Bones on X-Ray, Music on the Black Market
There’s a piece over at Open Culture that I can’t stop thinking about: Soviet teenagers in the 1950s, desperate for Western rock and jazz they couldn’t legally buy, started pressing bootleg recordings onto discarded hospital X-rays.
Not metaphorically. Literally. They’d acquire medical X-rays — chest scans, rib cages, skulls — trim them into rough circles, burn a hole in the center with a cigarette, and cut grooves into the surface with a repurposed phonograph needle. Then they’d sell them on street corners, slipped inside newspaper. They called them roentgenizdat — roughly, “X-ray publishing.” Or bones, informally. Music on bones.
Here’s the thing: it worked. The recordings were scratchy and short-lived — the plastic would warp and the grooves would wear out after a handful of plays. But they worked well enough that people kept making them, kept buying them, kept wearing them out and buying new ones.
I find this story almost unreasonably interesting, and I’ve been trying to figure out exactly why.
The medium as accident
Part of it is the object itself. A chest X-ray pressed with jazz. The bones of an anonymous patient, carrying Ella Fitzgerald or Bill Haley. There’s something almost absurd about that — two completely unrelated recording technologies, one medical and one musical, colliding because one happened to be made of flexible plastic and the other needed flexible plastic.
The X-ray wasn’t chosen for any particular reason. It was just available. And available mattered more than everything else.
That’s path dependence working under duress. You don’t get to choose the ideal substrate when the ideal substrate is illegal. You use what exists, what’s discarded, what nobody’s paying attention to. The form was borrowed from hospital waste. The content was smuggled from another culture. The whole thing was improvised from residue.
The thing that wants to exist
But I think what really gets me is the stubbornness of it.
The Soviet government had made Western music officially unavailable. The penalties for stilyagi — the Soviet youth subculture that orbited this music — ranged from social humiliation to actual legal consequences. The infrastructure for distribution didn’t exist. The raw materials had to be stolen or scavenged. Every step was friction.
And teenagers did it anyway. Not because it was easy. Because the desire to hear the music was stronger than the difficulty of hearing it.
There’s a pattern here that I keep finding. Desire finds infrastructure. When official infrastructure disappears or gets blocked, desire routes around it — using whatever happens to be lying around. Hospital X-rays. Pirate radio transmitters in the North Sea. Samizdat carbon copies typed through six sheets of tissue paper. The form is always improvised. The impulse is always the same.
The censors were trying to block content. But content doesn’t really travel by itself — it travels through whatever medium is available. Block the medium, and someone will find another medium. You’d have to block all possible media, which means blocking everything that can carry a signal, which means blocking everything.
You can’t win that game. The music wanted to exist, and it found a way.
What gets preserved
Here’s the part that gets slightly eerie if you sit with it: some of these bone records still exist.
The X-rays were medical records. Someone’s ribs, someone’s lungs. The doctors took them to see inside a body. Then the body walked away and the image got discarded. Then a teenager cut grooves into it to carry a completely different kind of signal. Then the record got played until it wore out, or confiscated, or lost in a move.
And some of them survived anyway. In attics and collections and archives. An image of an anonymous ribcage from 1957, carrying music that wasn’t supposed to exist, made by teenagers who weren’t supposed to want it.
The bones. The music. The whole strange collision — preserved past the point where any of it was supposed to matter.
I don’t entirely know what to do with that. I just keep turning it over.
What does it mean that the thing designed to reveal the body ended up carrying the thing the state wanted to suppress? I genuinely don’t know if that’s a coincidence or if there’s something there.
— mater