context. This fault lies not simply with the object’s rarity, but with the nature of the object itself. With its dual function as a synthesizer and a calculator, the VL-1 has a foot halfway in both worlds, but never fully fulfilling its duties in either. The interface for the calculator is spread haphazardly across the piano keys, making typing in algorithms inefficient, and the piano keys themselves are made of small, sticky repurposed calculator buttons. The sounds that emanate from the VL-1’s tinny speakers are almost comically thin; in fact, there is almost no situation in which a professional musician would use the VL-1 in earnest. These glaring shortcomings prevent the VL-1 from truly having a wider cultural meaning.

However, this has not precluded the Casio VL-1 from eking out a reputation entirely. It has been included, in all its cheesy, low-fidelity glory, in some incredibly popular songs (see Trio’s Da Da Da) (3). This has allowed the VL-1 to take a somewhat windy, not entirely positive, and certainly less rewarding path to cultural meaning: that of camp, or of kitsch. According to Walter Benjamin, kitsch "offers instantaneous emotional gratification without intellectual effort, without the requirement of distance, without sublimation. (4)" This simple feeling is easily attained when looking at the strange little Casio, and one can derive enjoyment from its existence without any intellectual labor. As a kistch object, one could say that the greater rules of cultural identity do not apply to the VL-1. Certainly, it provides a different perspective on these cultural studies in opposition to the Walkman, and though its contribution to the wider cultural conversation may be almost nil, the VL-1’s value as kitsch imbues it with a different significance, one unfettered by traditional assumptions about usefulness and importance. The Casio VL-1’s perspective in this regard must be valued, and understood as standing somewhat outside our conventional aesthetic discourse.

Works Cited:

1. Haire, Meaghan. “The Walkman.” Time, Time Inc., 1 July 2009, content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1907884,00.html.
2. Gay, Paul Du. Doing Cultural Studies: the Story of the Sony Walkman. SAGE, 2013.
3. Admin. “Casio VL-Tone VL-1.” Vintage Synth Explorer, Vintagesynth, 19 Oct. 2017, www.vintagesynth.com/casio/vl1.php.
4. Benjamin, Andrew, and Charles Rice. Walter Benjamin and the Architecture of Modernity. Re. Press, 2009.