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For Today’s Funky Friday, The Fantastical Fusion of Sci-Fi & the Funk: Even in Space, the Booty Don’t Lie

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Ever since the 1970s, science fiction and the funk have somehow emerged as two great tastes that taste great together.

I suppose we can credit George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic for the concept of the extraterrestrial visitors who descend to Earth to bring us some form of rump-shaking higher knowledge.

By introducing the Mothership and it’s garishly clad crew of funkateers, Clinton managed to combine the self-determination that arose from the civil rights movement of the 1960s with the idea that maybe something bigger was needed to bring about full acceptance of the African American culture that has informed every bit of American life since the 1600s.

Something like … a full-on alien invasion.

The concept of alien visitors bringing about some kind of funk epiphany was new, but somehow it caught on. The Mothership itself bootsy-collinsappeared in live P-Funk shows and the massive musical collective worked the extraterrestrial vibe to the hilt (everybody say, “Go Bootsy!“). Their rallying cry was, “Free your mind, and your ass will follow.” Well put.

It could have been a one-time thing had young Prince Rogers Nelson not set upon his own journey of funk/rock fusion and become the performer we now know only as Prince, who counted among his early influences Sly & the Family Stone, James Brown, Earth, Wind & Fire, Miles Davis, Carlos Santana, Jimi Hendrix, Todd Rundgren and … Parliament-Funkadelic.

Prince seemed to bring everything along for the ride – space, pan-sexuality, end-of-days prophecy, visions of a post-apocalyptic utopia – all packaged in this surreal mix of pop, rock, funk and old-school R&B. When Prince broke big in the 1980s with 1999 and Purple Rain, it really did seem like he’d come from space like a late wave of the invasion that P-Funk initiated.

Plenty of old-timey “classic rock” guys turned up their noses, despite the scorching guitar solos and the obvious tribute to Jimi Hendrix, probably because it was hard for them to get past the fact that the Little Purple One was black.

Meanwhile those of us of a more sci-fi frame of mind more easily got a hold on what Prince was doing – pushing the envelope that had been shrunk ever smaller by obnixious, prefab arena rock and what was left of those trying to capitalize off the disco craze.

Since Prince curtailed his career and output, there have been few willing to step up and bring the sci-fi/funk connection back to the fore. Until now.

Janelle Monae seemed to emerge from much the same science fictional universe as Prince, and brings even more of that delightful future-funk to the world, especially in her videos. “Dance Apocalyptic” brings us the end of the world, complete with zombies, aliens and humanoid apes, but for purposes of today’s blog, it doesn’t really count as funk, per se. It’s still a damn fine song, and you should still give it a listen.

The best example of Monae’ sci-fi/funk fusion is the song – or more specifically the video – below. While the song isn’t science-fictional in itself, it does propose that the world is a better place when everyone’s being him or herself without worrying about the folks who never can quite get the hang of that.

The video, though, is based on the premise that Monae was the leader of a full-on cultural and social revolution, and that her organization has been frozen in suspended animation in a “living museum” for rebels and radicals – until they are once again unleashed.

Which brings us right back around to the P-Funk motto. Let the funk free your mind, and your ass will indeed follow.

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Entirely Biased and Totally Subjective Book Review: ‘Sacré Bleu’ by Christopher Moore

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You can dive into Sacré Bleu, the most recent non-spinoff work from comic/fantasy yarn spinner Christopher Moore, without an art history degree, but it might not be a bad idea to have a working knowledge of the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painters of Paris in the late 1800s before you start.

That’s because most of them (at least those Moore can place within temporal or physical proximity to the setting) make appearances in Sacré Bleu, a paranormal mystery that casts artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec in the unlikely role of investigator when his pal and fellow painter Vincent van Gogh suffers what appears to be  self-inflicted gunshot wound, but then proceeds to walk to find a doctor, dying not long after he arrives.

