Lost Transmissions

by Desirina Boskovich

  These difficult experiences pushed Cuomo’s creative interests in a different direction. Songs from the Black Hole was always kind of a goofy, tongue-in-cheek concept, good-naturedly accepting of its own ridiculousness. The whimsical tone no longer worked for him. Instead, he went in a darker, more confessional direction. The result was Weezer’s actual second album, Pinkerton. Cuomo called it “an exploration of my ‘dark side’—all the parts of myself that I was either afraid or embarrassed to think about before.”

  Pinkerton was not treated kindly by critics, who’d expected something better, based on the success of the Blue Album—or at least something different. Cuomo himself eventually joined in on panning it, calling it a “hideous record” and a “hugely painful mistake.” He regretted the intensely personal nature of the album, telling Entertainment Weekly in 2001 that the experience was like “getting really drunk at a party and spilling your guts in front of everyone and feeling incredibly great and cathartic about it, and then waking up the next morning and realizing what a complete fool you made of yourself.”

  Those scars took some time to heal, but they did. Eventually, Cuomo made his peace with the album. A retrospective look reveals its unmistakable impact on the world of rock ’n’ roll. Still, it’s tempting to imagine what might have been, and what direction a completed Songs from the Black Hole might have taken the band.

  A few of the songs from SFTBH’s track list made it onto Pinkerton: “Tired of Sex,” “Getchoo,” and “No Other One.” These songs were written before the Black Hole concept came to be, so it was easy to transition them. Indeed, they make more sense on a confessional album like Pinkerton than they did as the diary of an angst-ridden and oversexed astronaut.

  Two more songs from Black Hole were later released as Pinkerton B sides: “I Just Threw Out the Love of My Dreams” and “Devotion.” Five more songs made it into Alone: The Home Recordings of Rivers Cuomo, a demo compilation. Three more tracks made it onto Alone II, and six onto Alone III. Alternate versions recorded at shows also circulate on the Internet and among fans. With all this material to choose from, playlists approximating the imagined album can be found easily. So cue one up . . . and imagine. *

  Speculative Music of the New Millennium

  The dawn of the new millennium heralded a particularly rich moment for SFF-inspired music, and the late nineties and early oughts brought us several lasting masterpieces of the genre. Radiohead delivered the heavy hitters: OK Computer (1997) and Kid A (2000). The Flaming Lips contributed the unforgettable Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots (2002). And there were plenty of others: OutKast’s ATLiens (1996), Air’s Moon Safari (1998), Daft Punk’s Discovery (2001), Goldfrapp’s Black Cherry (2003), and The Mars Volta’s De-Loused in the Comatorium (2003).

  Goldfrapp live at the annual Summer Series at Somerset House in 2017. Photo credit: Sonic PR/Daniel Roberts.

  OK Computer regularly makes it onto lists of greatest albums of all time, so if you haven’t listened to it yet, you probably never will. Still, if you haven’t, you should. It’s a masterpiece that perfectly blends its many disparate influences into something altogether new. The album utterly encapsulates a mood that pervaded science-fiction storytelling in the late nineties: trepidation about the unknown future blended with a weary ennui at the isolation and inauthenticity of an artificial present. (Or as Newsweek puts it: “The terrifying and dehumanizing malaise of modern life and consumerist culture. Exhibit A: Every song on the album.”)

  Also, one the album’s best-known songs is titled “Paranoid Android,” inspired by Marvin the depressed robot in Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Marvin also suffers from the galaxy’s most severe case of ennui, spouting grim lines such as “Here I am, brain the size of a planet, and they tell me to take you up to the bridge. Call that job satisfaction? Cos I don’t.” Meanwhile, on the track “Subterranean Homesick Alien,” “aliens hover making home movies for the folks back home,” and like the overlooked women in James Tiptree Jr.’s classic story “The Women Men Don’t See,” the song’s narrator only wants the aliens to take him with them.

  While not exactly a concept album per se, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots delivers a coherent narrative across several songs, more in the tradition of prog rock’s grand epics. Obviously, the heroine of this story is Yoshimi, a black belt and all-around badass, who along with an army of similarly badass girl warriors, is called to keep “the city” safe from the scourge of psychedelic robots with an evil plan for world domination. Her counterpoint is unit 3000-21, the robot who discovers in itself the seeds of humanity, “feeling a synthetic kind of love . . . one more robot learns to be something more than a machine.” Rolling Stone calls the Flaming Lips’ tenth album “a delightful iridescent bomb of buoyant electronics, imaginary Japanese anime and plaintive vocal surrender.”

