Lost Transmissions

by Desirina Boskovich

  The Lifehouse narrative focuses on a family of humble turnip farmers, who also live outside the Grid, in the unpolluted wilderness of Scotland. Their teen daughter Mary runs away to go to the concert. This is where narratives diverge; in some iterations, the parents go after her together, in others it’s just Ray. Anyway, Ray and sometimes Sally arrive at the rock festival just in time to find Bobby and the band hitting the One Note . . . that one powerful and mystical sound, fully in tune with the vibrations of the universe, that unites all people and achieves world peace.

  The Who performing in Chicago in 1975. Left to right: Roger Daltrey, John Entwistle, Keith Moon, Pete Townshend. Photo credit: Jim Summaria.

  Perhaps even more complicated than the virtual reality stuff was Townshend’s conception of music as a metaphysical force. The idea was that Bobby, on his path to the One Note, would create songs that uniquely represented individual audience members, connecting directly to their souls. More challengingly, Townshend imagined that in their role as the band, the Who would find a way to do the same thing. It’s one thing to envision the supernatural; it’s quite another thing to aspire to execute it. In 1978, Townshend admitted as much to Trouser Press: “What fell apart with it . . . was that I actually tried to make this fiction that I’d written happen in reality. That’s where I went wrong, actually trying to make a perfect concept.”

  Their attempts to capture the sublime began and ended at the Young Vic, a theater in London where the band booked a months-long residency. The goal was to develop the concept through daily live performances in which the band’s synergy with the audience would organically melt into total harmony. Instead, the confused audience heckled the new material and demanded to hear the hits.

  Under pressure from the rest of the band, Townshend reluctantly gave up the Lifehouse concept. They narrowed the material down to the strongest songs, which became the basis for a non-concept album, Who’s Next—widely regarded as one of the best rock albums of the twentieth century. Those songs include “Baba O’Riley,” “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” and “Behind Blue Eyes,” some of the Who’s biggest and most enduring hits.

  But Pete Townshend remained fascinated by the SFF elements of Lifehouse and never abandoned his vision for it. He drew on it heavily for inspiration on his 1993 solo album Psychoderelict. In 1999, the BBC produced Lifehouse as a radio play. In 2000, Townshend released a six-disc boxed set called Lifehouse Chronicles.

  Lifehouse Chronicles includes original 1971 demos of Lifehouse songs, live recordings, new studio recordings, orchestral arrangements for the radio play, and the radio play itself. Unfortunately for Lifehouse fanatics, the full box set is out of print and hard to find; used copies go for $300 or more online. On the other hand, Lifehouse Elements—a one-disc sampler with eleven tracks—is widely available, and offers a rousing glimpse of the Lifehouse that could have been. *

  JOHN CHU

  Sweet Bye and Bye and Speculative Fiction in Musical Theatre

  Scientists have located, “under the waters of Flushing Bay,” the time capsule buried during the 1939 New York World’s Fair. On the United States’ tricentennial, scientists recover and open the capsule. They find among its contents a letter from a Solomon Bundy to his namesake in the future. He bequeaths his future namesake five shares of stock in the Futurosy Candy Corporation, which is now “the biggest candy cartel there is.” These five shares from 137 years ago gives his namesake a controlling interest in the company and make him one of the wealthiest people in the world.

  The Solomon Bundy of 2076 is a tree surgeon who thinks of himself as being “born too late.” He is completely unprepared to be the president of the Futurosy Candy Corporation. This is, of course, precisely what he has just become.

  This reads like the setup for a science fiction satire. And it is. But it’s also the 1946 musical Sweet Bye and Bye, featuring robots and a partially drowned New York City, not to mention a second act where Solomon Bundy flees to Mars on a space liner. The pedigree of the creative team was also out of this world, with a book by S. J. Perelman, the revered New Yorker writer and humorist, and Al Hirschfeld, the legendary caricaturist, lyrics by Ogden Nash, the popular poet, and music by Vernon Duke, whose collaborators over his career included Ira Gershwin and Johnny Mercer. Sadly, despite all this talent, the original production failed before it reached Broadway. The score was thought lost for decades until it was rediscovered in a warehouse in Secaucus, N.J., in the mid-eighties, but happily, sixty-five years after the show opened, it was made into an audio recording in 2011.

