Tag: GenMarsFoodMusic

Kyle Tran Myhre deserves a special place in my series of posts on #GenMarsFoodMusic.

I use the final verse of his piece called “Matches” as an epigraph for Food because it captures the essence of hopepunk.

It reminds me of the Carl Sagan quote: “In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.” The obvious point being that we’d best get on with doing it ourselves.

It captures the hope-despite-hardship of my characters as they struggle with starvation and social collapse. It captures the hope-despite-hardship of all of us in our own struggles IRL.

It’s about self-reliance, except the self is collective. We succeed when we all take care of each other.

Kyle’s are the first and third verses here:
https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=6rphS6Ux-wY

To learn more about Kyle and his many activities, visit:
https://guante.info/

image: Kyle Tran Myhre performing. Taken by Adam Bubolz.

Many years ago, I went to Bolivia to help a friend with some field research. We stayed on a remote ranch in the Gran Chaco, an arid grassland in the southern part of the country. One night, as we were sitting and drinking beers with the rancher, he shared that he liked Mexican music. Being a young white American from the exact center of the country and only beginning to shed the cultural myopia which that entails, I found this eye-opening. It’s not like I didn’t know Latin America contained many countries, but I’d never really thought of them as being different from each other, you know? The idea that this rancher in southern Bolivia was a fan of Mexican music kind of slapped me and opened up my worldview in a most charming way.

I was thinking of this when I wrote a scene in which my Chinese protagonist shares Isan music from northern Thailand with his American friend.

Excerpt:
“Jun pulled out his tablet and touched it several times to cast music to the room’s sound system. Something like a guitar began noodling out an arrhythmic introductory riff that eventually settled into a repetitive pattern. This became more complex with each measure, building intensity until finally, drum and bass joined. Jun saw Keiron’s head begin to bop subtly up and down when the beat dropped.”
— from Food: Generation Mars, Book Four

Pretty sure this was the track I described.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2VXJ-Gyle4

https://open.spotify.com/track/4KKOeMWgKcHEle0chfj8hd?si=46c975d01b5548c6

There are many musical references in my latest book. Such references are a challenge for an indie author. I have to be careful to not cross any fair use boundaries: artists and titles and bare hints of lyrics only. So I thought it might be fun to elaborate on some of them here.