Formidable
May 31st, 2013
Vuijlsteke is right. This is a brilliant song. It’s a bit of a cliche, but it reminds me of Jacques Brel, the anguish Stromae puts in his voice.
Category: Music
Some reasons why science fiction needs more diversity
May 14th, 2013
Science fiction and fantasy can be incredibly whitebread at times, though it is slowly getting better. One of the things that having more writers of more diverse backgrounds brings to the genre is new and interesting perspectives, as the two examples below make clear.
First, in a review for the LA Review of Books Nalo Hopkinson made the point that the Caribbean makes a good hjumping off point for a colonional or post-colonial sf setting that would be more interesting than the usual American frontier nonsense:
To my delight, in Lord’s afterword, she claims the Caribbean as the post-colonialist convergence of cultures that it is, pointing out that it is thereby an apt jumping-off place for speculative extrapolation. Sing it, sister. It’s all too common for the rest of the world to assume that the Caribbean is a bucolic vacation playground of villages and beaches, incapable of initiating any real scientific or technological progress.
Then I also found an old post of Aaron Hawkins (RIP), who quoted Mark Dery on why science fiction is so relevant to African Americans:
African Americans, in a very real sense, are the descendants of alien abductees; they inhabit a sci-fi nightmare in which unseen but no less impassable force fields of intolerance frustrate their movements; official histories undo what has been done; and technology is too often brought to bear on black bodies (branding, forced sterilization, the Tuskegee experiment, and tasers come readily to mind).
No real conclusions here, just some things that made me think.
Categories: Music, science fiction, video
You can’t help but get into the groove of this one
May 11th, 2013
Eric Burdon and War on Beat Club in 1970 is some of the funkiest laid down groove you’ll ever hear, the perfect mix of funk and psychedelic rock. It’s Eric Burdon’s 72nd birthday today so why not celebrate it this way?
She said I’d need a blaster and I’d need a freezer gun
April 13th, 2013
Nicked from James. A folk song written in 1952 by Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger, parodying Golden Age science fiction, kept alive in filk, then reworked as a straight forward folk song by what’s basically a folk supergroup.
I hadn’t heard it before, even though James had linked to it two years ago, but it’s a great song, sung by Eliza Carthy with just the right kind of wistful melancholy undertone to it.
If you want to know where all the clips are from, the creator put a list on their Livejournal.
Categories: Music, science fiction, video
Come on down to the Mothership
January 29th, 2013
The Atlantic discovers Black musicians can be geeky too:
But what such cutesy nicknames obscure is that R&B music—and black American culture more widely—has embraced fantasy, sci-fi, or other “nerdy” subcultural tropes more often than many people realize. From the space-travel fantasias of Sun Ra and George Clinton in the ’70s to the Wu-Tang Clan’s Shaolin kung-fu obsession in the ’90s to the present day—when 2012′s most widely acclaimed album, R&B singer Frank Ocean’s Channel Orange, includes a nine-minute odyssey imagining the ancient Egyptian empire reincarnated on the Las Vegas Strip— black musicians have drawn from the same wellsprings of imagination and popular culture as everyone else.
Well, yeah. Moreover, Black musicians have not just drawn on those wellsprings, they’ve replenished them as well. People like George Clinton or Sun Ra were not just influenced by fantasy or science fiction, they also composed their own epics. Clinton especially with his parliamentfunkadelicgroovethang was just as creative in developing their own cosmology as Jack Kirby was in developing his Fourth World. It’s just that these contributions often go unrecognised. Black geekdom, Black interest in science fiction and fantasy is still strange, still dangerous.