  Setting Sweet Bye and Bye in the future heightens what Tommy Krasker, the producer of the 2011 recording, identifies as the theme of the show: “How do you really find your way in a world of limitless possibilities?” Unfortunately, while this was the show Duke and Nash wrote, what Perelman and Hirschfeld wrote was a farcical revue. The show then had an exceptionally difficult out-of-town tryout. The original leading man couldn’t sing. His replacement couldn’t remember lines. The original leading lady had a nervous breakdown (but was replaced by Dolores Gray). The show closed in Philadelphia, canceling its Broadway run. As brilliant as the score was, the book didn’t work, and fixing it left the score in tatters. There was never a version of the show to present both elements in their full genius. (Although one can listen to the 2011 recording and imagine the wonderful show that could have been.)

  Caricaturist Al Hirschfeld, who contributed to the book for Sweet Bye and Bye. Photo credit: Carl Van Vechten.

  Despite the heavy hitter talent behind Sweet Bye and Bye, it is not a successful example of the subgenre, but there are a surprising number of shows that do work.

  Theater, from its various origins, has always included the fantastic. So works like Kurt Weill’s One Touch of Venus (1943), where a statue becomes the literal goddess Venus, have never been out of bounds. Even in works that are essentially mimetic, like Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel (1945) and Damn Yankees (1955), Billy Bigelow tries to fight his way into heaven in the former, and Joe Boyd makes a pact with the Devil, kicking off the plot of the latter.

  Musicals like Kurt Weill and Alan Jay Lerner’s Love Life (1948), Leonard Bernstein’s 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue (1976), and Heading East (2001) play with time differently than Sweet Bye and Bye. They span multiple centuries while their characters age only years, if at all. This drives home that the struggles in marriage, American democracy, and Asian American immigration recur over the broad sweep of history. Speculative devices function for works meant to be performed in the same way they function for works meant to be read—they heighten those works in a way that would be more difficult, if not impossible, without them. *

  ANNALEE NEWITZ

  X-Ray Spex, Poly Styrene, and Punk Rock Science Fiction

  In the mid-1970s, a young woman from Brixton named Marianne Elliott-Said had a profoundly transformative experience. She went to a Sex Pistols concert and was galvanized by the realization that punk meant expressing herself however she wanted. Shortly thereafter, she saw a fiery pink UFO hovering in the skies over Doncaster. By 1976, she’d taken the name Poly Styrene and formed a punk band called X-Ray Spex, whose singles “Oh Bondage Up Yours,” “Identity,” and “World Turned Day-Glo” rocketed up the charts. Though X-Ray Spex only released one album, Germfree Adolescents (1978), the band had a profound effect on punk rock, feminist fashion, and science fiction.

  Proudly calling herself “artificial” and “a poseur,” Poly sang about a future of genetically-engineered humans, consumer droids, environmental apocalypse, and mind-blowing explorations of outer space. Wearing retro fashion mixed with gilded junk, she belted out songs that combined elements of ska, punk rock, and new wave synth weirdness. In 1977, she told an Australian TV interviewer that her trippy sound and look weren’t about LSD, but futuristic fantasy: “I wanted to write something using all kinds of plastic words and artificial things and sort of make a fantasy around it. It’s about the modern world.”

  Germfree Adolescen
ts should be read in the tradition of Samuel Delany, Octavia Butler, and Joanna Russ, with some sarcastic notes of Philip K. Dick thrown in for good measure. In the song “Genetic Engineering,” she gives us a future ruled by biologists, where a “worker clone” is a “subordinated slave” ruled by “expertise proficiency.” But in the song “Plastic Bag,” she’s become a clone herself, calling her mind a “plastic bag that corresponds to all those ads.”

  Poly’s lyrics were often absurdist and surreal, almost as if she were channeling Delany’s Dhalgren. But there was also no mistaking her rage. Like Russ and Butler, whose characters are often treated like aliens and monsters by the men around them, Poly wanted the world to know what it felt like to be a mixed-race woman in a scene dominated by white men.