Toulouse-Lautrec has reason to believe that his friend’s death was instead a murder, and sets out to find out who might have been the killer. He enlists the help of a young baker, Lucien Lessard, whose father was both an aspiring artist himself and a patron of the Impressionist community. Lucien, it turns out, has some talent of his own, and as such is doted upon by the likes of Toulouse-Lautrec and his peers.

Central to the plot, as you might gather from the title, is the color blue, specifically the “sacred” blue reserved in European art for the shade of the Virgin Mary’s gown. Its origins and mysterious purveyors – and how they relate to the artists of late 19th century France – help Moore explore the primary themes of talent, inspiration and madness, and how the three can be inseparably intertwined.

Stylistically, Sacré Bleu hews mostly closely among Moore’s works to Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal. In Lamb, Moore took the established canon of the New Testament and, through legitimate historical and theological research, filled in the blanks of the missing years of the life of Jesus with fictional suppositions about his travels and the earthly inspirations for his later, better documented ministries.

Of course, Moore being Moore, he did so with a heaping helping of satire, naughty wit and downright hilarity, and Sacré Bleu is no different, reflecting the same narrative base – actual people and history are folded into a completely fantastic storyline that somehow manages to incorporate real events and landmark art in a way that makes you pause and say, “Well, maybe it could have happened that way after all.”

As a character in a Moore novel goes, Toulouse-Lautrec is so perfect it’s like history planned for him to star in this book. Short in stature but overwhelming in his confidence in his own talent, the artist was well known as a libertine and based much of his oeuvre on the sensory experiences of spending lots of time in burlesque halls and brothels.

Complementing it all are the full-color (at least in the first edition hardback copies) illustrations of nearly every painting Moore references in the course of the narrative. They are used both as a (very subtle) art history lesson and to place into context the interactions between the artists and their mysterious muse. It’s a clever – and to my knowledge, unique – device that does nothing to interrupt the story and so very much to remind the reader that the characters placed in these fictional situations were indeed real people doing real and very relevant work.

I noted earlier that this is a “non-spinoff” work to distinguish it from the pseudo-sequels of two of Moore’s earlier novels, Bloodsucking Fiends and A Dirty Job – those being You Suck and Bite Me. While, as a Moore fan, I enjoyed the latter two, at times it felt as if the author was phoning it in to try and grab some of that tasty vampire mojo that keeps copies of the Twilight series flying off the shelf.

This novel doesn’t suffer from that feeling. Indeed, when Moore puts his mind (and research and shoe leather) to it, he can craft a detailed and stylistically pleasing novel that incorporates a detailed and well organized story, plenty of Tom Robbins-style wordplay and sexy-sexy plot points with the abundantly weird supernatural/science fictional elements that keep readers coming back.

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Today’s Funky Friday Brought to You by The Roots and … Elvis Costello? (A Rumination on Genre Busting)

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OK, lemme ‘splain.

Anyone who’s read this blog … you know – ever – has a pretty good idea that I’m an Elvis Costello fan from way back, and there’s a good reason: I consider my discovery of Costello on par with my initiation into a musical world that included the Beatles as its foundation.

But I’ve never really explained why.

Better than why, I’ll explain when. It was 1983, and I was 15, riding with my dad in his tiny Chevy pickup truck to help him out with a rehearsal for a play he was directing at the Chapel Street Playhouse, a tiny but very active community theater in Newark, Del. As we got closer to the theater, this song came on the radio – likely longstanding Wilmington, Del., Top 40 station WSTW. Something about the opening piano chords with the bass guitar right up front grabbed me, then the singer’s falsetto kicked in, followed by a more normal register, and the sound of the female background singers.

That’s about 20 seconds into the song. And man, I was hooked. I did something I rarely did. I asked my dad to just sit there in the parking lot and leave the radio on while I listened to the rest of the song, which turned out to be about a lovelorn writer using literary imagery to explain the ups and downs of a romantic relationship.

OK, I thought. You got me. I’m done. Who is this guy?

But the DJ didn’t say. Because this was the Stone Ages, when there was no handy digital display to tell you the artist if the DJ neglected to, I was in the dark. When I got home, I was doubly in the dark, because my family had no cable TV, and thus no MTV. That might have been the last time I heard it on the radio.

