Science fiction and music

Strange Stars: David Bowie, Pop Music, and the Decade Sci-Fi Exploded, by Jason Heller

4columns, June 2018

By Simon Reynolds

Strange Stars starts with author Jason Heller recalling a profoundly formative experience: a David Bowie stadium concert in August 1987, when the Glass Spider tour reached his hometown, Denver, Colorado. Not the most auspicious initiation, perhaps: generally deemed a garbled farce of overdone spectacle, Glass Spider might be the nadir of Bowie’s increasingly rudderless eighties. Still, for fifteen-year-old Heller, the sound and vision—“a tornado of catsuits, astronaut costumes, and gold lamé”—blew his mind. The wonderment of that night propelled him along his life-path: a parallel trajectory that entwines being an active musician in various bands and an acclaimed science-fiction writer. (Author of the counterfactual satire Taft 2012, Heller also won a Hugo Award for his contributions to the magazine Clarkesworld.)

Coming at his subject, the interface between popular music and science fiction, from an unusual angle—as a practitioner of both s.f. and music, rather than rock critic or historian—gives Heller a fresh perspective. One fascinating thread concerns the surprising number of direct collaborations between rock bands and s.f. writers. Admittedly, they’ve rarely reached fruition: Theodore Sturgeon, for instance, was invited by Jefferson Airplane’s Paul Kantner and ex-Byrd David Crosby to turn their song “Wooden Ships” into a screenplay, but the process collapsed amid an excess of egos. Heller’s deep familiarity with his genre’s history also enables him to cross-reference the publication of landmark books with songs that appear to have borrowed from them: Bowie’s 1967 song “We Are Hungry Men”—a comic satire about an overpopulated near-future—was recorded suspiciously shortly after the final portion of Harry Harrison’s Make Room! Make Room! was serialized in the UK.

Despite being a musician, Heller’s approach in Strange Stars is largely lyric-based, treating songs as “a vehicle for science fiction.” He quotes from Kodwo Eshun’s More Brilliant Than the Sun but oddly doesn’t make use of the Afrofuturist critic’s concept of “sonic fiction”: the ways in which production, effects, timbres, and other futuristic or spacy audio elements create effects of disorientation and estrangement. Take “Silver Machine” by British cosmic rockers Hawkwind: it’s the sound of the single—Chuck Berry riding a Mercury rocket rather than a Chevy, a vertiginous whoosh into the beyond—that transports the listener, rather than the half-buried lyric about a vessel that “glides sideways through time.” Likewise, Bowie’s Low—devoid of s.f. lyrics—feels more science fiction thanks to its innovative production and brittle, neurotic rhythms than Ziggy Stardust and Diamond Dogs, whose songs about alien messiahs and Orwellian dystopias come clad in relatively conventional rock settings.

Although Bowie’s name is highlighted in the book’s subtitle and he appears often enough to approximate a narrative spine, one can’t help wondering if this slant was intensified after the glam rock visionary’s 2016 death, reframing what was originally intended as a broad survey of the s.f. influence on seventies pop music. But that 1970s emphasis itself also stirs a wrinkle of doubt. For sure, Heller’s list of definitively seventies genres—“Krautrock, glam, heavy metal, funk, disco, post-punk”—all deployed imagery related to the future, space exploration, etc. But pop’s infatuation with s.f. started well before 1970 and continued to flourish into the eighties (the era of synth pop, industrial music, and electro) and nineties (rave culture and techno).

Despite those somewhat arbitrary boundaries, Strange Stars provides a brisk and entertaining tour through terrain that has not been mapped at book length before. The briskness does have a downside. Strange Stars is structured as a year-per-chapter arc through the seventies, which means that the same figures keep cropping up, but often in a glancing way before we hurry on to the next example. Whenever the narrative slows and zooms in, it’s a richer read, as with sections on Hawkwind’s relationship with doyen of the British New Wave s.f. scene Michael Moorcock, Devo’s Spengler-retooled-for-MTV vision of humanity’s degeneration, and Poly Styrene of X-Ray Spex’s lyrical fantasias of consumerism-gone-crazy.

At other times the book can feel like a hectic and overly wide trawl that often pulls in things only tenuously connected to s.f. (a song that references a planet, a robotic dance style briefly in vogue). Midway through, I began to feel that while a formidable accumulation of evidence was underway, the case actually being argued had yet to emerge. Clearly there is a deep connection between rock and science fiction. Both forms operate within an uneasy but potent interzone between lowbrow and lofty, juvenile trash and avant-garde bohemia. But why haven’t other pulp fiction genres—westerns, hardboiled detective stories, mysteries—bonded with rock to anything like the same extent?