  After Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik put OutKast on the map as a majorly talented rap duo to watch, ATLiens solidified that reputation with its delightfully funky and futuristic hip-hop. The influence of George Clinton and the Parliament/Funkadelic collective is evident. ATLiens speaks to the duo’s feelings of alienation, and weaves a narrative of personal marginalization together with imagery from science fiction and folklore that expands the story into something much larger. The lyrics are both smart and catchy, and are underlined with addictive beats and spaced out sci-fi sound effects.

  Air’s Moon Safari, Daft Punk’s Discovery, and Goldfrapp’s Black Cherry each offer a unique take on synth-pop electronica, with abstract, minimal lyrics and lengthy instrumental interludes. The science-fiction appeal of these albums is primarily in their enchanting space-pop sound. Moon Safari, for instance, includes the track “Kelly Watch the Stars,” whose lyrics consist of the one line “Kelly watch the stars” . . . repeated seventeen times. Slant Magazine writes of the album, “At the same time that it’s space-y and breathless, it’s also organic and downbeat; at the same time that it’s nostalgic, it’s also clearly planted in the future.” This is the music that plays in the passenger lobby of the space yacht while you wait for the hyperdrive to kick in.

  The iconic cover art for Air’s debut album, Moon Safari, first released in 1998, with a tenth anniversary re-release from Virgin Records. Rolling Stone included it in a list of the best albums of the 1990s.

  Like Air, Daft Punk is a French electronica duo. Discovery is a more uptempo album, with a pulsing dance beat and lyrics that are almost hypnotically repetitive. (This album includes the world-conquering workout anthem “Harder Better Faster Stronger.”) Treble Zine calls it “a record that truly sounds like an outer-space version of an ’80s rock band.” Discovery is primarily instrumental and doesn’t listen like a concept album, but in a fairly unprecedented move, the duo turned it into one—by releasing an animated movie alongside it that wasn’t widely seen.

  Interstella 5555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem is a Japanese-French anime that tells a story solely through its visuals, using the entirety of Discovery as its soundtrack. Interstella 5555 is about a blue-skinned alien techno band kidnapped by evil earthling music executives (and followed by space pilot Shep, who is in love with bass player Stella). The band’s memories are reprogrammed and they are forced to perform as the Crescendolls (see Discovery, track five). Shep intervenes, and slowly the band overcomes their amnesia to piece together what happened and how they ended up here, so they can go back home. It’s a pretty hallucinatory ride, but critics hailed the trippy film as a success, comparing its kaleidoscopic pleasures favorably to Disney’s Fantasia. The film was created in a collaboration between Daft Punk, Leiji Matsumoto, Cédric Hervet, and Toei Animation, and reportedly cost $4 million to make.

  De-Loused in the Comatorium (2003), the debut studio album from the Mars Volta, with album cover art by Storm Thorgerson. This weird concept album follows the metaphysical journey of Cerpin Taxt. From the accompanying storybook: “Faith vanishings, hence the litter passing by muttering underbreath, and waterlike, I thought someone mi
ght still be able to spot me . . . testator nomadic. Trailing a tail of trick mirrors, hyperventilating as I did past my own temple.”

  Goldfrapp’s Black Cherry is slinky, seductive, and charged with sexual tension. It’s the perfect album to accompany dark and erotic fairy tales for adults in the vein of Angela Carter, Tanith Lee, Helen Oyeyemi, or Catherynne M. Valente. Writing for Bustle on Alison Goldfrapp’s “fantasist’s dream” wardrobe, Freyia Lilian Porteous describes Goldfrapp’s music as “sparkling with something akin to both fairy dust and the sheen of a futuristic spaceship.” Perhaps not just a perfect accompaniment to Tanith Lee’s fairy tales, but her equally luscious and uniquely feminine science fiction stories, such as The Silver Metal Lover, Electric Forest, and Don’t Bite the Sun.

  At The Drive-In live in concert in 1999 at 3B in Bellingham, Washington. Left: Omar Rodriguez-Lopez. Right: Cedric Bixler-Zavala on vocals. Photo credit: Jacob Covey.

