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The music on Star Trek Discovery

Christopher said:
..I get a little tired of the fact that nobody in the 23rd or 24th century is interested in any era of music or literature or popular culture more recent than 300-400 years in their past...
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I don't really understand what you are asking Star Trek to do here. Do you want the composers to invent entirely new musical genres anytime they want a character to listen to something in the show? [/understatement] That would be a little difficult. [/end understatement] Additionally, the audience won't be able to connect emotionally with music, and that is largely the point of choosing some kind of musical addition - to add to the meaning of the scene.

Additionally, Trek has referenced musical composers and artists from other planets and other/later centuries, just not very often. TOS makes some references; Bashir and Garak discuss literature, especially Cardassian; and in TNG/DS9 Worf, and Dax to some extent, listened to Klingon opera (we even heard some). Man, was "Aktuh and Maylota" terrible or what?! (But I guess that was part of the joke.) So it has happened, just not a lot.
 
Ometiklan said:
I don't really understand what you are asking Star Trek to do here.
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Just include some references to future pop culture so that it isn't so contrived that the characters are only interested in stuff older than the show itself. I did this in my novel Only Superhuman -- it was a hard-SF superhero novel steeped in references to existing pop culture, so to avoid the contrivance, I added references to pop culture and slang from the characters' own era and recent past as well as from our era -- like their TV shows, movies, comic-book characters, currently popular bands, etc. It's actually quite fun to do, especially coming up with ideas for bad pop culture that I can make fun of. It doesn't actually have to be shown, just talked about, acknowledged as something that exists as part of the world's background texture. If a future world has no pop culture that doesn't originate in our past, that makes it feel shallower and less believable.


Ometiklan said:
Do you want the composers to invent entirely new musical genres anytime they want a character to listen to something in the show?
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It's not as though it's unprecedented for composers to imagine what future music styles might sound like. You mentioned the examples Trek has used. But the problem there is the only "future" music we ever hear is alien. Okay, TOS had "future" human music that sounded uncannily like 1960s music (the party music in "Mudd's Women" and "The Conscience of the King," the space hippie songs in "The Way to Eden"), but in the Berman-era series, it's as though humans totally stopped creating anything after the year 2000. And that is very contrived and artificial.
 
Christopher said:
Just include some references to future pop culture so that it isn't so contrived that the characters are only interested in stuff older than the show itself. I did this in my novel Only Superhuman -- it was a hard-SF superhero novel steeped in references to existing pop culture, so to avoid the contrivance, I added references to pop culture and slang from the characters' own era and recent past as well as from our era -- like their TV shows, movies, comic-book characters, currently popular bands, etc. It's actually quite fun to do, especially coming up with ideas for bad pop culture that I can make fun of. It doesn't actually have to be shown, just talked about, acknowledged as something that exists as part of the world's background texture. If a future world has no pop culture that doesn't originate in our past, that makes it feel shallower and less believable.




It's not as though it's unprecedented for composers to imagine what future music styles might sound like. You mentioned the examples Trek has used. But the problem there is the only "future" music we ever hear is alien. Okay, TOS had "future" human music that sounded uncannily like 1960s music (the party music in "Mudd's Women" and "The Conscience of the King," the space hippie songs in "The Way to Eden"), but in the Berman-era series, it's as though humans totally stopped creating anything after the year 2000. And that is very contrived and artificial.
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I understand that, to a degree. It also fits with the "parallel Earth" history take that Roddenberry had thought of with Star Trek.

I mean, we had a genetic superman rule more than 1/4 of Earth, be overthrown, exiled and go into space on a sleeper ship 21 or so years ago, but it wasn't on the news. Creating a pop culture for that world is something that could be a lot of fun!
 
Where is this music so we can listen? All I can find are messages, tweets and other assorted BS about how great it is. I'd like to hear it for myself.
 
Christopher said:
I guess it wouldn't be any more anachronistic than all the swing/jazz/big band songs Vic Fontaine did on DS9, but those were a little contrived. I get a little tired of the fact that nobody in the 23rd or 24th century is interested in any era of music or literature or popular culture more recent than 300-400 years in their past.
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One word: licensing.
 
