#Her favorite band is Scott Bradlee's Post Modern Jukebox

[quoteiplier]

My Campsona: Quote

Made with this picrew.

[lonbergwrites]

Literary “Covers”

I have been really into Post Modern Jukebox for quite a few years now. If you’re not familiar with the production company, go to YouTube right now and do a search. They take modern pop songs and (to greater and lesser degrees) arrange them in the style of quintessentially American standards - most often Jazz, but also Bluegrass, Soul, Country, etc.

The results are often amazing, and they partner with some truly astounding musicians - especially the singers. And it all seems to be arranged by a man named Scott Bradlee, who is usually seen playing piano in the videos.

I got to thinking the other night about this phenomenon - covers - and how it is so ingrained in music, and so very absent from literature. Cake covering I Will Survive is - in my opinion - the version of the song. I know this is not a popular opinion, and I in no way mean to knock the American Treasure Gloria Gaynor. I just really like covers. Punk as a genre does them particularly well. All of the Standards were, from moment one, sung by anybody and everybody. Covers are everywhere.

I know that music is very different from literature - the way it is shared, taken in, tinkered with. But musicians have forever played with each others’ works - changing instrumentation, notes, tempo, even words. PMJ changes the whole structure and genre of many of your favorite songs, and that is all that they do as a “band.”

In the literary world, the closest thing we have is fanfic; these are unauthorized stories that, if they make money, are highly illegal. If authors come into contact with them, they can tamper with the author’s own rights to their own intellectual property. Sure, public domain exists, and eventually, some stories are starting to transition to the Commons now after endless protections secured by the biggies like Disney. But no one is allowed to riff on The Expanse and profit off of it.

I am all for author’s rights. I think authors should always own their characters. But... I think we lose a lot as a community by walling off all of our own IP from the fingers and the brainpower of other creators.

I don’t know how this would even work... what goes on in the music business isn’t exactly like Beyonce taking a Marty Robbins story song, and writing six new verses of it, and releasing it on her next album - though I want very much to hear that now that I’ve written this... But how might authors play with this idea? One idea that comes immediately to mind are the books like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, or Android Karenina. But those are tinkering with genre on books well inside the Commons. Nobody’s doing this with 1984 (now a Romance novel), let alone something as new as The Fifth Season (now a Western). At least not without “scratching off the serial numbers.”

Even with Audiobooks, rights are sold to one firm that makes one definitive version. Another company cannot just hire their own voice actor and purchase their own hardcover book on release day and sell their own copy, paying the author a share of the profits.

I’m no expert of music copyrights, but I am curious how and why the lines were formed the way they were. I’d like to see more openness in the literary world. I want to make sure that along the way, authors are getting paid. But I want to see what we might do as a society if we were allowed to as fully participate in the experience of literature as we are in the experience of music. I think it would go a long way towards making reading more accessible, exciting, and mainstream popular. I also think that a lot of authors would be making money without having to lift a finger. And that’s a pretty cool idea.

What say you, fellow authors?