King Crimson, “The Court of the Crimson King” (1969)
Pre-’70s Moog synthesizers were hampered by what now seems like a bizarre limitation — they could only play a single note at a time. Even simple chords were only possible by repeated overdubs in the studio, meaning that it was impossible to play any of these compositions live. The Mellotron, on the other hand, worked via strips of audio tape connected to a keyboard, meaning that it could be played live. Sure, it was as heavy as an elephant on Saturn, but what had been impossible was now merely very difficult. Mellotrons show up in pop music as far back as 1965 on songs like The Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields Forever.” But they really came to the fore when English group King Crimson made pioneering use of the Mellotron to help found progressive rock with their 1969 debut single “The Court of the Crimson King,” which helped lead to the massive, spectacle-driven arena rock of the ’70s. As prog evolved, it embraced the tropes of science fiction and fantasy for its expansive concept albums, and “Crimson King” was no exception, spinning a Dylanesque allegorical tale about the devil that begins with “prison moons” being destroyed in a solar explosion. In 2006, director Alfonso Cuaron highlighted the song’s SF roots again with prominent placement in his post-apocalyptic film Children of Men.
Sun Ra, Space is the Place (1974)
Jazzman Sun Ra claimed to be an emissary from the planet Saturn — and maybe that’s true, considering just how far ahead of everyone else he was in using electronic instruments, debuting a Wurlitzer organ on his album Super-Sonic Jazz in 1956. A pioneer of ambient music, Ra continued to supplement his recordings with tape effects and other electronic devices throughout his career, and never lost his sense of the cosmic. In fact, his blend of Egyptian, psychedelic and science-fiction imagery, seen in its full flower in his surreal 1974 movie Space Is the Place, helped create the Afrofuturist movement soon to be embraced by the space-funk outfit Parliament.
Kraftwerk, “The Robots” (1978)
As advances like the Moog and Mellotron made electronic instruments increasingly available to any talented musician and not just the technocracy, they infiltrated a wide range of popular music, causing revolutionary new changes in some genres and also allowing the invention of totally new ones. German group Kraftwerk were massively influential in the latter regard, exploring new ways of making pop music entirely with electronic instruments that led directly to synth-pop, electronica, house, and club music, and cast long shadows over hip-hop and other genres. They deliberately courted a technophile style, playing up the machinelike qualities of their music not only by writing songs like “The Robots” and “Metropolis” (the latter a tribute to the pioneering Fritz Lang SF film of the same name), but actually building robotlike mannequin versions of themselves that played their music in concert.
Space Invaders (1978)
The late ’70s also saw the rise of a completely new phenomenon, video games, that would rival and even supplant the movie theater and the concert stage as a natural home for electronic music. Space Invaders, which debuted in 1978, not only sparked a craze for coin-operated arcades, it was the first to feature music playing continuously throughout the game. It was incredibly primitive sounding compared with Switched-On Bach, but it was a start, expanded on later by games like Defender and Donkey Kong on the long road to today’s far more complex game music. And it’s been embraced again more recently by the chiptunes movement, about which more in a moment.
Thomas Dolby, “She Blinded Me With Science” (1982)
Kraftwerk was just the vanguard of the popularization of the synthesizer. ’70s arena-rock synths were still bulky and expensive, but the ’80s brought new instruments, like the Roland TB-303 bass synthesizer and Yamaha DX7 keyboard, that didn’t require an army of roadies to move and could be bought for a few hundred bucks. And that was the tipping point: Electronic music invaded everywhere, from the pop-rock of Duran Duran and Depeche Mode to the industrial noise of Einstürzende Neubauten and Ministry to the groundbreaking sampled beats and turntablism of hip-hop’s Grandmaster Flash. English musician Thomas Dolby, a confirmed gearhead who was well ahead of the curve technologically, used a combination of Moogs and less expensive synths like the Roland JP-4 to create his biggest hit, “She Blinded Me With Science” — a classic and charmingly goofy example of early synth-pop that tells the story of a brilliant but emotionally clueless mad scientist who falls in love with his assistant.
Scientist, Scientist Meets The Space Invaders (1982)
Created in the late ’60s by a Jamaican collective including eccentric-genius producers Lee “Scratch” Perry and King Tubby, dub reggae’s experiments with the electronic manipulation of sound was undeniably trippy and organic, especially in comparison to what musicians in Europe and the U.S. were doing at the time. Dub’s heavy reverb and overdubbing was simultaneously an embrace of cutting-edge technology and an aural recreation of a psychedelic state of mind, and it came to embrace SF ideas as a way to express that duality. It helped that “scientist” has a double meaning in Jamaican slang, indicating not just circuitry and tech but occult symbolism. King Tubby’s protégé Overton Brown, who took the pseudonym Scientist, raised dub’s SF flag high on records like Scientist Meets the Space Invaders and Scientist Encounters Pac-Man. Dub would go on to be a guiding influence on hip hop and electronic music into the ’90s and ’00s.
