by Agent 817 – Pangea Federation
Location. Location. Location. Buy up some space in Andromeda while the prices are still affordable.
ANDROMEDA QUADRANT 1787X (Special to TSD) Being from your future – specifically 2052 – It was nice to go back to 2011 for an event called the Super Bowl which featured low brow, highly produced music and a football game played by two long gone professional football teams named the Green Bay Packers and Pittsburgh Steelers; part of a sports league called the NFL. Records indicate that human beings actually played in these games as opposed to the cyborgs who play in games today.
Anyway, back to the music.
I really have fond memories of that time as a child. Music was theoretically still made up of notes and time signatures, though songs had several years earlier discarded the use of traditional song form. I guess it was sometime around 2002 that kids learning piano or guitar could no longer walk in to a music store and find the sheet music for songs they heard on the radio because the music at that time was generally made up of pre-processed rhythm tracks. It also happened to be void of what we understood to be guitar chords and standard melodies.
What an exciting time; To fly in the face of conventional wisdom, and really dumb it all down to the lowest common denominator by making it all about recycled dance steps, hand gestures, and samples from songs from the 1980‘s. Fuse this with vocal gymnastic espousing divas attempting to resuscitate their free-falling careers, with proponents of a movement known at the time as rap and hip hop, and you had a formula for a highly successful “showtime.”
That’s what I call music.
It got us all off our collective ass to dance the night away as regenerated riffs from our parent’s generation cycled through incessant pulsating rhythms as a real living drummer cracked a backbeat like a motherfucker, and a tattoo-covered, blinged out, recovering ecstasy addict called a DJ mumbled some “call to action” kinderspiel into a device called a microphone.
Damn, I miss those days. That was my music. Our music.
Things are of course different now. With the Williams Administration’s acknowledgement of the Andromedans in 2021 – thus allowing alien technology to stop operating in the shadows – we can now do things unheard of just thirty years ago; Vacations on Mars, time travel, even a cure for the common cold.
Sadly however, music is barely non-existent in 2052. Forget about not having melody. Kids don’t even dance anymore. Rhythm was essentially abandoned in 2041 as being old fashioned, though some underground artists with diminishing musical skills occasionally would use it, as it was only discouraged, but never officially outlawed. Rhythm was almost universally replaced with a hypnotic, atonal, sub-sonic hum that permeates the inner ear and causes a sort of euphoric glee or wretched malaise – depending on the user’s preference. Some of the leading figures in this movement are Dr. Heinrich Klump, Professor Li Ling, and Cool Mo Fe Fi Fo Fum – all disciples of the Andromedan Minster of the Arts known as Z^N8)+.
Anyway, no big whoop. I just thought I’d write from the future and tell you what’s coming. Still, I’d like to leave you with a positive note – the Andromedans have this tapas called ^5++0^6 – a sort of tofu-esque little ditty that has a subtle hint of saffron and a couple of herbs from their planetary system. Eat some of that and kick back with a little Heinrich Klump. To die for.
Ciao for now.