Via boingboing, I found a great LA Weekly profile of Devo co-founder Mark Motherbaugh’s turn from New Wave post-punk icon to noted, “quirky”, soundtrack and jingle writer for his omni-art creative emporium, ‘Mutato’.
That swept me back thirty years to those dusty shelves in the back of the Uxbridge Free Public Library’s fiction stacks, and “The Metallic Muse”, a collection of wonderful stories by the writer with the weird name, Lloyd Biggle Jr. You don’t hear much about him anymore. I don’t think I ever found even one other person who had ever even heard of him until I saw Orson Scott Card do a reading at a Baycon one year, and he mentioned how Biggle’s story “Tunesmith” got him into SF as a kid. (And he would later do a double-book with his story “Eye for an Eye” on one side, and Biggle’s “Tunesmith” on the other).
“Tunesmith” was the story of a jingle writer a couple hundred years from now, selling dish soap and jet cars and whatever, who has a problem: he’s too good at what he does. His jingles are intricate and musical and so popular that people play them in clubs… sometimes… without the words.
Which is illegal. Music without a purpose — a commercial purpose — is against the law. Music just for the sheer joy of it? Music to make you happy, or sad, or even horny…? No, not allowed. He should write forgettable jingles that sell the product, stick with that, he’ll be fine.
He refuses to conform, and pays the price.
“Tunesmith” is of that certain time in the 50s when America was beginning to question itself and its values. When Ginsberg was writing “Howl!” in the streets of San Francisco. When movies like “The Apartment” started showing how life really was vs how life was usually shown. Biggle, with “Tunesmith”, said — the superficial, commercial culture is blinding you. If you took a chance, and looked beyond it… you might get a good long look at Truth.
His writings are full of people that find in themselves a moral character they didn’t know they had, and can use that to expose the superficialities of a commercial society. His masterwork, “Monument”, remains one of my favorite works of science fiction.