Sadly, even though the song was on the 1983 album Punch the Clock, it took me until 1985 to actually own the song with the release of Elvis_costello_best_1985The Best of Elvis Costello and the Attractions in 1985. It contained the single I had heard – “Every Day I Write the Book” – as well as enough cuts from his back catalog to make me want to investigate further.

What I found was not a gold mine but a friggin’ platinum mine. Here’s this skinny dork (hello, 115-pound theater nerd 11th-grader) who not only rocks with this weird amalgam of new wave pop and pissed-off punk, but who is obviously literate. His songs, dense with words and metaphor and cross references, were like novellas in themselves.

Since then I’ve been a permanent fan, and pretty much anyone who knows me well is aware of this. Example: When I met up for lunch with a former college girlfriend a few years after graduation, one of her first questions as we made awkward smalltalk was, “Still like Elvis Costello?”

I wanted to say, “Yes, because he A) Didn’t break up with me, and B) Writes great brokenhearted nerd songs that helped me get over you.”

But it was more than that. I admired not only the literary quality of the songs, but the fact that his style was all over the map. One minute he was channeling pop-punk rage, while the other he was crooning a country song or paying homage to the sweet harmonies of Motown.

It was that ability to adapt and cross genres that, in the end, kept me as a fan. And, as it turns out, those same qualities are frequently what I look for in the authors I read and the ones I try to apply to my own writing.

As much as I love science fiction in books, film and TV, it’s the work that is able to admit that it’s other things that really grabs me. For instance, one of my favorite authors is Christopher Moore. If you’ve ever read his work, you know he’s hard to pin down as far as genre. Does he write humorous fantasy? Fantastic humor? Is it horror? Scifi? Occult? Why does he say the F-word so much?

Exactly! You never really know where he’s going – only that along the way you will be taken on an absurd and ultimately sweet adventure. Whether it’s a Pacific Island cargo cult, a pesky Native American trickster spirit or a rumination on what happened during the “lost” years in the life of Jesus, you will laugh and you will encounter elements of the weird, fantastic, science-fictional and – occasionally – the kinky and naughty.

Another example: I just watched the movie Safety Not Guaranteed, about a team of magazine writers pursuing a story about the guy behind a classified ad seeking a time travel companion.

Is it science fiction because there’s the prospect – real or imagined – of time travel? I say yes. But what makes it great is that around that conceit is a deep story of real people trying to recapture lost time or bygone days. The emotions are true and the situations believable, even if, at the center of things, is a concept that goes back to the earliest science fiction novels. The same could be said for films like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Seeking a Friend for the End of the World.

So, how does this all relate back to the funk mentioned in this post’s title?

In his latest collaboration, Elvis Costello has teamed with perhaps The Best Band in the World, The Roots (hailing from my adopted metro area of Philadelphia), working together to fuse The Roots’ particular brand of neo-soul, funk, hip hop and R&B to Costello’s dense storytelling. It’s what makes me love Costello still, repackaged and re-purposed with a funky back beat, a driving horn section and a noir feel that he hasn’t inhabited in years.

There’s no fear as both he and The Roots venture into uncharted waters of creativity, and the result, as it frequently is when fear is cast aside and new frontiers are explored, are extraordinary.

 

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The Monorail – Getting from Here to There the Science Fiction Way

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One of the early criticisms of Immaculate Deception (from a friend and former newspaper colleague who had not yet read the book, incidentally) was that there would be no way that anytime in the near future the United States could agree to build any sort of high-speed rail system, let alone the extensive maglev network I describe in the novel.

Had he known they were present in the narrative, he probably would also have pooh-poohed the presence of the aircar, loosely based on the designs of the Moller Skycar, which is an actual thing.