Metal Heads, “Terminator” (1992)
The rise of hardcore dance music in the ’90s took dub’s innovations firmly into the computer age, creating a whole new world of beats, samples, and rhythm-heavy effects. Under the project name Metal Heads, Scottish-Jamaican DJ Goldie pioneered a technique called “timestretching,” which slows down a piece of audio without affecting its pitch, giving his beats a distinctly metallic tone. The track “Terminator” picked up on that vibe by taking its name — and sampling Michael Biehn’s and Linda Hamilton’s dialogue from — James Cameron’s SF thriller about an unstoppable time-traveling killer robot.
Daft Punk, Tron Legacy (2010)
Kraftwerk may have sent android versions of themselves out to play their songs on tour, but Frenchmen Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo took that idea to its logical conclusion: becoming androids themselves. As Daft Punk, the duo stays almost entirely hidden, Residents-like, behind the masks and personae of steel-headed robots — characters they took beyond the music in the clever yet patience-testing arthouse film Electroma. Their greatest mainstream success came in 2010 when Disney brought them on board to enliven the soundtrack of its retro-gamer SF blockbuster Tron Legacy, a perfect marriage of the story’s inherently nostalgic appeal as a sequel to a 28-year-old movie, and Daft Punk’s unflagging futurist approach.
About the Author
Christopher Bahn lives in Minneapolis, where he avoids the cold as much as possible and writes about pop culture, music, film, science fiction, travel, history, and the arts for venues including The A.V. Club, MSNBC, St. Paul Pioneer Press, Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, Momentum, Spaces, The Rake, Request, and Memory Lane. He is also the writer/co-creator of the radiodrama series Where Threads Come Loose.
Things You Will Never Understand: A Conversation with Robert Jackson Bennett
Jeremy L. C. Jones
The writing of The Troupe started for Robert Jackson Bennett with the image of “a boy in the dark, muddy and wounded, holding a body in his arms, and singing.” He wrote the novel to understand who the boy is and how he got there.
Bennett jokingly calls himself an “accidental horror” writer. Much of that self-identification comes from simplifications and from his having won the Shirley Jackson Award for his first novel, Mr. Shivers. As Bennett discusses below, there are elements of horror in his fiction, but there seems to be more of the strange and weird — the unknowable, the un-understandable — than the scary or terrifying. The unknowable coupled with a desire to know, to learn about the world and oneself, fuels his fiction with a tension that is at times unbearable.
“Writing fictio
n is an interesting form of self-deception, because it’s a self-deception you’re aware of, and one you consciously initiate,” said Bennett. “It’s a strangely schizophrenic, disparate process: your attention and personality are put through a thresher, split up into facets, and set to work independently on different questions and problems. Your left hand has no idea what your right hand is doing until your left hand encounters a problem and stops, wondering how on Earth it’s going to get out of this one, which is when your right hand swoops out of nowhere with a solution you had no idea you were even working on.
“You learn a lot about yourself, writing fiction,” he added. “You just have to hope the end product is fun enough for everyone else.”
Indeed, his novels are “fun” and disturbing and a pleasure to read. There’s his first novel, Mr. Shivers, a dark fantasy set during the Great Depression as seen from the perspective of hobos riding the rails. His second, The Company Man, pits industry and unions, technology and telepathy. And his forthcoming third novel, The Troupe, which is set in the delightfully strange world of vaudeville.
The Troupe focuses on George Carole, a sixteen-year-old piano prodigy. Carole travels the Vaudeville circuit under the guidance of Harry Silenus, who teaches Carole about the First Invocation (also known as the First Song) which is the very tune the Creator sang in the beginning. It is their job to sing the song of creation to lift the shadows of the world. Here lies one of the fundamental differences in The Troupe as compared to Bennett’s first two novels.
In Mr. Shivers, Bennett uses a shadowy mood, layered atmosphere, and painfully real characters to reveal the darkness of the world; The Company Man takes a scalpel to the heart of capitalism to shake out the grit and grime of corruption. The Troupe, on the other hand, sings of... “hope” isn’t quite the word, but it’s close.
Below, Bennett and I talk about vaudeville, writing, and the search for peace.
First things first, what compelled you to set a novel in vaudeville?
Vaudeville is a fascinating time in American history: it’s when the rails really started to open up, and all sorts of barriers started becoming permeable. The great melting pot that is America actually began to percolate.
Entertainment is always a fascinating expression of a nation’s subconscious, and vaudeville, which was meant to be light, frothy, diverting entertainment for the masses, suddenly became a huge source of cultural cross-pollination: anything strange or exotic would do. Modern country music owes the slide guitar to vaudeville, for example, due to country acts touring the circuits alongside Hawaiian bits.
But moreover, The Troupe is a story about the building blocks of creativity, and how they still resonate today. And vaudeville might have been the first definer of modern American entertainment, so the building blocks it created can still be found now, whether it’s in Looney Tunes, sketch comedy, stand-up, musicals, or even comic books (is there any bigger vaudevillian than Batman’s arch-nemesis?). The people who made movies, and especially comedies, what they are — Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, the Marx Brothers, Laurel and Hardy — all started out on the circuits, and none of them have lost their verve.
