Pitchfork Book Club highlights today’s best new music books.
Even as readers have grown accustomed to the divination powers of science-fiction writers in these dystopian times, the plot points of Sarah Pinsker’s 2019 novel, A Song for a New Day, are next-level prescient. A sudden pandemic and a society changed by life under quarantine? Check. A people’s rebellion against draconian anti-assembling measures and questions of how we live in the future? Check. A world under curfew, reliant on delivery drones, and without mass gatherings, including live music? Check and check. Yet the value of Pinsker’s near-future story of rock musician Luce Cannon and music exec Rosemary Laws goes beyond eerie prognostication. The Nebula Award-winning book also allows us to reconsider the apparatus at the heart of contemporary music, weighing its commercial and social principles against the rituals and roles live music has long served.
The world into which A Song for a New Day was born—hit by a virus, on the verge of economic fallout, with an uprising against the policing of Black lives and a reassessment of society’s core values—has emboldened the book’s central conversation. At a moment when the power of organized voices to dream up a “new normal” is growing, and the civil usefulness of technocratic establishments is up for debate, questions such as, “What does the music world we want to live in look like? And can we do something about it?” are worth pondering as potential flights of radical re-imagination. Pinkser’s blend of real and fictitious dystopia suddenly signifies both our present and potential futures.
Reimagining society through song is certainly among the guiding principles espoused by Luce Cannon. A Song for a New Day introduces readers to the punky singer-songwriter with a budding hit on the eve of a sold-out headlining show, which takes place the same night as a catastrophic nationwide event (part terrorist act, part virus outbreak, but never fully explored). Luce’s show becomes famous as the “last concert” before society was ground to a halt. Her story is juxtaposed with that of Rosemary Laws, a twenty-something music fan we meet years after the event, remotely laboring on the customer service line for an online goods-and-services megacorp from the safety of her parents’ still-quarantined rural home. Rosemary’s professional competence gets her a bonus in the form of an invitation to her first concert, which in the post-event world are produced as holograms by the entertainment giant StageHoloLive. The show is life-changing (“She’d felt for the first time like she was inside a song, that a song was a living thing”), and soon Rosemary starts working for SHL as a talent recruiter, looking for new musicians. Her first assignment is in Baltimore, where she walks into an illegal club called (cue: bonus contextual symbolism) 2020 and run by Luce, the scene’s éminence grise.
Rosemary’s job is essentially to infiltrate the scene and convince musicians to sign with SHL. But as she finds herself in a post-apocalyptic city, embracing the community and experiencing a series of important firsts—the power of live sound and artist-audience interactions, a repudiation of establishment values, complexities of creative relationships that go beyond the producer-consumer—Rosemary ponders her responsibility to the job versus the people around her. It’s a balance that proves untenable by her employer’s practices of undermining the local cultures whose musicians they poach. So the novel’s final third finds Rosemary trying to atone for her role as an unwitting destroyer, by presenting Luce with a platform for the singer’s broader humanist message. The anthemic big-rock ending is a just a page-turn away, and does not disappoint.
Much of Pinsker’s most vivid and visceral writing comes when she describes her protagonists’ interactions with music. Rosemary’s by-the-book life is blown open in her discovery of music’s physical power. “The guitars swallowed every inch of space in the room, filling the air and replacing the oxygen in her lungs,” Pinsker writes about a show at the 2020. “The kick drum rose through her bones; the bass mimicked her pulse, or her pulse mimicked the bass.” Presented in the third person, Rosemary’s sections are the bildungsroman of a young obsessive mapping her own route. By contrast, Luce narrates her own chapters, expertly navigating the musical world she escaped into from her Brooklyn Hasidic upbringing, nurturing its many guises. It’s there when she describes composing (“I wrote the lyrics to a song I wasn’t yet prepared to put to music… I locked this one into order, painstakingly, letter by letter”). Or why she is running her secret club (“either a shrine to rock as it was or an attempt to build something better”). Or describing her post-event worldview (“‘Fear is a virus. Music is a virus and a vaccine and a cure’”).
It matters that both characters identify as queer—as does Pinsker, who also plays in bands in Baltimore. Putting forth members of a marginalized community as protagonists draped in the well-worn cloak of lives saved by rock’n’roll—a salvation often ministered by Patti Smith/Springsteen-like poetic spiritualism, but also historically informed by civil rights and gender liberations, DIY origins, and cultural shifts—reasserts that cliché’s once-mythical power. Before rockist patriarchy industrialized its youthful energy, the possibility of music contributing to remaking the world was not a marketing bullet point but a truth deeply held by many. And if not the collective outer world, then certainly the personal inner one. It is a truth that Luce embodies, and that Rosemary grows to recognize. Yet she also believes corporate music platforms can amplify and optimize that truth’s message. So, where should the balance between music’s SEO and its spiritual power vet out?
If A Song for a New Day does not specifically jump into questions around streaming-music models and live-music economies of scale, it is certainly not hard to see the real-world parallels behind Pinsker’s literary veil. Consider the most straightforward question New Day’s plot raises in our current environment: How do you produce safe live music events? In the book, society’s fears are taken advantage of by a collaboration between government health regulations and StageHoloLive’s disaster capitalism-style land-grab. In our society, when “live music now” is not presented as right-wing code for American individualism, it is driven by expansive economics. Organizations like Live Nation and agencies like Paradigm claim they’re faltering, despite massive reported valuations. Their model of tiered artist and tour monopolies has placed musicians in a technocratic hamster wheel, their livelihoods reliant on participation, since the value of recorded work has plummeted. Most live-music headlines are centered not on the need to support actual venues, which have been its community centers and now find themselves in crisis, but on far-fetched proposals (drive-in shows or concertgoers walking through disinfectant mists) and alternate strategies (cutting musicians’ performance fees or monetizing the livestream industry), ultimately serving market-share interests. The reaction to a crisis is doubling down on the failing parts of the status quo.
And yet, as in Pinsker’s novel, it’s not the power of live music itself that is failing this moment. New York City, at least, is teeming with sound and life as people fill the streets in unprecedented numbers. Jazz musicians stoke protests and jubilees, playing moving concerts and tapping into the music’s protest tradition. Sound systems proliferate throughout historically Black neighborhoods in Brooklyn, whether at regular block parties or, in one case, a pop-up Paradise Garage. Like events at the 2020, these spontaneous happenings have the feel of community-guided Temporary Autonomous Zones, establishing the required equilibrium between individual and collective safety while reinforcing live music’s world-altering energy. They feel apt for a moment that needs us to thoughtfully, radically reinvent music for the here and now, a manifestation of independence and righteousness that would make Luce Cannon proud.
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