The League Of Extraordinary Tracks 4: SHORT SONGS Poll

When Squirrel Nut Zippers came up on the Bird Site polls, I commented “There’s a subset of acts I think of as music for nerds who aren’t music nerds. Characterised by theatricality; quirky subject matter; no specific style but sounds that are orthogonal to the pop of the day: if retro, it’s out-of-time, not nostalgic.”

I fear I have nominated a Music For Nerds song this week. I don’t know Emperor X, though evidently some other folks here do; I found this song from the Wikipedia article Long-term nuclear waste warning messages (which I had accessed for the purpose of adding a convoluted joke to an office Q&A). If you’re unfamiliar with this bit of nerd-internet lore, it’s about the problem of how to communicate a warning message that will be interpretable over the time scale for which nuclear waste remains dangerous:

“French author Françoise Bastide and the Italian semiotician Paolo Fabbri proposed the breeding of so-called “radiation cats” or “ray cats”. Cats have a long history of cohabitation with humans, and this approach assumes that their domestication will continue indefinitely. These radiation cats would change significantly in color when they came near radioactive emissions and serve as living indicators of danger.

“To transport the message, the importance of the cats would need to be set in the collective awareness through fairy tales and myths. Those fairy tales and myths in turn could be transmitted through poetry, music and painting. As a response, the podcast 99% Invisible commissioned musician Emperor X to write a song about ray cats for a 2014 episode about long-term nuclear waste warning messages. The song, called “10,000-Year Earworm to Discourage Settlement Near Nuclear Waste Repositories (Don’t Change Color, Kitty)”, was designed to be ‘so catchy and annoying that it might be handed down from generation to generation over a span of 10,000 years.'”

I don’t really listen to podcasts, so I don’t know anything about 99% Invisible, and I think that there are problems with Bastide and Fabbri’s proposal as well as Emperor X’s execution of the concept. (They seem very confident that Radiation Cats would be preserved as valued anticipators of doom rather than scapegoated as vessels of that doom, which I think radically misunderstands humanity’s understanding of cause and effect! Also the song is indie-folk catchy, not nursery-rhyme catchy, which is good for our purposes but not for theirs.)

But I think what I do like about “10,000-Year Earworm to Discourage Settlement Near Nuclear Waste Repositories (Don’t Change Color, Kitty)” is the way it acts as post-apocalyptic science fiction. Even though it’s written to be a transmission to a disaster-struck future, it comes off instead as an artefact from that far-distant time: a place where cats are treasured yet prone to mysterious inflorescence, where settlements are permanent enough to grow crops but transient enough to be cheerfully packed up when danger comes; and when nuclear radiation is a phenomenon whose meaning is lost but danger is still known. Maybe it’s a partner to another recent work of nerd-sci-fi, Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play, a piece of theatre that imagines a dying world where the only surviving cultural artefact of our times is The Simpsons episode Cape Feare.