How much of vaudeville is improvised, I wonder? Is any of it off the cuff, responsive to the audience?
The best vaudevillians had their acts fine-tuned and prepared to the smallest degree. And once they had something down, they never changed it — which is why film killed off vaudeville so quickly. There was never anything new there.
How does orchestrated music like, say, Aaron Copland, speak of a different America? Or is it that Copland speaks differently of the same America?
I would probably say that Aaron Copland speaks more to a Mid-Century America, one that had seen a great deal of trouble and wanted to re-envision itself as something more pastoral, majestic, and peaceful. Aaron Copland wrote about a home we all wanted to go back to: vaudeville, on the whole, just wanted to entertain.
Whose music is likely to show up on a soundtrack for The Troupe?
Probably Bert Williams. I listened to a lot of The Magnetic Fields while writing it, probably because of the whole overly-earnest-emotions thing. But I feel like the 78-version of Tom Waits’ “Innocent When You Dream” captures something that’s in The Troupe.
Where does a novel usually start for you — image, plot, character, historical event, somewhere else altogether? And how do you develop the novel from there?
I usually start with an image, frequently an image of the ending. The image comes loaded with atmosphere and subtext and other vague abstracts I can’t immediately define. Defining those things, and figuring out how we got there, is the interesting part.
It is probably the least efficient way to start writing: I start with nothing concrete. Not even names, which is quite inconvenient. But I don’t get to choose these things.
What is it about transience (Mr. Shivers) and touring (The Troupe) that sparks your creativity?
Well, there are two practical matters to take into account. One is that it’s a classic story template, going off into the wide world to seek your fortune and all. It’s something the human mind is geared to accept. The second is that the traveling mode usually makes it easier to introduce interesting and surprising situations than a static mode. (Though it can make things a logistical nightmare — readers might wonder, “How does the antagonist keep up with them?” or, “I thought she lost that in Cheboygan. Why does she still have it in South Dakota?”)
But the thing that chiefly interests me is the question of identity. There are some characteristics and beliefs we have solely because of where we come from. Taking characters out of their homes and putting them into strange, challenging circumstances essentially nullifies those characteristics: it forces characters to ask themselves who they are, and to decide how they will act when their friends and family are not watching.
When the world is changing around you, a lot of you will change with it. But some part of you will not. That part you cannot change is who you are.
You were born, raised, educated, and currently reside in the South. Are you a Southern writer? What of the South appears in your writing? Or, put a little differently, what are some of those beliefs and characteristics that you have or had by grace of being born in the South... and how have those beliefs and characteristics been challenged in your writing and travels?
I actually spent most of my formative years in Houston. Which is not really part of any region — it’s Houston. Just as London is not England, and Tokyo is not Japan, Houston is neither quite Texan nor Southern. It’s a huge, huge metropolis, made of satellite towns with no real, definable center. It is also profoundly international — most of my friends were Korean, Pakistani, and so on.
My parents, and a lot of my extended family, are probably a lot more Southern than I am. And I do not think much of that Southern sensibility finds its way into my work. Except possibly drinking.
The interesting thing about growing up in Houston is that Houston — a city which is now founded mostly on large corporations and suburbs, where your neighbors are always in flux and there is no agreed-upon “hangout” for anyone — is largely bereft of intrinsic culture. It is not like New Orleans, which is definitely New Orleans; it is not like Austin, which is most certainly Austin (in fact, the first time I saw someone in a cowboy hat and cowboy boots was when I came to Austin; it was also the first time I saw someone covered in tattoos and piercings, but... that’s Austin). There are definitely parts of Houston that have a sense of character — the Rice Village, Bellaire, the Museum District, and so on — and I got to visit them quite frequently, and I’m happy for that — but my experience of the whole does not.
It is this sense of communal identity, or lack thereof, that has probably shaped a lot of my beliefs and outlook. I always want to ask people — who are you? Is that something you decided, or something that was impressed upon you? Was it really impressed upon you, and did you really choose that, or do you simply think you did?
&n
bsp; After all, “character” in Greek translates into “that which is engraved.” The question, then, is who, or what, is doing the engraving.
How much of you is there in George Carole?
Probably more than most characters, and probably more than I’d care to admit. George was initially hard to write for reasons I will explain a little later, but I will say that if I were to meet my sixteen-year-old self today, it would take an awful lot for me to resist punching that condescending little shit in the face. It would probably do him some good.
What makes for a compelling protagonist? How do you create one?
A good protagonist must 1. have functionally believable and preferably interesting characteristics that 2. result in or directly affect clearly-defined, active goals that 3. the protagonist keeps to consistently throughout the story, though 4. keeping to those goals either changes A. what the protagonist thinks of themselves, the world, or both, or B. what the reader thinks of the protagonist, the world, or both.
A lot of the actual character is not determined by a trait of characteristics, but by voice, which is the manner in which things are described, the process of logic their thoughts follow, the way the character engages a scene or other characters, and much more besides. Voice is both the most important quality of any protagonist, and indeed any story, as well as the hardest thing to learn or to teach. Naturally.
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