I'm forever indebted to a Terry Gross interview with William H. Macy that I heard on the radio years ago. In it, she grilled him on his acting technique, and he held forth on it with perfect confidence and Mametian precision. He said something to the effect that he didn't like method acting or so many of the other popular acting techniques because they all came too close to relying on inspiration, or the Muse. He said that any 'technique' that relied on inspiration or the Muse wasn't a technique at all, and that when you were inspired or had the Muse, you didn't need a technique. You were on fire then, and nothing could hold you back. But for the other 360 or so days per year, you needed a technique to get you through each scene. To reliably produce results in the absence of inspiration. It's common sense, but he put it very nicely and it applies to any kind of work you're serious about, in my humble opinion.
In a sense, his technique turned each scene into a problem, and it was his job to work toward a given solution. I'm a hyper-analytical kind of guy who likes solving problems, so this way of working through things does wonders for me.
So anyway, I'd identified a problem in one of my stories that I'm working on, and I was trying to work through it today. Imagine if all human civilizations were hijacked by a somewhat oppressive power in about 1943. We're not talking about slave-camps-and-hot-iron-on-the-feet oppression, just a power that attempts to put a collar on all humanity's baser instincts (being loud, sensual, indulgent, etc.). So think of it as a giant Baptist church, but without God. So in other words, like the Baptist church in the South. We'll call it The Power.
Now The Power doesn't really understand humans terribly well. It has great technology, superior to humans', but it doesn't understand how good humans are at running around or going under barriers they are confronted with. So The Power is, like most so-called totalitarian authorities, quite inefficient, leaving people with some wiggle room to play with.
So my 'problem' was: what do you think popular music would look like in America by 1983? Pretty soon, I got so fascinated with the possibilities that I forgot about any kind of solution. So really, the exercise worked.
No Sun Records. No British Invasion. And then no hippies, and no Summer of Love. No mass production or distribution of rock or R&B records. It all stays underground. Records are cut in improvised basement studios or in normal studios, after hours, when nobody's around to see it happen. An array of regional bootleg networks bleed over into each other somewhat, but mostly you're listening to records produced one town over. Except when you can tune in a pirate station across the country run by a music fanatic with some balls and a shortwave set, beaming outlaw, raunchy blues out of the South or the latest crazy jump and swing out of Chicago, and it blows your mind because you've never heard it before, and may never hear it again.
Rock and Roll (though it doesn't exist by that name) stays naughty. Even the 'mainstream' of it is subversive when it's not sexy, angry when it's not animated. It's sweaty men in juke-joints playing for that girl at the edge of the stage. It's the obsessed who only find peace in their music, recording it for the love of the sound. Very little in the way of paychecks, very little in the way of marketing. It's country boys with homemade electric guitars jamming with R&B drummers and horn players, after hours, in the back of the roadhouse.
Rock and roll.
I'm getting drunk on thinking about the ultimate bands that might exist in such an alternative universe.
And whatever it ended up looking like, there would be no such monstrosities as this.
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7 comments:
It's an interesting idea, but I'm not sure how it would work. How do you keep people from being sensual or indulgent. Past a certain point, you'd have to prevent the necessary biological urges such as sex, without which we wouldn't be around long as a species.
If they managed to banish music, I think the humans would explore forms of music less stand alone as music and more incorporated with the rest of the world. Stand-alone instruments would be banned, of course, so you'd end up with a sort of industrial folk music where the instruments would be otherwise utilitarian tools used to our own ends. Glass harmonicas, beer can xylophones, boxes of cutlery, even chains in the bath tub.
Besides that, by 50 years later ambient sound might be designed as a form of music where the product designers take into account how the product sounds in order to make a sort of music. Pitched fan noise, irregular seams in the road belting out an interesting rhythm, &c. &c.
In the rpg setting I had devised some years ago, the elf language was tonal, not in the way that some human languages are tonal in using relative pitch, but truly tonal as in perfect pitch. The note the sound fell on influenced the sound's meaning. As such, you couldn't speak Elf so much as have to sing it. God help you if you were tone-deaf.
Ah, but the point of it is that it DOESN'T work. Too much scifi has a poor understanding of authority and power. Attempts to discourage or outlaw mankind's more 'animal' instincts don't snuff those instincts out. But they do shape how they are expressed. As the decades pass, attempts to control human behavior are less and less successful, for a variety of reasons that will be explored.
Additionally, boring orchestral/crooner music and tame folk music is still allowed and subsidized, so the instruments are still there. Though all adaptations of instruments for rowdier application (distortion, etc.) will be of the homemade variety, and I think you're right that the blues/folk-world use of improvised instruments would continue more than it has in the real world.
Nice point on the ambient stuff; I shall think on that.
And if that isn't a goddamn great story idea, I don't know what is.
Hmm... technique. Now that sounds like a good idea.
Oh. I hadn't thought of writing a story just about the music thing.
Hmmmmmmmmmmm. One side story for the Lazaro world, coming up.
That video is twisted, by the way.
I have a suggestion for your background, Split. Feel free to ignore it.
One thing that bugs me about most alien contact stories is that so often the aliens don't understand how rat-viscious, sneaky, out-of-control, stubborn or illogical humans can be.
Give the aliens some credit. Humans have been oppressing each-other for a long time, and knowing our rebellious side has neither stopped the attempts at control, nor made them work. So make the aliens understand us. Maybe even make them scarily good at understanding us (helping explain how they manage to hold on for so long).
That's my feeling, (and I suspect you were going to do that anyway). I'm sure there are other places where you can make their alien-ness shine through.
It's an excellent idea, colin. Even more excellent in that I'm already going sort-of in that direction. : )
In my never-ending quest to further complicate everything, the aliens are factionalized. Most humans don't even know this. But I have a beautiful little dialogue in mind between Lazaro and a 'friendly' alien during which this will be revealed to him. As with most colonial regimes, some of the imperialists wish to ignore the colonized while making a buck off them. And some 'go native' and gain tremendous understanding of the indigs.
Many of the nativists will not only understand humans and their nasty underbellies, but will grow to really like them.
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