Granted, when it seems difficult for some in politics and punditry (the real in which my skeptical friend now dwells) to wrap their brains around better, cooler trains. The fact that people in urban areas (particularly along the Northeast Corridor of the U.S., where I live) actually like to use trains and would like to see more of them seems antithetical to the the current widespread belief that investments in forward-thinking infrastructure are silly. Honestly, it’s so much easier to spend all that money on fighting spurious foreign conflicts and letting bridges rot, right? But that’s another blog posting…

Suffice it to say that whether they’ll every really happen in the U.S., high-tech public transportation systems like maglevs (beyond the one at Disney World, of course) are an integral part of science fiction literature and film. There are even a few musical references – my favorite being “IGY” by Steely Dan co-founder Donald Fagan.

And it’s not just a current (pipe?) dream – it’s one that’s apparently been around a very long time. Here’s a great story from the website io9 talking about the monorail concept through history.

All aboard!

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After This Weekend, I’m Renaming Monday “Napday”

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This weekend flew, with the usual basket full of chores and fun topped off with a last-minute, quick turnaround editing assignment from the West Coast that didn’t wrap up until 2 a.m. today. So it’s not that I really need any instruction on this, but it’s good to have some reference material to make sure I’m doing it right.

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For the Love of the Mix Tape

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Some of you might actually be old enough to remember making good, old-fashioned mix tapes (if you do you’ll know the significance of the picture above).

Maybe. But since I have no way to track the demographics of this blog other than by geography, for all I know every one of you could be 8-year-olds sneaking a peek behind your third-grade teacher’s back.

But I’ll assume that if some of you might not be able to remember making a mix tape, you’re at least old enough to be familiar with the concept.

Let me be clear – we’re talking about a mix TAPE here. Not a burned CD. Not an iPod or online playlist.

It’s a tape. That you mix. Yourself.

If you’ve never done this, here’s a short tutorial, compliments of one Mr. Cusack.

Yes, there are indeed rules – rules that you can only learn by doing exactly what John is doing in that clip, which is sitting in front of a stereo system with stacks of records and tapes and CDs and hand selecting the songs you are going to painstakingly record onto a compact cassette of magnetic tape over the course of several hours.

It is an act of artistic devotion. An expression of love. A declaration to the universe and every person that ever rummages through your music collection that this – THIS – is what you believe is music that deserves to be listened to over and over again.

Yes, iPod playlists or other digital media accomplish basically the same thing, Actually, this isn’t the first time I’ve written about musical mixology. In working on Immaculate Deception, I went so far as to create a custom-mixed “soundtrack” for the novel – an album-length collection of music that complemented and/or inspired the narrative. Early readers of the novel got custom burned CDs as little hand-crafted thank-you gifts.

But actual mix tapes were beautiful for one very important reason: whether intended  or not, they became artifacts of specific times, places and emotions.

Want to know what songs you compiled to accompany that last minute road trip to the beach the summer before college? There it is, sitting in a long-overlooked box, in its sturdy plastic case, the ball-point lettering on the song list long faded.

Want to know what songs you put together for that desperate first love? Ha! Too bad! Chances are you can’t (unless you married your first love) because you gave it to her as a token of your deep affection and she either threw it away in disgust over your cheating/boring/politically untenable nature or has treasured it always as a symbol of something dear and true she once had.

How about the mix for that Michael Bey-scale epic kegger your junior year? Ha! That’s lost, too, purloined by a friend or random guest who lifted it from the stereo after everyone else had passed out or retired to a corner or their room for less musical (but more rhythmic) activities. But somewhere that person might still have that tape.

And even if it ends up in a landfill, when the aliens come to excavate a dead Earth thousands of years from now, Flmbrg, commander of the interstellar expedition, might dig it up and consider it on par with the cryptic cave paintings of Neanderthals.

And in essence, that’s what a real mix tape is – something that serves as a musical complement to something in life, whether it’s a love affair, break up, an epic party or just … hell, I don’t know, Monday morning.

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It’s a Massive Science Fiction Convention Convergence Weekend! Behave Yourselves!

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Wow is right. God bless the Power Girls and Supergirls out there hitting the two major science fiction conventions happening this weekend – DragonCon in HOT-Lanta, Ga.; and LoneStarCon, this year’s World Science Fiction Convention in San Antonio, Texas.

