Jonathan Coulton's New Dystopian Album Becomes a Graphic Novel (jonathancoulton.com) 57
An anonymous reader quotes NPR's report on one of Slashdot's long-time favorite musicians: In April, musician Jonathan Coulton released Solid State, a sci-fi concept album that represented a significant departure -- both from Coulton's wry, bright, tuneful back catalog and from any conventional understanding of what a sci-fi concept album sounds like... On first listen, with its shout-outs to futurist Ray Kurzweil, comment-section trolls, thinkpiece-gluts, and hack memes, Solid State seems a caustic critique of the internet -- which would be, as Coulton notes, "a little-off brand for me." Spend a bit more time with it, however, and its muted, melancholy songs reveal their true target: the toxic culture of glibness and hot takes that's leaching from the internet into every aspect of our lives.
The album features multiple perspectives and timelines, but its soundscape is allusive and impressionistic, resisting strict narrative. For that, Coulton turned to writer Matt Fraction and artist Albert Monteys, who with Coulton's input have taken some of the album's words, images and thematic preoccupations and crafted a graphic novel set largely in a future that will seem familiar to any reader of science fiction: a corporate-owned dystopia where humans have become dutiful, unthinking, unfeeling worker bees attending to menial tasks amid a culture engineered to keep them unthinking and unfeeling...These three creators believe that the roots of this dystopic future are all around us, but we're collectively choosing to ignore them in precisely the same way we blithely click past online Terms and Conditions agreements without bothering to read them.
The official music video for one of the songs takes the form of a text adventure.
The album features multiple perspectives and timelines, but its soundscape is allusive and impressionistic, resisting strict narrative. For that, Coulton turned to writer Matt Fraction and artist Albert Monteys, who with Coulton's input have taken some of the album's words, images and thematic preoccupations and crafted a graphic novel set largely in a future that will seem familiar to any reader of science fiction: a corporate-owned dystopia where humans have become dutiful, unthinking, unfeeling worker bees attending to menial tasks amid a culture engineered to keep them unthinking and unfeeling...These three creators believe that the roots of this dystopic future are all around us, but we're collectively choosing to ignore them in precisely the same way we blithely click past online Terms and Conditions agreements without bothering to read them.
The official music video for one of the songs takes the form of a text adventure.
Oh the irony (Score:2, Troll)
What's truly dystopian is a future (which largely is already here) where people don't read novels but need them pre-digested as picture books.
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Need their music made into best selling picturebooks because they are too lazy to listen or *READ* stories :)
The dumbing down of music is also well underway. Music consists of melody, harmony and rhythm, but melody and harmony require a slight amount of attachment, and are on the way out. Harmony is largely gone already; single notes are complex enough.
There are also signs that the already short ~4 minute "radio edit" for songs is becoming too long. Some modern stations are cutting to 3 or less - presumably attention span is not what it was.
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What does song length have to do with quality? A 25 minute rap song will still be total shit, because song length is independent of quality. Even just 30 seconds of some of the best classical music is more expressive than any rap song of any length could ever be.
Length doesn't matter for crap, but for many great works of music (old or modern), you need the time to build up, transform, and paint the bigger picture. There are plenty of great music that isn't played on the radio because it doesn't fit. NPR and BBC seem to only want to play longer pieces of classical music, nothing else, which is a shame.
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Re: Or worse yet... (Score:1)
I think the complaint isn't that "dumbed down" music exists, it's that it's become incredibly difficult to find anything else via radio.
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Hosea https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
And just about anything by Harry Calligan, aka Harry101UK. He also has Portal comedy and fangames footage.
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Jonathan Coulter did the music on the three main portal games,
Portal and Portal 2 are certainly famous games, but not for the music. if you ask random people who played the games what the music was like, I think you'll get a lot of "um" and "er" replies, unless they remember the turrets and GLaDOS "singing". And the main body of music wasn't by Coulton either.
