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Music

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.
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Jonathan Coulton's New Dystopian Album Becomes a Graphic Novel

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  • by arth1 ( 260657 )

    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.

    • What's even more dystopian than that is a world where Ray Kurzweil is taken seriously.
    • Or spoiler filled monetized youtube review videos.

  • by alvinrod ( 889928 ) on Sunday August 20, 2017 @12:01PM (#55052813)
    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.
    • 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

  • 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.

  • 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?

  • by Anonymous Coward
    Whats the difference between comic books and graphic novels? Number of pages? Existence of a plot?
  • I don't get it (Score:4, Informative)

    by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Sunday August 20, 2017 @06:15PM (#55054023)

    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.

  • "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..." I don't think that's future. It's the present.

"The pathology is to want control, not that you ever get it, because of course you never do." -- Gregory Bateson

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