  The Mars Volta’s debut full-length studio album, De-Loused in the Comatorium, is about as far as you can get from Goldfrapp’s chilled out pop . . . but prog rock has its virtues too, as well as a storied legacy in the halls of SFF.

  The Mars Volta formed in 2001 from the same duo who previously performed as successful band At The Drive-In: Omar Rodriguez-Lopez and Cedric Bixler-Zavala. This voluntary reinvention speaks to the innovative impulses that motivated the duo’s creativity—a desire to tread new territory. With De-Loused in the Comatorium they delivered that, and the album was both a critical and a commercial success. It pays tribute to their close friend Julio Venegas, an artist whose troubled life ended in suicide—after recovering from a drug overdose that left him in a lengthy coma. This tragic story is recreated in De-Loused as the fictional story of Cerpin Taxt, whose mind undertakes a series of nightmarish voyages as his body remains comatose following an overdose on morphine and rat poison.

  Bixler-Zavala and Rodriguez-Lopez also wrote a storybook to be released alongside the album. This story weaves a more complex fictional narrative to accompany each song’s lyrics, detailing the people and places that Taxt encounters on his otherworldly journey. Much of this story, like the album’s lyrics, is a surreal and Burroughs-esque stream of consciousness whose chaotic litany of words evokes a vision through accretion rather than explanation. *

  MARK OSHIRO

  The Timeless Brilliance of Deltron 3030

  It’s been nearly two decades since the world was given the debut record from Deltron 3030—the hip-hop supergroup comprised of Del the Funky Homosapien, Dan the Automator, and Kid Koala—and yet Deltron 3030 remains relevant, prescient, and exciting. It came out while I was in high school, right at a time where I was thirsting for more—for art that addressed the oppressive structures that dictated the difficulties in my life. For music that made me feel less alone. For the escapism of densely-constructed worlds. Del’s lyrical complexity and vocal uniqueness—which I’d fallen in love with on his fourth album, Both Sides of the Brain—was present here. He’s got a voice that is instantly recognizable, and even to this day, no one sounds like Del. But this voice was paired with a sweeping, operatic story set in the year 3030, where hip-hop is the last hope in a society ruined by a set of oppressive oligarchs.

  I devoured it. Here was a world where I could easily imagine myself as the hero, even though I can’t rhyme to save my life. Musically, both Dan the Automator and Kid Koala provided a soundtrack that managed to straddle the line between soulful throwbacks and futuristic intensity. Nothing in hip-hop sounded like this record!

  Truly, the brilliance of Deltron 3030 was multifaceted. The complex future that’s spread over the album felt living, real, and frightening. Half the planet is an unlivable desert, populated by brain-eating cannibals. And the world that is tenable is controlled by a vicious military force, which is where the album’s hero, Deltron Zero, rises to the occasion. While referencing The Matrix, Ghost in the Shell, Metropolis, and other popular science fiction narratives, Del’s rhythmic lyrics portray the struggle between independence and fascism, violence and hope, self-determination and despair. And practically all of it works as a scathing indictment of the problems and issues that Del and his contemporaries were dealing with back in 1999 and 2000.

  Deltron3030’s Del the Funky Homosapien.

  Photo credit: Elliothtz.

  I don’t know if it’s sad that, eighteen years later, the album is just as politically and socially familiar. It seems fitting, though, because Deltron 3030 is cyclical in nature. When “Memory Loss” hits and Deltron Zero loses his memory upon his return to Earth, we’re shown how the forces that hurt us repeat over and over, in large part because humans are so ignorant to the repetitive nature of history. Let Deltron 3030 be your lesson then. Let the sultry grooves and beats take you over as you immerse yourself in the intoxicating and invigorating experience of one MC’s fight against a dystopian world. It’s an album that rewards multiple listens, and it remains one of the more underrated albums in the genre—well, both the genres of hip-hop and science fiction. Get into it. *

  The Science-Fiction Soundscapes of Porcupine Tree

  Composer, singer, and guitarist Steven Wilson (b. 1967) founded Porcupine Tree in the 1980s as a solo project, but as the music found its footing as postmodern psychedelic prog rock, Porcupine Tree evolved into a genuine band. Their music is often experimental and ambitious, changing significantly from album to album. Their discography is incredibly varied, making them one of the era’s most difficult musical acts to classify. Writing for Rolling Stone, David Fricke called their music “an aggressively modern merger of Rush’s arena art rock, U.K. prog rock classicism—especially Pink Floyd’s eulogies to madness and King Crimson’s angular majesty—and the postgrunge vengeance of Tool.”

