In the early 80s, one of the big bands on the Swedish music scene was Adolphson & Falk. A lot of their early stuff covered space, technology, radios, and astronomy (they met during their military service at the Swedish agency for signals intelligence). This is their breakthrough song “Blinkar blå” in English translation.
As far as I know they have never been a part of or encountered sf fandom, but this is true found filk.
Not quite filk, but have you heard of Steeleye Span’s album “Wintersmith”? It’s basically just songs about Terry Pratchett’s book Wintersmith (and some about his Tiffany books in general), and it’s great! Just thought it’s something that might be interesting to some people who follow this blog lol
For anyone who doesn’t know, Tom Lehrer was a Harvard mathematics lecturer who did musical satire in his spare time during the 50s and 60s.
He’s basically a lyrical genius: ridiculously clever and funny and awesome.
His songs cover pretty much every topic imaginable as well, from the political (the atomic bomb and world war three) to social issues (tolerance, drugs, homosexuality and religion) to environental issues (pollution and animal welfare) to the macabre and the kinky (masochism, necrophilia and dirty novels). And all in a tongue-in-cheek, amazingly still relevant way.
Tom Lehrer fandom, where you at?
(Party at my place. Bring the cheap jug wine and a couple-dozen pizzas)
In the filk and dementia communities, where we’ve always been.
What would Peggy Carter do?
She’d happily fight anyone who’d gotten in her way
What would peggy carter do?
She wouldn’t listen to what the haters have to say
She would catch all of the bad guys and she’d do it looking great
Peggy Carter is my hero, and she’s why I’m here today
“What Would Peggy Carter Do,” an anthem from Kate Nyx.
Today in found filk: “The Griesly Bride,” a murder ballad adapted by Tom Campbell from a poem written by John Manifold.
Despite being written in the mid-20th century, it sounds like a traditional ballad, and has a very filkish supernatural twist. It’s actually so filkish that when I was first trying to track down the origin of the song, I found some folks who were convinced it had been written by filker Cynthia McQuillan.
Quick content warning for an implied threat of sexual coercion, though it’s never followed through, and the woman who’s threatened is not the one murdered in this ballad.
Do you think the song “Pioneers Over c” by Van Der Graaf Generator could be considered filk? It’s prog rock rather than folk, but it is about the first astronauts to surpass the speed of light, who then find themselves sort of disconnected from time. I suppose it’s more like speculative fiction in song form than science fiction fandom, though. Idk, that’s why I’m asking y’all.
It is if you want it to be! Because definitions are made up and only exist as long as they are useful to us. I definitely thing filk is a genre doesn’t ever need to sound folk-ish, it just often does because 1) it evolved out of the 60′s folk movement and 2) it’s an easy style to write and perform in for amateur musicians. But heck, there’s rap filk, there’s no reason there should be prog rock filk…except that prog rock typically requires at LEAST six musical instruments and electricity, and so is more conducive to staged concerts than song circles.
….but there’s plenty of filk on concert stages, with electric instruments, with the extensive arrangement, rehearsal, and setup you get in prog rock. I saw a prog rock band at a con, and while it wasn’t billed as filk, being at a con makes you basically filk.
As for whether it’s science fiction fandom music – if you’re in the science fiction fandom, and feel like it’s relevant, and you like it, it’s science fiction fandom music. That’s why songs about cats and Shakespeare are considered filk, even though they have heck all to do with science fiction. They might be pretty far removed from Star Trek, but a whole bunch of people like all of those things, and that unites them. Fandom is about the people, more than the content, in the end.
Anyway, I’d say a case can be made for calling it filk, and if you want to make that case that’s fine by me. It’s a few steps removed from what I might suggest as some kind of archetypal filk song, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t one. It’s like how a dachshund and a wolfhound are both dogs. They’re just very different dogs, and you just have to be aware that traits of most dogs do not necessarily apply to these dogs. If filk had a real dictionary definition it would have a dozen subdefinitions, and one of those would probably say “songs about science fiction concepts” and that’s this!
Nothing banishes Monday blues like discovering that a decidedly sinister, 100-year-old H. P. Lovecraft poem, entitled “Nemesis,” maps almost perfectly to the 1973 song “Piano Man” by Billy Joel.
If you already know the song, then simply reading the poem below is enough to see that the two really do match. But listening to “Nemesis“ being sung by songwriter and performer Julian Velard as he also plays “Piano Man” is one of the most unsettlingly sublime things the internet has ever produced.
What do you get when you meet Godzilla and fall in love?
This song is on Kesha’s new album, and a few of our friends told us that it sounded like a Doubleclicks song. When we heard it, we definitely wished we’d written it. So here, in tribute to this fantastic bit of songwriting: Godzilla! It’s a really sweet little song.
