2/14/09

A genre pet peeve and the application of Moore's Law

I've been watching the 1995-6 series Space: Above and Beyond a lot lately. I still love the show, but I've been reminded of a pet peeve I have with lots of future-set genre shows, this one included: the constant thematic use of 20th century popular music.

I don't mind the suggestion that people will still enjoy music from other eras in the near future. I have very eclectic tastes myself, and I believe people's tastes are only going to get more eclectic as time goes by and Moore's Law makes the storage and easy portability of ridiculous amounts of pop ephemera the norm. But if space marines in 2063 head off to battle listening to 19th century classical, mid-20th century Patsy Cline, and late 20th century punk rock, shouldn't they occasionally also listen to mid-21st century mind-click-phono-folk-pop-weirdness? Or whatever is actually being written and performed in 2063? Surely not everyone on board the Saratoga is a vintage music junkie?

I love the way Lost tweaked the use of pop music in genre shows, even though it's not (mostly) a futuristic show. They won my absolute devotion in an early episode that closed with a dreamy montage of beach life over a pop song, complete with lyrics. Then abruptly, the song cut out. Hurley reached for his disc player, shook it and said "oh well, I guess that's that." And that WAS that. No more unexplainable pop music -- at least not until they found all those records in the hatch...

I've been trying to figure out how much "earth archive" materials my own future explorers will be able to access in Savages. Well, duh, Betsy -- they'll have EVERYTHING. Probably on an iPod the size of a finger nail inserted subcutaneously somewhere in their heads. They'll have the entire, searchable, Library of Congress and then some.

Crap. Moore's Law is a bitch.

But I promise, if I ever have them enjoying a thematic moment of popular music, some of it will date to 2258.

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