#Leslie Fish

[fanlore-wiki]

Featured Article: Banned From Argo

This week’s Featured Article is Banned from Argo, a classic and much riffed-on Star Trek: TOS filk by Leslie Fish.

“Banned from Argo” was a last minute addition to Folk Songs For Folk Who Ain't Even Been Yet, released in 1976. This collection was the first commercially available filk recording. The song won a Pegasus Award in 2003 for Best Classic Filk Song. The author also eventually turned it into a novel and posted it to Archive of Our Own in 2021 under the same name: Banned from Argo.

Learn more about this iconic song on Fanlore!

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[somethingusefulfromflorida]

There's a hyperspecific genre of song that always makes me cry; sci-fi "filk" music about spacemen who sacrifice themselves for their crew.

Ballad of a Spaceman

Some Kind of Hero

Sam Jones

Dawson's Christian

"I'm as good as dead, but there's still something I can do to save everyone else, so that has to be enough."

[theoutcastrogue]

Leslie Fish & The DeHorn Crew - Thoughts on Strange Visitors

What manner of men are these who fly so free? Not bound to any planet's rules, Not tied to flocks and herding tools, Not serving country-minded fools— Not chained to dust, like me!

What manner of men are these, well-known to stars? Not limited to one tribe's lands, Not fed by any one tribe's hands. The mountains where my border stands Confine like prison bars!

What manner of men are these who stand alone? In all they do or say to me, The echo of the stars they see Confirms that one could be that free— It gnaws me to the bone!

What manner of men are these? I need to know! They fill my dreams with wondrous things, They give my soul impatient wings, They show me where their freedom springs— And I am called to go!

First released in the album Solar Sailors, 1977

[fuck-you-upmusicbracket]

I’ve Got A Dark Alley And A Bad Idea That Says You Should Shut Your Mouth (Fall Out Boy)

Joke me something awful just like kisses on the necks of "best friends"/we're the kids that feel like dead ends/and I want to be known for my hits not just my misses/took a shot and didn't even come close/and trust and love and hope/and the poets are just kids who didn't make it/and never had it at all.

"It encapsulates a feeling of being stuck as a teenager or 20something. its a song about dead ends, about the memory of when all your friends were a phone call away instead of a plane ticket apart."

Some Kind Of Hero (Leslie Fish)

I saw she had left on the screen/“If any old shipmates should ask after Moll/Just tell them she finally died clean.”

"Old sci-fi ballad about some folks in a space station emergency, and the three people that were able to save everyone. Two of them died in the process, and the song is from the perspective of the surviving hero, insisting that they're not the real hero here - everyone should remember and respect the other two more, and why. It also has one of the most heartbreaking (but bittersweet) depictions of someone struggling with addiction that I've heard in a song."

Poll Runner: One of the first songs in this tournament I truly got attached to. This whole album slays. It's got so much worldbuilding in one song!

Some Kind of Hero submitted by @shadybug

[andmaybegayer]

I downloaded a bunch of filk and I always forget just HOW obvious Leslie Fish's politics are in her music.

[aurelianpen]

Happy moon landing day!! Have some Leslie Fish singing about the moon landing and then go listen to more of her music

[maybe-not-a-chicken]

Bad news everyone Leslie fish is super transphobic

Like thinks the trans suicide rates are a bluff tactic transphobic

And for an anarchist she seems kinda down on people protesting without a permit, which seems hypocritical.

She also thinks that transphobia doesn’t exist and actually trans people are the last sexists in the western world

So yeah, sorry about that folks

[insertfandomrefhere]

"but your honor i'm a silly little guy!"

[adara-of-the-flame]

Carmen Miranda's Ghost is haunting Space Station 3...

[gunpowderdtim]

Carmen Miranda's Ghost - Leslie Fish & Vic Tyler

If you are looking for a whoops all bangers filk album, I'd love to introduce you to Carmen Miranda's Ghost. By Leslie Fish and Vic Tyler, we have my favorite filk album of all time - if you enjoy songs about a ghost haunting a starship, space shanties, the horrors of war, and tragic fates of young spacers, this album is for you!

please listen to it. I'm obsessed with this album.