As Heller notes, it’s striking that several of the very first magazines containing rock criticism were launched by figures who came out of the s.f. fanzine scene. Later, music papers like NME would regularly profile writers like J.G. Ballard. Science fiction and rock both have an association with youth culture. While some stick with either or both for their whole lives, fanatical involvement is generally associated with adolescence and the early twenties. That super-intense seriousness—seeing s.f. or rock as a world-transformative force, or as a world unto itself—is an overestimation you’re supposed to grow out of.

But why is the affinity between rock and s.f. so strong, and what is the connection with youth? A clue can be found in a Bowie song mentioned in the book largely because of its title: “Life on Mars?” Heller rightly points out that the lyric isn’t really science fiction. But the song scenario and its emotional tenor do evoke exactly the sort of longings and frustrations that fuel “the desire called utopia,” the poetic subtitle of Fredric Jameson’s s.f. study Archaeologies of the Future. Bowie’s own account of “Life on Mars?” is that it’s about “a sensitive young girl’s reaction to the media.” Formulaic entertainment offers no relief (“the film is a saddening bore”), TV news presents a panorama of absurdity (“the workers have struck for fame”), and humanity in all its futile striving seems lemming-like (“the mice in their million hordes”). The question of the title is at once an indictment of the sheer mundanity of life on Earth and a sighing entreaty: there must be more than this, an absolute elsewhere.

Good on the details of s.f.’s interactions with rock, Strange Stars never addresses this deeper commonality: the fact that it’s the insufficiency of the world as is—and the inadequacy of the half-formed adolescent self—that drives kids into the fantasy-systems of science fiction and rock. Both offer ways of being “anywhere but here, anyone but me” through heroic narratives of discovery and danger. The feeling of risk is crucial: indeed, you could twist Jameson’s phrase and talk about “the desire called dystopia.” As shown by the contemporary boom of YA fiction set in totalitarian near-futures, or by the catastrophe sub-genre of sci-fi, it’s even more exhilarating to imagine being tested by extreme predicaments or struggling to survive in a radically (and thrillingly) transformed world. As the novelist John Wyndham—quoted in Strange Stars by Neil Peart, Rush’s drummer and lyricist—once put it, science fiction is about “extraordinary things happening to ordinary people.” That is a large part of rock’s promise too, for fans and for aspiring stars alike. 

Booker Contra The Future

Christopher Booker's The Neophiliacs: A Study of the Revolution in English life in the Fifties and Sixties  was published in 1969. It's well worth a read, despite - or rather because  - his take on the 1960s is so unsympathetic.

The overall theme is the idea of Sixties neophilia as a kind of collective national hysteria, a mass delusion, a mirage caused by the media that became self-perpetuating, stoking an appetite for shocks of the new and breaks with tradition... leading to an upward-spiraling demand for change that couldn't be satisfied, short of revolution. It could only crash and burn into bitterness and disillusionment. 

Brooker is a persuasive enough writer that even a "Sixties fan" like myself began to feel like it was all quite insane. At the same time, you gradually become aware that his worldview is basically Christian - I'm guessing in the high Anglican tradition, moderation in all things, non-fervent. He views society as - ideally - homeostatic. Things should change only very very slowly indeed - and perhaps not at all.  You sense that he not-so-secretly believes that things were better and people were happier when everyone knew their place.... The right attitude to have is humility and fatalistic acceptance of your God-given lot, rather than striving to get above yourself, or shake things up.

Curiously, Booker was a player in the British Sixties early on as one of the writers on That Was the Week That Was. So he was instrumental in the whole Sixties satire boom - with its groundbreaking irreverence towards authority (e.g. the impersonation of  Prime Minister Harold Macmillan - something deemed unthinkably disrespectful in 1962 or whenever it was).  He was also involved in Private Eye.

But by the time of writing The Neophiliacs, Booker has switched over to the other side and the satire boom is something he criticises. 

But then he criticizes everything: fashion, the cult of photographers like David Bailey, commercial TV, the dissolving of class barriers, permissiveness, the Pill, feminism,  Brutalist architecture, urban planners, Harold Wilson's "white heat of technology"...

He's possibly the original young fogie. 

America gets blamed for a lot - rock'n'roll obviously, but also for the arrival of supermarkets in the U.K. And if I recall right, he blames Americanization for the liberalisation of gambling laws, with casinos opening in London for the first time.

Another thing he doesn't approve of is James Bond movies!  On account of the way they glamorise sex and violence (which Bond clearly enjoys).

Wish I had this edition rather than the one up at the top....

One thing's for sure, Christopher would have hated, hated, Expo 70. 

Even if you already know a lot about the British Sixties - from more sympathetic historical accounts like say Robert Hewison's Too Much: Art and Society in the Sixties, 1960-1975, or frontline real-time takes  like Jeff Nuttall's Bomb Culture, Richard Neville's Playpower, or George Melly's Revolt Into Style - the Booker-book is worth a peruse I'd say, for the quirky way he's goes about assembling the narrative, as well as the less-common conservative perspective. 