You want future music? How about dis, welwala?

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uniderth said:
You want future music? How about dis, welwala?

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Nah, it's this:
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or this:
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The thing with creating "future [pop] music" is it is almost always sonically tethered to the era in which it was created. Because the issue is, when it comes to the "core" or "meat" or "nuts and bolts" (or whatever metaphor you want to use) of contemporary/popular music, it hardly changes at all over long periods of time, and yet the "trimmings" or melodic veneer can change drastically, even within a few years. Plus, these changes aren't necessarily induced by changes in taste so much as the technology available.
 
CorporalClegg said:
The thing with creating "future [pop] music" is it is almost always sonically tethered to the era in which it was created.
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Of course it is, but the point is that it's silly to portray a fictional future that has no popular culture less than 300 years old. It doesn't matter how convincingly futuristic it is -- the point is that it's far more unconvincing if it isn't there at all. The phenomenon you're mentioning can date a show or movie in retrospect, yes, because the "future" music will sound backward to viewers a decade or two later. But the phenomenon I'm talking about dates a show immediately, because the cutoff in popular culture is so obviously the present day when the show is made. Picard likes 1940s detective stories. Tom Paris likes 1930s movie serials and 1950s cars. Bashir likes 1960s spy movies and Vegas singers. Kelvin Kirk and Jaylah like 1990s heavy metal or punk or whatever. But nobody ever likes anything from the 2000s or 2100s. And that is egregiously artificial, that absolute cutoff corresponding to the date the show was made. It's ridiculous. I'd rather have future music that sounds dated in 20 years than no future music at all.

After all, the technology and costumes and social mores are going to be just as dated later on, so that's no reason not to include them. All a science fiction story can do is extrapolate forward from the present as best it can. The fact that those extrapolations will seem dated to future generations is simply a standard occupational hazard.

And again, I am not talking exclusively about music. I'm talking about any and all pop culture -- books, movies, serial fiction in whatever form, games, sports, fashion, you name it. (Sports is the one area of pop culture where Berman-era Trek did attempt futurism, with things like Parrises squares, Velocity, anbo-jytsu, and futuristic tennis rackets and racquetball courts.)
 
Christopher said:
And again, I am not talking exclusively about music. I'm talking about any and all pop culture -- books, movies, serial fiction in whatever form, games, sports, fashion, you name it. (Sports is the one area of pop culture where Berman-era Trek did attempt futurism, with things like Parrises squares, Velocity, anbo-jytsu, and futuristic tennis rackets and racquetball courts.)
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DABOO!!! :beer:
 
Christopher said:
Of course it is, but the point is that it's silly to portray a fictional future that has no popular culture less than 300 years old. It doesn't matter how convincingly futuristic it is -- the point is that it's far more unconvincing if it isn't there at all. The phenomenon you're mentioning can date a show or movie in retrospect, yes, because the "future" music will sound backward to viewers a decade or two later. But the phenomenon I'm talking about dates a show immediately, because the cutoff in popular culture is so obviously the present day when the show is made. Picard likes 1940s detective stories. Tom Paris likes 1930s movie serials and 1950s cars. Bashir likes 1960s spy movies and Vegas singers. Kelvin Kirk and Jaylah like 1990s heavy metal or punk or whatever. But nobody ever likes anything from the 2000s or 2100s. And that is egregiously artificial, that absolute cutoff corresponding to the date the show was made. It's ridiculous. I'd rather have future music that sounds dated in 20 years than no future music at all.

After all, the technology and costumes and social mores are going to be just as dated later on, so that's no reason not to include them. All a science fiction story can do is extrapolate forward from the present as best it can. The fact that those extrapolations will seem dated to future generations is simply a standard occupational hazard.

And again, I am not talking exclusively about music. I'm talking about any and all pop culture -- books, movies, serial fiction in whatever form, games, sports, fashion, you name it. (Sports is the one area of pop culture where Berman-era Trek did attempt futurism, with things like Parrises squares, Velocity, anbo-jytsu, and futuristic tennis rackets and racquetball courts.)
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I would also like to see Earth popular culture that doesn't obviously come from the western hemisphere.

Kor
 
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