10/08/2022
Tragically, we have lost another beloved pop icon of the 80s. Let's take a trip down memory lane to that special time with Montag author Mark Miller as he recalls seminal musical acts of his youth in The Librarian at the End of the World:
It’s two AM and I-30 is a siren’s song of static. I lose myself in darkness. Colletta is asleep against the passenger side window. With each breath she exhales a gray delta upon the glass which dissipates almost immediately. Willy’s note could only mean Deep Ellum, and my synapses tingle with the feeling of providence. There is an insurance convention in Dallas I had wanted to go to anyway. I am going to roast both of those fu***ng birds on one spit. But now the silence is oppressive.
I’ve always had a thing for music. My first girlfriend always wondered who was more seminal in rock and roll, Alice Newtonian or Sophia Eaton. I admit, I couldn’t tell, even after hours of listening to their albums side by side, track to track, forwards and backwards. It was the 80s, so there were important religious concerns: we had to pay attention to the backmasking. Which artist had better hidden messages regarding Satan? On this score, DEFINITELY Sophia Eaton, whose 1989 Pleasure Heaven was actually a masterful homage to the Prince of Darkness when played backwards. She got right down to the nitty gritty, going so far as to explain the proper techniques for sacrificing babies, helpful hints about removing bloodstains, what to do with their bodies, and even naming the names of some hospital maternity wards with sub-par security. Like I said, first rate stuff.
But then I saw Alice Newtonian in concert in Berlin in 1999, at an age that many would think her well past her prime, and she allayed any doubts I might have had. They had reprised her 1988 masterwork Summer Heat as a techno remix. I was never into techno, but the barrage of beats and the kaleidoscope of otherworldly riffs definitely perked my ears up. Then, BOOM, right in the middle of Hotter than the Night, she amped it up and things got crazy. She ran around the stage wagging her microphone at the speakers, laughing and weaving a sonic tapestry of feedback and Doppler effect. The audience was stunned into silence as she started to disrobe. The years had done nothing to diminish her totally rocking 80s body. Soon she was topless, wearing nothing but a nuclear green thong, leaping from sound stack to sound stack amid the deafening squawk of feedback, and I was assaulted by sound, the shrieking crush only deepening the wrinkles in my brain that were eagerly storing this clash of imagery and noise. My eyes wanted to leap out of my skull, grow tongues, and lick the sweat from her abs. The air was electric, and I sensed that she was reconfiguring the raw energy, molding it into something with her bare hands. A bass line started to form from the feedback, and it was reminiscent of something. God, what is that? We all wondered. I looked around and saw that everyone was struggling, struggling, struggling, right there on the tips of our tongues. And then she did the most stunning thing I have ever witnessed in a musical venue. She was completely naked by then, and all of us were under her spell, mesmerized, malleable. We would have killed kittens for her. She took the microphone, slapped some KY on it—sparks flew—and she inserted it inside herself. Her eyes rolled in the back of her head as her body was flooded with voltage. But then we heard the thunder of her pulse, the blood racing through her nether parts, and the beat of it synced with the feedback loop, and at last she was clear in her intentions: she was playing Sophia Eaton's Love Commute with her va**na! Her rival finally vanquished, we snapped out of our stupor. The dam broke, and we rushed forward, a frenzy of arms and fists. That stage must be destroyed! We had to level the hierarchy, deconstruct fame. She was one of us, the teeming rush of humanity! We had to bring her down to us that we could properly commune with her! Dozens died and hundreds were hospitalized. But I had her and held her for just one moment, before she was ripped away from me by the throng of engorged beasts So, yeah, Alice Newtonian all the way in my book.
The Librarian at the End of the World https://a.co/d/bSBbPLu
“Part action, part thriller, all comedy, The Librarian at the End of the World fires on all cylinders. Fans of Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace will revel in the ridiculousness that is Miller’s America.”
“A constantly surprising picaresque journey through cultural darkness”
“Not so much a novel as a perpetual- motion machine: part road-show, part parable, careening between surrealism and comedy”
“Lovecraft turns Beatnik and drops acid”
“Brilliant, raunchy, hilarious, heartfelt, and by the end, breathtaking”
“Social satire at its best”
“On the cutting edge of audacious literature”
“Prepare to be blown away”
The Librarian at the End of the World
