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Jonathan Coulton's New Dystopian Album Becomes a Graphic Novel (jonathancoulton.com)
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.
Does the comic book tell me who wins the global fish war?
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.
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.
Need their music made into best selling picturebooks because they are too lazy to listen or *READ* stories :)
Yeah, I feel that way about movies.
You aren't really grasping this whole "information" concept are You? If they were telling you about music everyone already knows about, and everyone has heard / experienced via the medium everyone already has in their collection, THAT would be the time to complain.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
It's cute you think this is original, cupcake.
Information without relevance has negative value.
Congratulations on your complete lack of reading comprehension mr stalker!
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
So you are saying what you just wrote has zero value ... agreed.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
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.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
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?
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Whats the difference between comic books and graphic novels? Number of pages? Existence of a plot?
What's it like being not funny or smart?
I think they might have identified him explicitly, but I don't think it's too far of a stretch to have an article about the musician from Portal - Still Alive (This Was A Triumph); Now I Only Want You Gone - plus a few other geek-known tracks here and there. Agree they should have given a quick lead-in on background though.
Nazis were rather funny and smart.
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 in celebration of Slashdot's 15th anniversary.
#DeleteChrome
Nazis were rather funny and smart.
Shut up, nazi.
"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.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." - Jiddu Krishnamurti