  Her song “Identity” tackles this head-on, asking, “Do you see yourself on the TV screen . . . When you see yourself does it make you scream?” Here she’s grappling with the problem of representation in the media. Like many punk and ska acts inspired by her, from the Specials to Bikini Kill, Poly loved to dress up in outfits that were arresting precisely because they defied gender norms. In the song “Highly Inflammable,” she trills about a person who is both man and woman, who “wants to join the hermaphrodite clan.”

  X-Ray Spex in concert, September 14, 1991. Photo credit: Ian Dickson / Shutterstock.

  Over a decade later, intersectional and queer feminists would explore this issue, highlighting how women of color in mass media are either demonized or rendered invisible. In her lyrics, Poly calls identity a “crisis you can’t see.”

  Early in her career, Poly explained that her obsession with artificiality came from women’s punk fashion, recalling that she started writing “Oh Bondage Up Yours” after a Sex Pistols show where she saw “two girls handcuffed together.” Poly liked the way they were “drawing attention to the fact that they were in bondage as opposed to pretending they weren’t.” For Poly, bondage wasn’t just a matter of identity. It was about a future ruled by consumerism. “Oh Bondage Up Yours” describes a fake consumerist utopia with wordplay: “Chain-store, chain-smoke . . . chain-gang, chain-mail!” She throws off her bondage by immersing herself in it completely. “I consume you all!” she screams in the chorus.

  The science fiction of X-Ray Spex was ahead of its time. Poly was an intersectional feminist in an era when that concept had no name. And she was describing a cyberpunk future long before cyberpunk became popular. Her music gave voice to a generation for whom authenticity was artificiality, and futurism felt like a dead end.

  Though she struggled with depression that often kept her out of the limelight, Poly continued writing genre-inspired songs until the end of her life. Her final album, Generation Indigo, was released in 2011 a month before she died at fifty-four of metastatic breast cancer. Like all of her work, it was eclectic; there’s an electroclash satire of MySpace culture called “Virtual Boyfriend,” and a dreamy post-punk song called “Ghoulish” about loving creatures who seem monstrous but are actually just nice guys.

  In the video for “Ghoulish,” we’re given a final glimpse of the alternate future world that Poly made real for so many young people who never saw themselves on TV. We watch a surreal version of American Idol unfolding, as mixed-race kids and queers dance for judges who offer bizarro commentary. Finally, a Michael Jackson impersonator lights up the stage with amazing moves and magical glitter powers, the judges cheer, and we have our new idol. The room fills with dancers, many of them mixed-race and androgynous, and we zoom in on the winner. He looks up from beneath his white fedora . . . and we realize this Michael Jackson clone has been female all along. She turns to the camera, her face alight with mirth, and lip syncs to Poly Styrene singing, “I’m not so foolish to be scared.”

  This moment sums up what Poly Styrene has left in her wake. It’s a narrative fusion of sharp social satire and playfulness that keeps the world’s horrors at bay. But it’s also a promise. Maybe one day, in a world without slave clones, we’ll see ourselves on the mobile screens and it won’t make us want to scream. *

  Weezer’s Songs from the Black Hole

  Weezer’s first album, Weezer (aka The Blue Album), went triple platinum when it was released in 1994, and launched the band to sudden and stratospheric success. Lead singer Rivers Cuomo felt that he, too, had been launched into outer space . . . and for the band’s sophomore effort, they set out to make a concept album exploring the experience. As Ryan Bassil put it in Noisey, “Blue Album had been released to critical acclaim and Rivers Cuomo, a maverick in despondency, had mixed feelings about its success.”

  Weezer released their eleventh album in October of 2017. The band’s creative inspiration for Pacific Daydream is “reveries from a beach at the end of the world,” and includes the hit “Feels Like Summer.”

