I have two issues with music; a tendency to earworm and a deep sadness that’s triggered by certain kinds of music, a state of affairs Oliver Sacks wrote about it in Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain. There is a lot of music I love but can’t listen to. Steve Reich, for example, reminds me so acutely of a time past. So there’s a vast no-fly zone that has to worked around.
Still, there’s a lot of music in The Adjudicator, and some of it can actually be accessed via the QR codes my editor, Isaac Peterson, brilliantly scattered throughout the book.
“Sloop John B” – Bahamian folk song recorded by The Beach Boys
In the first scene, the Adjudicator, Zedi Loew is on the subway, and it’s full of sounds and music. She has mirror-touch synesthesia, so she feels the pain, tics, and pleasures of her fellow passengers. I was in the first car of a G train around the time I was beginning the book, and heard the conductor singing “Sloop John B” at the top of his lungs, and I thought about how he might have felt no one could hear him above the sound of the train, like singing in the shower, or maybe he just didn’t care, but I was thinking about that experience of being underground all day long, that sense of being alone and private in your front post while millions of people will be squashed in behind you coming and going until your shift is over.
“I Wanna Be Sedated” – Joey Ramone
In this scene Zedi also hears The Ramones, “I Wanna Be Sedated,” which has its source as a non-annoying earworm. I have a secret life that involves taking the advanced ballet class in the morning at Mark Morris. I’m a class taker, not a performer, but have been taking class one way or another since around age four. The pianist one morning played a version of the song, very fast, for a very fast combination we were doing, and the contrast between classical ballet, done very quickly, and “I Wanna Be Sedated” had us all laughing hysterically during and after, so that made it into that scene.
“It’s Not Unusual” – Tom Jones
“It’s Not Unusual” is meant to signify the character humming that song at that moment when he’s extorting money from the Adjudicator, is a sleazy wrench in the works. Isaac found a clip of Jones on the Ed Sullivan Show circa 1967 that’s a fantastic but odd cultural moment. For the dance moves alone, Jones should be knighted.
“Legal Tender” – the B-52s
My former husband is a cinematographer. He shot a B-52s music video “Monster in My Pants” many years ago, and I came home from work one day to find our apartment in the East Village full of B-52s. I wanted to reference the idea of copies and forgeries in this scene, so “Legal Tender” fit rather than Monster, but both are great songs.
“Yuri G” – PJ Harvey
Also found by Isaac. Singe LaVeneer, the mother who believes her daughter’s consciousness was switched with another child’s in the lab, is an Originist, that is to say, someone who believes all art objects should be returned to their country of origin, regardless of whether or not that country still exists. A statue of Yuri Gagarin, astronaut, has crossed her path, but returning it to the Soviet Union is a moral problem because the USSR no longer exists.
“Fly Me to the Moon” – Frank Sinatra
The Adjudicator hears this song when she’s standing in an aerially suspended subway car looking out at an illegal Dormazin lab below. Dormazin is a drug used to get more concentrated sleep, for example 5 hours for 8, which gives you more time to be alert and functioning, but it’s also very addictive. The structure is based on a sculpture by artist Michael Oatman that’s actually an Airstream trailer, not a subway car, you can climb into it where it’s perched high above MassMoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts. The interior is a 70s era space ship, and references Giotto, Jules Verne, NASA, and Chris Marker’s 1962 film La Jetée.
A futuristic song by Sinatra about love, how can you go wrong?
“Burnt Toast and Black Coffee” – Mike Pedecin
There’s something sinister about this song, you don’t know the story behind it, but it’s not going to leave you thinking, oh what a wonderful world. It was recorded in 1961, not only the year of the first human space flight by Yuri G. but also the year that marked the building of the Berlin Wall.
The Adjudicator is a futuristic geography, but the music is mostly from another era, one that is remembered and can be referenced with a certain amount of nostalgia, that notorious drag on the future. I was interested in a kind of Blade Runner effect where Replicants are a threat, but on ground level there are ramen stands, neon signage, and smoky bars. In The Adjudicator, all humans are genetically engineered down to the last allele, but cultural time is slow, and stopped somewhere in the 90s. When I was writing the book, my son asked me what was the first concert I went to when I was in high school (Nina Simone), and what did I listen to in the 80s? Thanks to the invention of the internet and some digging those obscure East Village and Brixton bands could be recovered in one form or another, so there was some of that, from the Del Byzanteens to Orchestre Jazira.