  Despite the unpredictability of each new album from this innovative group, one clear uniting element is a preoccupation with outer space and the otherworldly, a thread running though their discography to date. These themes are perhaps most explicit on their first album, On The Sunday of Life (1991), when the band was still finding its footing, with over-the-top and occasionally parodic lyrics rife with lush and purple prose. The album includes acid-trip-ready tracks such as “Jupiter Island,” which evokes “magenta forests on a crimson sea, the electric clouds are as vivid as can be,” and “It Will Rain For A Million Years” (“I locked myself inside the capsule and watched the planet slowly turning blue . . .”). Perhaps the most over-the-top of all is the track “Space Transmission,” which purports to convey a message from someone who has been trapped on Planet Earth in darkness ever since the sun exploded fourteen years ago.

  Porcupine Tree’s early albums also wear their Pink Floyd influence on their sleeves, paying homage to their prog rock progenitor through similar expansive soundscapes and psychedelic riffs. The SF Encyclopedia draws this comparison specifically with regard to The Sky Moves Sideways (1995), which “details a materially disintegrating world, but this apocalypse is so dreamily hallucinogenic as wholly to avoid the usual outré stylings of this manner of end-of-the-world music.”

  Lightbulb Sun (2000) includes the fantastic track “Last Chance to Evacuate Planet Earth Before It Is Recycled,” which samples a recorded speech by the leader of the suicidal cult Heaven’s Gate, whose members believed themselves to be representatives of another dimension. Explaining the cult’s impending departure, its leader states, “Let me say that our mission here at this time is about to come to a close . . . We came from distant space . . . We are about to return from whence we came.”

  Steven Wilson live on the To The Bone tour. Photo credit: Hajo Mueller.

  Voyage 34: The Complete Trip (2000) also samples an existing recording, while continuing to riff on the concepts of inner and outer space. The found audio that serves as the backbone of this concept album reports on a young man’s bad acid trip in the 1960s. “It was an anti-LSD propaganda album,” Wilson said to Rolling Stone, “and it was perfect to form a narrative around which I could form this long, hypnotic, tri
ppy piece of music.” Though primarily instrumental, the album nevertheless transports its listener into psychedelic planes.

  Perhaps the best way to enjoy Porcupine Tree’s early, SFF-adjacent and influenced work is through their retrospective compilation album Stars Die, which collects some of the band’s best work from 1991—when it was really just Steven Wilson and a synthesizer—to 1997. It includes the fantastic tracks “And The Swallows Dance Above the Sun,” “Synesthesia,” “Stars Die,” “The Sky Moves Sideways,” “Fuse the Sky,” and “Dark Matter.” It’s the perfect soundtrack for an especially dark night watching the especially bright stars, dreaming of all the worlds that have long since died, even as on our own distant planet we continue to glimpse their long-lost light. *

  LASHAWN M. WANAK

  Metropolis Meets Afrofuturism:

  The Genius of Janelle Monáe

  A dark alley behind an apartment complex in Neon Valley Street. Two figures running hand in hand, one human, the other android. The buzz of chainsaws and the crackle of electro-daggers. This evocative image begins the tale of Cindi Mayweather, spun in lyrical form by Janelle Monáe: songstress, poet, dreamer, prophet, feminist, Afrofuturist.

  To listen to Janelle Monáe is to immerse oneself into an audio-cinematic experience. From her debut EP Metropolis to her current album Dirty Computer, Monáe’s songs sweep through genres with the ease of donning clothes: crooned ballads, punk rock screamfests, bubblegum pop, swelling orchestral arias, blistering rap. Through it all, science fiction wends like a pulsing heartbeat. Fritz Lang’s Metropolis influences the creation of Neon Valley Street, with Monáe adopting its titular poster image for her album cover of ArchAndroid. There are references to electric sheep, time travel, and a prophecy about a cyborg messiah who will unite the whole world.