Saturday, July 5, 2008

"Stand on Zanzibar"

Listen to "Stand on Zanzibar" by Trip to Jerusalem, the UK band of Manfred Allseason (the man who ponders whether Sherlock Holmes was getting it on with Mrs. Bridges, in a comment on previous post).

The song is an electronic post-imperial "Star Wars" (with touches of TNG) waiting-for-the-barbarians type of story told from the colonizers' pov...

But mostly it's cool music that makes great listening while downloading Star Trek clips.

Click on the arrow in the round circle in the box below to make it so.
If this box thingy doesn't work, you can find the song here.

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I don't know if Trip to Jerusalem referenced this, but here is the extraordinary explanation of the title of the 1968 book Stand on Zanzibar, from Wikipedia:

The novel's main driver is overpopulation and its projected consequences.
* * * Its title refers to an early twentieth century claim that the world's population could fit onto the Isle of Wight (area 381 km²) if they were all standing upright.

[The author] Brunner remarked that ... the 3.5 billion people living in 1968 could stand together on the Isle of Man (area 572 km²), while the 7 billion people whom he projected would be alive in 2010 would need to stand on Zanzibar (area 1554 km²).


Throughout the book, the image of the entire human race standing shoulder-to-shoulder on a small island is a metaphor for a crowded world where each person feels hemmed in by a prison made not of metal bars, but of other human beings. By the end of the book, some of that crowd is (metaphorically) knee deep in the Indian Ocean surrounding the island.

___________

Really spooky kids: In 2008, we almost have reached a world population of 7 billion.

6 comments:

ooooooooooooooooooooooooooo said...

Sorry. This is our poorest song, and is just a demo anyway, we lost the actual recording due to recording equipment failure, ahem. Madam Fresca is being awfully kind...

But what an honour to be on Gugeo, the home of original film making!

Fresca said...

Oh, gee, I LIKED it...
Send the link to your best favorite song and I'll plunk that on too.

momo said...

I read Stand and Zanzibar, and The Sheep Look Up, also by Brunner when I was quite young. They were very disturbing. I tried to find them a few weeks ago at that store on Lake/Lyndale (forget the name) but they were out. Classic dystopian prescient stuff.

Fresca said...

Oh yeah, Dream Haven you mean? Have you tried Uncle Hugo's Sci-Fi? (Or amazon used books, of course.)
I don't think I need any more dystopian lit, I'm dousing myself with this ridiculously optimistic stuff. Like "WALL-E": even if/when we destroy Earth, the human spirit will survive.

Anonymous said...

I spent a lot of time trying to get this song to play and couldn't. Is this just another example of how my web browser is too out-dated?

Fresca said...

I don't know why sometimes it plays and sometimes it doesn't, Bink. Yesterday it wouldn't, but I clicked on the box in this post today (7-7-08) and am listening to it right now.
It's a mystery, but I don't even know how the radio works!