He has a peculiar methodology, which is that he appears to have sat there with piles and piles of newspapers and ploddingly worked his way through the late Fifties and the Sixties year by year, month by month, week by week, day by day. On one level, that's lazily linear and pedestrian:  a chronicle, insufficiently analytic. But on another, it's fascinating - you get to know what the weather was like and how that affected the national mood. All kinds of little stories get included that a historian of the era operating later on might not have swept up. A reference to a "power breakfast" that David Frost held with all kinds of cultural bigwigs and movers and shakers attending. Something I'd never heard of, no doubt a big deal at the time, at least for a few weeks, but subsequently utterly erased from the memory.

Another interesting tic is the way Booker -  being a bit of a snob, or more charitably, acutely class-conscious - will mention what school someone went to, whenever he introduces a significant new character to the narrative. Or what university. It all feeds into his running theme of how the old social barriers were collapsing, an unprecedented degree of cross-class hobnobbing was going on. Which he probably found consternating. 

There was a follow-up to The Neophiliacs, not written as a book-book but compiled out of articles and opinion pieces: 

However it's not so much that the 1970s  is "the decade that changed the future" -  rather it's the decade where the future died. Or at least where the idea of the future, the romance of the future, faded and fizzled. That's what Christopher says. Faith in a brighter tomorrow, anticipation, eyes on the horizon, we are the tomorrow people  - he thinks all that goes, under multiple pressures (economic decline, environmental devastation, the oil crisis, the break-up of families through divorce, you name it - the laundry list of right-wing bogeymen). Hence the boom for multiple simultaneous nostalgia revivals....

 (But there's plenty of evidence for continued neophilia and future-anticipation in the 1970s- look at Tomorrow's World, Omni magazine, books of futurology, the aesthetics of disco and glam). 

I guess The Neophiliacs and The Seventies are Transatlantic cousins of Alvin Toffler's famous work Future Shock but Toffler is more diagnostic, whereas Booker is just aghast, recoiling in horror and disgust.  

Blank-eyed dollies in space age fashion juxtaposed with urban bleakness or Brutalist architecture  - this is a special bugbear of Booker's

Of course, he became a strong supporter of leaving Europe...

Just one of his anti-EU tomes. 

Now I wonder if Booker actually coined the term "neophiliac"?

And what would its opposite be? 

Not retrophiliac, because "retro" is always a present-day version or revision of the past - it says more about today than it does the actual historical past. . 

Whereas loving the actual past in all its deadness and gone-ness.... antiques and long-ago glories..

hmmm

Paleophiliac? 

これは明日だった (This Was Tomorrow)

 

Coulhart a/k/a { feuilleton } on Expo 70 in Osaka

There is a brief mention in Retromania of Expo 70 on account of what Karlheinz Stockhausen did there: 

Stockhausen had a spherical auditorium built to his specifications at the 1970 World's Fair in Osaka, Japan, with nests for musicians scattered throughout the audience; the latter sat at "the equator", on a sound transparent platform, and surrounded by fifty speakers distributed in ten circles (eight above the equator, two below).

There is a whole account of it here

This is one of the compositions performed 

Despite the title resemblance, this is something else - pretty cool sounding, though, and love the record cover

Someone - I think it was Rem Koolhaas - said Expo 70 was the peak of the 20th Century and that's it been downhill all the way since, in terms of human imagination. The swansong of the era of big public projects, governments prepared to plan things that took decades to be realised and that they'd not benefit from electorally, state action with a long-term focus rather than short-term with an eye on the next election. 

But there's a lot of gauchely futuristic buildings that have been built in the last couple of decades - London is overrun with them, things that feel like intrusions into realspace of digitally imagined architecture. And then you have the whole megacity ultramodernist thing of Dubai and Shanghai.

Still, none of it has that mid-century utopian aura - it's corporate power flexing itself, imposing on the skyscape. Mostly coming out of the private sector, right? 

The future now - in that brash teenage hard sci-fi distinctly old fashioned sense - seems to be owned, as a site of enthusiasm, by your tech-bro oligarchs. They are the "I heart eyesores" contingent  of today. The "sores" has a different inflection beyond the aesthetic, it's like gashes in the cityscape left by disruptor capital. 

(Likewise Trump's disgusting conception of Gaza as a potential real estate development bonanza.) 

Realtor-futurism. 

I have not yet seen The Brutalist, perhaps this is relevant. 

At any rate I personally now am more interested in seeing bits of England I never got to see than ever getting to the Moon or Mars. 

I wouldn't want to live in the house - or apartment - of the future either.  Those sort of desires seem arrested-development type desires. Child-man desires. 

Perhaps as you get older, you become more painfully aware of what's disappearing than exhilarated by the thought of things ahead - especially given you won't get to see them owing to your rapidly shrinking lifetime. 

