Music in SWAN:

The future there is pretty normal – everything looks nearly the same there to them as it does to us here.  One change is the almost complete lack of new music. Something happened in the rearranging of the world that Pepito so gloriously fucked up that music really became part of everyone on a subconscious level. All information about who the artists of anything had been was lost, and as far as anyone knew, music just flowed from nowhere. CDs and tapes were rare, and found generally only in academic institutions or museums, though copying them and selling them blindly is becoming more popular.

Oddly enough, what gets copied and sold most are mix CDs, so the artists and songs get progressively more scrambled with each recopy and redistribution.

What remained on the radio was old music, and anything new rarely made it to the airwaves. Music wasn’t generally put on anything hard copied any longer for several reasons. Once someone made a song, it sort of just flowed out of them. If they released it in a public way – once enough people had heard it - it was no longer theirs, and became a sort of public mental property. Songs found people because people called to the songs, or needed them in some way. (This explains why Nny has lots of German music. It’s not that he lives anywhere near Germany, or has Amazon.com to fire up, he just needed what the music had to offer, so it came to him. He has some other foreign stuff as well.)

Artists now get no pay for what they make, because everyone can hear it in his head anytime he chooses, so hard copies are HARD to come by. The modern music that makes it to the radio/hard copy is generally dance music, or love songs –things you want to enjoy with more than just yourself.

The perk here is that because of the music on a subconsious level existing, as long as you are alive, people know who you are, know where the music is coming from.  After an artist dies in this time, usually in their homes are found recorded copies of what used to be in the public mental unconscious. It will still find people, but the signal of where it is coming from will weaken, and too long after death, it won’t seem to be coming from anywhere. These songs are then sold on CDs, played on the radio, etc, to keep things alive.

This is why Johnny’s music has such a strange effect on not only himself, but on Edgar. The songs Johnny has are from the old collection. They’re the old things that were around before the mental unconscious layer, and they have a weird subconscious ring in people.

This is also why forming a band will finally get Johnny and his friends out and visible. People will feel that music coming from them, coming from someone, and know who and where they are. Because they’re such a strange lot, playing lots of music from the bottom of the mental reservoir, and seemed to come out of nowhere, the Homicides become very popular. And while they don’t retain the rights to anything they specifically come up with, it doesn’t bother them in the slightest and they become the first group in the recoverable past that has released ALL their songs on CDs and tapes while living. Posters, pictures, and t-shirts depicting the band are insanely popular, and while they can have the songs mentally all they want, people are still buying CD versions of everything. The Homicides are having the same effect on the world as Johnny first had on Edgar in chapter one.

They travel, singing everywhere, and performing strange visual shows to make the shows worth it to people to come rather than just find the live version ‘deep in their souls’ or whatever. Johnny at the point that the band is named, knows that he, or some part of who he had been, was responsible for the deaths of his friends, and uses the band as the best way to laugh it off as he can. Jimmy and Edgar are painted with scars depicting how they were killed, and Devi is painted to look dead and withered inside.  There are no marks on Johnny, and aside from his star, or any other themed stage makeup, his appearance isn’t altered in any way.  Towards the end of concerts, he takes up his role of murderer again, and will randomly ‘knock off’ one of the band mates – taking their instrument (effectively) out of a song. At the end, after taking each one out of a song one by one, he’ll generally fade out himself, and let things go black.

The Homicides won’t perform outdoors during the day. The fading to black is a big deal, and part of the show in some manner or another, and Johnny refuses to leave it out.  The publicity shots of the band always show them very close in some way, and fans tend to throw rumors back and forth furiously about who may be with whoever else.  The ‘Formal Homicidal Orgy’ picture is a good example of one of their publicity shots. They are never portrayed far from each other, and rather enjoy the speculation about their inner workings that circulated among the fans.  Johnny never lets anything between him and one other member seem obvious or plausible for too long.

After Johnny’s death, things explode.  The band members themselves are devastated, and the fans run a little rampant.  Details about Nny’s death are never released, since Edgar can’t explain them.  It’s all over TV, all over the radio, and there is no where that the songs aren’t playing. People call into radio stations screaming that they can still feel where the music is coming from – they can still feel Johnny alive. The group’s school often has people swarming around the windows of the choir room, hoping to be able to catch some glimpse of where the Homicides started, and similar groups swarm Edgar’s home, which he refuses to leave.

A world of people newly consumed by music is driven completely mad when Johnny dies and essentially takes the music with him.  Mental plays of his songs run rampant, plus plays of a strange old song that becomes resurrected as people begin needing it. They don’t remember what it was called, but generally refer to it as ‘The Dead Music,’ or 'The Dead Song.'

People themselves are often referred to as songs, or by the songs they make. People beloved enough to other people tend to resonate with them. Jimmy always had a taste of something the Homicides had called “Never Been Hot Enough” and Tenna, who was part of the costume design, had been ‘She’s Got Technicolor Shoes.’ 

Johnny was the ‘Song Without a Name.’