[homosexualhooligan]

whenever i reread the iconic Leslie Fish's K/S fics, im always so struck by the illustrations, i cant help but think that they'd make killer relief prints

from her fic 'Poses'

[kivrin]

I read about Leslie Fish's fanfic Star Trek novel The Weight in an anthropological book or article about Star Trek fans - probably Enterprising Women by Camille Bacon-Smith though it might have been something else. The reference was to some conversations Chapel and Uhura have about gender discrimination in Starfleet, so I thought that more of the story would be about that. But instead it's a mirror universe / alternate history story in which Kirk encounters his alternate self in an anarchist community, and the anarchists are right about everything except trusting Kirk - first not trusting him enough when he could have saved their settlement with technology, but then trusting him too much about their options in his timeline, and the nature of Starfleet (it's not a cooperative association.)

Possibly the most surprising thing I learned is that in the 1970s Uhura's fanon first name was Upendra - it wasn't until the 80s that someone suggested Nyota.

I wasn't entirely expecting the story to be as, well, grim as it was, though I wasn't exactly expecting a happily-ever-after. It did amuse me to see some typos like "indigent" for "indignant," since fanzines were notoriously rife with such errors - which is understandable. Imagine sending drafts to betas through the mail in hard copy. (I did actually do that once or twice in the 90s.)

[somethingusefulfromflorida]

Everyone, do yourselves a favor and listen to Leslie Fish's 1989 anarchist filk album Firestorm: Songs of the Third World War.

Listen from start to finish.

The more things change, the more they stay the same...

[epic-song-lyrics-showdown]

Epic Song Lyrics Round 1, Wave 1, Poll 8

“I remember the view / street lights in the dark blue / the moment I knew / I’d no choice but to love you”

-Abstract (Psychopomp), Hozier

“Those cries and screams - they’re not just dreams, imagination’s lies / ‘God damn the whore, the bitch that bore you killers from the skies!’”

-The Bomber, Vic Tyler and Leslie Fish

Abstract (Psychopomp)-Hozier

Time Stamp: 1:57-2:08

Propaganda:

i recently went through a breakup and this album came out a few weeks after. the first time i heard these lyrics i almost fucking bawled. its so raw to me, and so so tender and vulnerable. it has a sort of resignation to it, reluctant acceptance of the love the lyrics talk about

The Bomber-Vic Tyler and Leslie Fish

Propaganda:

Even in their own mind the pilot is not the hero

Check out the other polls in this wave here.

[fuck-you-upmusicbracket]

Some Kind of Hero (Leslie Fish)

Heir of Grief (Homestuck)

[specialagentartemis]

It's Captain Sisko leading a war at the edge of Federation space, his friends and family who came out here during peacetime now on the front lines. It's Captain Janeway traversing the Delta Quadrant knowing that nobody in history has ever been so far from home before. It's Captain Lovelace building an escape shuttle by cannibalizing pieces of her own station in a desperate attempt to get herself and her people back to Earth. It's Commander Minkowski launching Eiffel towards Earth so somebody on her crew will make it home alive. (It's Minkowski being appalled, distressed, disbelieving at learning that Commander Zhang gave up on getting home and gave the self-destruct order to destroy her own ship with all her crew aboard.) It's the desperation in the narrator's voice in "Sam Jones" when she shouts, "Kate! Get back inside! Someone else will go!" even as she knows there's no other way for any of them to survive this careening orbit around this nowhere sun. It's Epic: The Musical choosing to forefront Odysseus's role as Captain and leader, and to emphasize loyalty to his men and duty to his crew as his driving motivation. The duty and devotion of a Captain to their crew and the solemn desire to get them home safe is just! so!! that's where it's AT!!!