Not just because you, as attractive female cosplayers and convention attendees, have upped the legitimacy of these events by your very presence, but also because you’ve had to put up with a lot of crap. That crap stems mainly from two things.

First, for a long, long time, science fiction, comics and horror conventions were the purview of – how can I put this delicately? – inadequately socialized men. And these men were used to a nerd/geek hierarchy that has developed over many years in which he who knew the most won.

Notice the pronoun there – he. Were there women in fandom? Sure. But it was assumed for a very long time that women were lower in this hierarchy because there was no way the could ever know as much about this stuff as guys. They just weren’t as interested, right?

Meanwhile, images of females – particularly in comics – tended to be exaggerated and hypersexualized per the cleavage-abundant Power Girl model.

But here’s the second bit – a funny thing happened. Somewhere along the way, little girls started checking out the comics and the classic science fiction movies and the horror books. And they dug it.

Then, roundabout the last 15 years or so, as you little girls who felt free to bust out of your pink Barbie prisons became grown women, you arrived at conventions in droves. Some in civilian garb. Some dressed in costume. Some dressed as Power Girl. You were smart (as sci-fi and comic fans tend to be) and engaged. You knew the movies, the novels, the TV shows and the comic backstories. And (perhaps most importantly) you threatened the entrenched fan power structure (male) on its own turf while being – gasp! – attractive and smelling nice and sometimes scantily costumed.

What happened next seems like it has been an ongoing problem that’s been only recently addressed. Some of those poorly socialized men forgot that you costumed women were fellow fans and made some inappropriate comments, then got a little handsy, then made more comments.

Not cool.

Seems they forgot that those fellow fans – regardless of the fact that they were in sexy costume – where there to be entertained, not be the entertainment. Granted, as a guy I can certainly appreciate the aesthetics in play, but this was an example of the grownups forgetting their kindergarten lessons: keep your hands to yourselves and if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything.

It was so not cool that author John Scalzi, who attends a lot more of these events than I do, recently mounted a vigorous campaign to get all genre conventions to sign an agreement stating that they wouldn’t tolerate any sort of sexual harassment and would pursue legal action in cases of assault at conventions. Here’s the story of what inspired him to take action.

Personally, I love the idea of female fans, both as a fan myself and as an author. You bring a vibrant dynamic to events and make them something much more than what they once were. And who, really, can complain about more Power Girl?

But don’t lose yourself in the imagery, guys. The woman in that costume has a job, is capable of vigorous independent thought and is not there simply for your amusement, so don’t treat her as such.

Treat her with the respect, the admiration, the acknowledgement of physical boundaries and the sense of camaraderie that you would treat your male friends.

Treat her like a fellow fan.

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Oh, Hey … Did I Mention I Was On the Radio?

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As I mentioned here a few weeks ago, I was scheduled to appear on Destinines: The Voice of Science Fiction, a fantastic weekly radio show out of Stony Brook, N.Y., on Aug 16.

Well, the interview happened and I really can’t stop saying great things about it. Dr. Howard Margolin was a stellar host and had a great selection of thoughtful, insightful and funny questions to ask about Immaculate Deception and the process of creating it. I also had the opportunity to do my first radio reading of an excerpt from the book, so there’s that, too.

It’s under the assumption that the host enjoyed the book that authors are invited on these types of shows, and Howard was very kind in his praise.

I invite you to listen to the entire interview here. If you’re the interactive type, use the comment field to let me know what you thought of the interview and whether you plan to go out and buy ID (assuming, of course, that you haven’t already).

As a follow up, my good friend and Codorus Press colleague Tom Joyce (I order you to follow him on Twitter at @TomJoyceAuthor, as well as on Facebook, and to buy his new novel, The Freak Foundation Operative’s Report) gave me a very kind shout out on his own website talking about how ID harkens back to some of the sci-fi novels of the 1960s, when authors were starting to realize they weren’t bound by many of the conventions of the genre that had been established from its emergence through the 1950s.

Thanks again to Howard from Destinies and for the continued support from Codorus Press and our fine stable of authors.