  The album would have been a musical space opera, titled Songs from the Black Hole. Cuomo envisioned Songs from the Black Hole in the tradition of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, as one coherent, flowing musical narrative. The band wrote the songs and shared two track lists, but the album’s concept was eventually rejected, and Songs from the Black Hole was never officially released. Many of its songs were eventually recorded and released in other forms. With the track lists and lyrics floating around on the Internet, plus some eventual versions of the songs, it’s possible to piece together a vision of what might have been. But the full album in its bombastic and space-operatic glory was never truly realized, to the lasting disappointment of fans.

  The album’s story is reminiscent of the best YA SF drama, a “space opera” that’s definitely heavier on the opera than it is on the space. A group of the top young graduates from the Star Corps academy are on a mission in space, which is to stop a planet called Nomis from getting “swallowed by its sun” . . . but their main focus seems to be on who’s boinking whom. (And yes, “boink” is a direct quote.) “Basically, the concept was bat-shit crazy ridiculous,” concludes Vice.

  The lead character is Jonas, the moody, brooding ship’s captain, jaded and depressed by the whole space travel experience, and caught in a love triangle between two shipmates, Laurel and Maria, an allegorical representation of Cuomo’s own love troubles at the time. Meanwhile, Jonas’s buds Wuan and Dondo—stand-ins for his bandmates—are eager and enthusiastic about the trip to space. The ship, Betsy II, is named after Weezer’s tour bus, which they called Betsy.

  Maria is a friend with benefits who wants something more, while Jonas keeps jerking her around. His friends talk shit about her. Dondo calls her a “cheap ho,” and Jonas sets out to comfort her, telling her he hates Dondo . . . who “acts like he knows he’s got a big dick.” (Keep this in mind; it will be important later.) The long middle of the narrative is mostly Jonas angsting about various things, like how annoying it is that all his fans constantly want to have sex with him, and how getting what you want is never as amazing as you think it will be.

  They finally prepare to land, to the great excitement of Wuan and Dondo and the typical pessimism of Jonas, who demands to know why they even bothered to yank him out of his pod. (Earlier in the album, Maria begs him to come to her pod, and they discuss the types of leisure activities they could enjoy within its privacy. Perhaps the fact that Jonas is now alone in his signifies some trouble in paradise.)

  Then . . . SPOILER ALERT! . . . Maria gives birth to Jonas’s kid, a baby girl. Awestruck and emotional to meet his offspring, Jonas is finally ready to commit. “She’s Had a Girl” is a sweet, haunting song that might even make an OK lullaby. Jonas’s backup girl Laurel dumps him, despite the fact that she still loves him; this song, “I Just Threw Out the Love of My Dreams” is one of the most compelling songs from the album, a catchy and affecting number sung by Rachel Haden.

  But alas, Jonas should have put a ring on it, for his return to Maria reveals an unsettling discovery . . . a used condom. An extra-large used condom. Who could have left behind such an artifact? Well, none other than Dondo, his shipmate with the big dick
.

  The final song, titled “Longtime Sunshine,” sees Jonas singing wistfully of purer and simpler times. He elects to stay behind on Nomis, perhaps to be devoured by the sun, which would explain the title. With all the relationship drama going on, it’s not exactly clear what happened regarding the mission or the fate of the sun-doomed planet. “Longtime Sunshine” is a wistful and melancholy song that also pulses with energy and a catchy, driving beat.

  As a work of science fiction, the story leaves a lot to be desired. But as music—as a raw, unfiltered taste of Weezer during their most inspired period—it’s exhilarating and satisfying. It would be fantastic to hear the thing in its entirety, produced with full theatrics (heavy on the synthesizers). Along with the standout songs already mentioned, there’s the opening number “Blast Off!,” which Jason Crock describes as “a fleeting rush of distortion-driven joy.” Writing for Noisey (Vice), Ryan Bassil proclaimed the album “better than almost everything they’ve released in the last fifteen years.”

  But it was not to be. Cuomo recorded some demos for the album during Christmas of 1994, using synthesizers he’d found at a pawnshop in Connecticut. The band continued to work on the album throughout the early months of 1995, but personal issues began to get in the way. In March, Cuomo underwent difficult and extensive surgery on his leg, followed by painful physical therapy. At the end of 1995, he enrolled at Harvard to study music. He found his time there lonely and isolating. He continued to suffer from chronic pain.