For some good video game scores, try Civilization IV [youtube.com], Homeworld [youtube.com] or Red Dead Redemption [youtube.com].
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If you utter the words "This was a triumph!", anyone who has finished the game will remember the song about making science, even if they don't remember their writer's name.
If you don't ask about "the music" in abstract but about "the songs", it's likely that anyone (who finished the game) will remember it, because it makes a very strong emotional impact.
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If you utter the words "This was a triumph!", anyone who has finished the game will remember the song about making science, even if they don't remember their writer's name.
I finished both, and all I remember was some children's music with vocoder-mixed turret/GLaDOS voices meant as comical relief. If that passes as great music now, we're doomed.
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You, sir, should return your geek card. The lyrics of the song were perfectly crafted to the narrative you had just experienced, and it contributed to build the best written antagonist of the decade even after the story had finished.
Lyrics don't define the music that hosts it. Whether you sing "Ein Vogelfaenger bin ich ja" or "tadum ta dumdum dum dum dum" only changes the performance, not Mozart's music.
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The dumbing down of music is also well underway.
That was already successfully happening in the 90ties.
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Re: Oh the irony (Score:1)
By billionaires with political power, no less.
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What's even more dystopian than that is a world where Ray Kurzweil is taken seriously.
Or where this album is taken seriously. Yuck!
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Or spoiler filled monetized youtube review videos.
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I see, so, your preference for picture-free books makes you arrogant and derisive of others, then?
I have nothing against pictures. But not as a replacement for descriptive language. Pictures are snapshots with big gaps between them, and have to be caricatures if they are to convey emotions, or they will be lost. Subtlety is almost impossible to convey, or it will be missed.
But if you transform a 400 page novel into an 800 page illustrated novel, I see no problem with it. But if it becomes a 60 page comic book, well, a lot will get lost.
As for arrogance and derision, those are generally seen as bad
Seems like a decent album so far (Score:3)
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There's a youtube video out there that has the full album if you care to listen to the whole thing. So far it's a pretty interesting blend, that's really hard to put a label on. One song reminded me of The Postal Service and another sounded a little like something Fleetwood Mac could have done. I'll have to finish the whole thing, but so far it's something I'd consider purchasing.
Fleetwood Mac!?!? I'm glad I listened on Youtube and didn't pay money for it. It sounds more like Ben Folds forgot what music sounded like, hired Vampire Weekend minus the "talent" and with worse instruments, after scanning Slashdot for buzzwords. I don't mean any part of that as a compliment. I hate being the hater, but I expected an NPR favorite would do better. Wow, this is so lame and cliched yet equally bad instrumentally that I can't even wrap my mind around it or adequately explain how much I hate it
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Information without relevance has negative value.
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JoCo! (Score:2)
Thanks for the ad for the new album. Totally didn't realize he had something new.
That being said, that's one sad music video.
Looks like an advertisement, but is it good? (Score:2)
It's nice, I guess, to see people talk of what they are passionate about and want to share with others. I'll say good things about music, books, movies, and such I like with anyone that asks, and a few that don't ask.
This Jonathan Coulton music and book sounds like something I might want to try but unless I hear it's good from someone that does not financially gain from the sale I'll have my doubts.
So, is it any good?
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I'm not sure about this album, but his live album 'Best. Concert. Ever.' is fantastic. Love every song. Just have to cut out the last song from the playlist when my kids are listening to it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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Forgot to mention: The music starts at 5:40 on the YouTube video.
comic books (Score:1)
I don't get it (Score:4, Informative)
How can so many people with reasonably low Slashdot UIDs apparently not know who Jonathan Coulton is? Even setting aside his cred as a geeky tech-loving musician - stories about him have been featured on this site for years.
Heck, he even recut "Code Monkey" and sent it to CmdrTaco [slashdot.org] in celebration of Slashdot's 15th anniversary.
Dystopian *future*? (Score:1)