"the Song of the Atom"

 Sean Albiez on the etymology and earliest uses of the term "electronic music"

The Substack post is a preview or advance-excerpt from a book length work-in-progress on electronic music in the 20th Century.

Amongst many other early examples, Sean points to Leopold Stokowsky, Director of the Philadelphia Philharmonic Orchestra, who in 1931 declared: 

"MUSICAL instruments up to the present have been developed on the cut-and-try basis. Electrical instruments offer us the really scientific method, with much greater possibilities.

When I return from Europe, I am planning to organize an orchestra made up entirely of artists playing electrical instruments. For the time being it may well be advisable to seek musicians who can play the old instruments well, and are willing to work up ability with the new."

I wonder if he followed through?  Seems unlikely, otherwise he'd been considered a real pioneer.

Something was in the air, though. Take Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley, which was published in 1932, and must have been written around the start of the 1930s. It contains descriptions of music involving instruments that are at very least electronically augmented versions of existing ones.  There's also reference to Synthetic Music. As I write in the Futuromania essay on science fiction writers and their imaginings of future music: 

"Huxley anticipates Muzak with his Synthetic Music Machines: the first one we encounter is "warbling out a super-cornet solo" in a female dressing room; later, a Super-Vox-Wurlitzeriana fills the air "with gay synthetic melodies" at a hospice for the terminally ill.... Mmusic production is centralized, streaming out of a gigantic building in London that contains various Bureaux of Propaganda, floor upon floor of which house the "laboratories and padded rooms in which Sound-Track Writers and Synthetic Composers did the delicate work".

In Brave New World, there are also concert halls and nightclubs like the Westminster Abbey Cabaret, whose hoarding promises "ALL THE LATEST SYNTHETIC MUSIC."   Two of the characters, Lenina and Henry, go there on a date, joining the crowd of couples "five-stepping around the polished floor" to the complex rhythms of Calvin Stopes and his Sixteen Sexophonists.  The band play standards like "There Ain't No Bottle in All the World like that Dear Little Bottle of Mine": not a paean to booze but Huxley's twist on Al Jolson's maudlin "Mammy", for in Brave New World fetuses are hatched in glass wombs, to spare women the hassle of pregnancy and the agony of birth but also to avoid emotional attachment and all the neuroses created by the Freudian "family romance".   Hence lyrics like "Bottle of mine, why was I ever decanted?/ Skies are blue inside of you/ The weather's always fine". As the "tremulous chorus" of sexophonists "mounted towards a climax" the conductor "let loose the final shattering note of ether-music and blew the sixteen merely human blowers clean out of existence." After the band finish, a "Synthetic Music apparatus" pipes out "the very latest in slow Malthusian Blues" leaving Henry and Lenina feeling like "twin embryos gently rocking together on the waves of a bottled ocean of blood-surrogate." 

Elsewhere there's ecclesiastical music (or in Brave New World terms, hymns and choral music for a Solidarity Service at the Community Singery), including fanfares from ersatz trumpets and haunting harmonies from "near-wind and super-string" instruments. Music is also a crucial component of the "feelies": an omni-sensory update of cinema in which smell and touch are stimulated as well as sight and sound. 

"and there'll be no life on Earth at all"

A bunch of children in 1966 - so bright, so worried about the future. 

Common anxieties about the world of 2016, i.e. a half-century ahead - world destruction, automation, computers, homogeneity, ugly modern buildings, overpopulation and overcrowding, robots,  battery farming, food pills, boredom. 

"I'm not looking forward to living in 50 years - there'll be machines everywhere"

"I think it's going to be very  boring, and everything will be the same, people will be the same."

"I think it will be very dull and people will all be squashed together so much there won't be any fun or anything. And people will be rationed to the number of things they can have."

"Very cramped"

" I don't think it'll be so nice - sort of machines everywhere. And you'll get all bored"

There's one kid who presciently worries about the sea levels rising and England becoming an archipelago of formerly-higher-ground islands.

Another who frets about a new Ice Age. 

A couple of girls who think because of overpopulation, a lot of people will have to live under the sea.

A rare note of curious optimism - a kid looks forward to curvy not square buildings (a young Archigram fan?)

The big difference between then and now is the disappearance of the fearful expectation of nuclear war. 

Plus ça change....   the worries and dystopian-scenario triggers today for kids would be largely different (pandemics, climate crisis, AI, terrorism, microplastics, declining birth rates, fascism)  but I expect the anxiety-levels are roughly the same. Perhaps made worse by the doom scroll and the access to information (although the kids in the 1966 film seem very well informed). 

I wonder how many of these kids are still alive (they'd be in their early seventies now)? What worries them today and how do they picture the year 2074?

Tomorrow's Music Today

 

"I'm hung up on the future"