BOC: Heaven Forbid

[Andy Gilham]

> > Gone with Messrs Pearlman and Meltzer, I guess.  You could try
> pasticheing
> > their style, but that would be horrid.  Better to take another tack
> > entirely, IMO.  Anyway most sci-fi is crap :)
> >
> This is a good point that often escapes me.  I forget that a good
> part of BOC's appeal is via sci-fi.

I don't really think of BOC as a sci-fi band (and that's *not* just because
most sci-fi is crap :)).  They've never been afraid to casually drop sf
themes into their lyrics - "Monsters", "Sole Survivor" - but much more
often, their lyrics have just been plain weird.  I don't see a whole lot of
sci-fi on _Tyranny_ or _Secret Treaties_ - certainly not genre sf.  If you
come to it from an sf background, you can interpret songs like "Harvester of
Eyes" in an sf fashion, I suppose, but I tend to think of them as being at a
disturbing angle from consensus reality - a similar appeal to (in another
context) the films of David Lynch.

Shirley's fiction is more of the urban dystopia school, "gritty" and
"realistic", and that comes through in his lyrics.  He's a borderline sf
writer, from my reading of him, what Bruce Sterling calls "slipstream", I
guess. Overlapping with what was fashionably called "cyberpunk" a few yers
ago.

What we really (really) wanted was more Eric van Lustbader lyrics! :)

- Andy

mailto:Andy.Gilham at btinternet.com;
http://www.btinternet.com/~andy.gilham