Twelve years after the release of Blonde on Blonde, Bob Dylan recognized he’d caught something special:
“The closest I ever got to the sound I hear in my mind was on individual bands in the Blonde on Blonde album. It’s that thin, that wild mercury sound. It’s metallic and bright gold, with whatever that conjures up.”
When I think about American music, I hear the Violent Femmes song with the lyric: “I like all kinds of music/but I like American music best.” When I try to define what I mean by the homey little phrase ‘American music’ I return to Dylan’s allusive, elusive description. I want Northern Arcadia to have a comparable musical tradition. Little problem. That ‘wild mercury sound’ was born from the blues, by which I mean…
“the name given to both a musical form and a music genre that originated in African-American communities of primarily the “Deep South” of the United States around the end of the 19th century from spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts and chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads.”
– source: Wikipedia article on the Blues.
There are people of all different skin colors in Northern Arcadia, for reasons I’ve touched on before. But there is no group of human beings who could be considered analagous to the African-American communities in the colonial Americas. When I first came to that conclusion, I stalled. I worried I’d never find a way to bring that ‘wild mercury sound’ to life in the taverns and camps and cobblestone streets of my novel new world.
This is the point when dhao bo, the toad people native to Northern Arcadia, stopped being a special effect (or an obscure reference) for me and became something rather more substantial in my imagination. Making music central to the toad people’s culture didn’t seem like a stretch. Toads and frogs and all their ilk warble on for hours, right? And of course (it flashed across my mind) the dhao bo tribes could croak messages back and forth network-style, allowing for some fairly sophisticated planning and military tactics. The dhao bo of Northern Arcadia would likely share an oral history, which would provide more information and a better context for dhao bo tribesmen during Pierre’s artifact hunt than Pierre himself.
And the music of Northern Arcadia no longer seemed destined to be completely funk-free.
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