From time-to-time people ask for suggestions for alternate history styles and genres of music. People often think that our names for various types of music are descriptive - Heavy Metal, Rock n Roll, etc... But they aren't.
What if Rock n Roll was Slap n Tickle? Not that different in semantic meaning if you think about it, but with a wall of Alternate History about it...I am just off to a Slap and Tickle concert...
Motown is an obvious style, named for the Motor City of Detroit - what if it grew out of a Southern fishing hub, would it be fishtown?
The Blues, Jazz, Punk, Goth, House, Garage...one word genres.
In another world, they could be the Weeps, Fizz, Tramp, Roman, Lift, Basement etc. Or more probably, named for something which is impossible for us to rationalise so easily. After all, to someone in 1910, the idea of a musical style called Jazz would seem outlandish and alien. To us, maybe an ATL where there is one called Unicorn would seem just as strange - but not necessarily unfeasible.
Band names are another area where we accept the realities of OTL without really thinking about it. Now, nobody would bat an eyelid at The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Bon Jovi etc. But - The Antz, Brown Smith, De La Pole...? These bands are really big in an ATL out there somewhere!
Engelbert Humperdinck, Alvin Stardust, and Iggy Pop? Let's take a popstar renaming himself Axel Oxenstierna, or Seymour Light, perhaps Bobby Bop..? These are NOT normal names! Even iconic names like Elvis Presley are no more sacrosanct than that peculiarly named chap who lives down the road: Tobias Hart.
Michael Jackson, Tom Jones, Robert Smith ?! You might as well have Peter Hunt, Paul Roberts and Phil Long... There's no more reason for Michael Jackson to be black than there is for Peter Hunt; the magic is not in the name. To someone in 1950 the idea of a black music star called Michael Jackson probably would seem strange - weren't they all supposed to be called Fats this, or Chubby that?
Take bands with well-known but unusual names, and substitute new ones for them:-
Black Sabbath could be Sicilian Vespers
Deep Purple could be Uranium 235
Judas Priest could be Bogomil or Albegensian Creed
Be imaginative and remember that every name has an origin somewhere. REO Speedwagon could have been Bugatti Royale, 10CC could have been V8.
We have gone from genres to bands, so how about next moving on to songs? Take a group of seminal songs - Another Brick In The Wall, Hotel California, Ruby Tuesday, A Hard Day's Night, Blue Suede Shoes, Paranoid, Stand And Deliver, Rio, Radio Gaga, Dead Ringer For Love, West End Girls...
These have different, and unique, origins and thats something important to consider when thinking about ATL alternatives - if Brown Smith release a concept album called The Garden, then maybe the most famous song will be Just Another Weed In The Garden...
Again, there is no magic wand that said that these song titles are more powerful or more meaningful than any others. The power is in the song itself, the music and the delivery. As far as the names of songs go, you could easily have (and somewhere probably do) such parallel titles as Puffin Cottage, Dress-down Friday, Black Jackboots, Jessica, Hot Piece of Ass, and Nightclub Bitches. Given the same power of lyrics, singing strength, music and performance such titles would have an equally good chance of being the hits of an ATL.
I'm not saying we should directly substitute one for the other (Puffin Cottage for Hotel California, for instance) - although Neil Tennant singing "Nightclub Bitches" has a certain power in the mind! Just that these song titles are as likely as the song titles of OTL to have become hits, and amongst the most famous and best-known around. Or as likely not, given of course how there was nothing inevitable about any of the OTL songs being the lasting power-houses that they are.
But what is music in an ATL? Apart from the issue of genres, bands, and song titles, that is. Music as an entity could be vastly different.
Think of how it is stratified in our society - culture, entertainment, dance, festival, popular, concert etc.
Now this could well go down a completely different road, and modern popular music could be the same as the music of a royal court - Lady Gaga plays for the Queen...or Mistress Woo-Hoo for King Charles VII...
Music is affected by snobbery, cultural elitism and a whole sea of confusion such as when people do like some classical music but partition it in their mind from the popular music they like, so they would not put Beethoven or Vivaldi on at a party - but why not? This is OTL societal apartheid, albeit a mental apartheid. In an ATL things could well be completely different
OTL = Our Time Line, and means history as we know it, the present as we know it
ATL = Alternate Time Line, and means a world in which Alternate History rules with all its changes, and knock-ons
Grey Wolf
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