As an aesthetic utility, Hash is highly invested in music. Bands, genres, and beats are embedded in how many of the characters in Hash describe the world around them and share their experiences. Even the technology plays back to the early ages of DJs, LPs, and FM: Tommy Eighty-Eight‘s headphones have the nostalgic bulk of yesterday’s studio gear, the ubiquitous flexible “pancake” computers carried by the City of the Future’s denizens are a quiet, digital homage to the faithful, ultimately surpassed, 7-inch EP vinyl record.
I’d like to show you around a few albums and singles that contributed to the world of Hash.
Things Can Only Get Better (Extended Version), Howard Jones [Listen/Read]
The City of the Future – the flagship of the Information Economy and the backdrop for Hash, is an idea in action, poised on a topplepoint; one way or the other, the City will act as a transit for a new way of life yet to be determined.
This feeling of an era and its emblems acting as a historical waystation is no coincidence. The universal feeling of being almost somewhere, yet hamstrung by our own limitations, was the dominant Weltschmerz and composite optimistic response of the 1980′s and its thematic icon, Howard Jones.
Even by looks, Jones embodies some of the New Urban Urchin look that I think of as being distinctly Tommy Eighty-Eight. Of course, Tommy is darker, more motor-oil and steel baton, but as much as Jones embodied his own time, so too does Tommy represent his. Howard Jones always struck me as being fully invested in the spirit of the era despite the lingering cultural rumors of its throwaway and transient nature.
That fearless investiture in the context of every everlasting now is the soul of Tommy Eighty-Eight. Same goes for the crazy hair.
The Nightfly – Donald Fagen [Listen/Read]
One of Tommy’s first encounters in Hash is with his old crew – Moses Iscariot and Suicide Super Dave, the two halves of “Future’s Twelve Waves” – a late-night live City music remix crew that echoes yesterday’s pre-satellite disc jockeys.
Fagen is in himself a consummate professional (and possibly one of the most boring interview subjects ever caught on transcript), but in “The Nightfly” he created a character – Lester the Nightfly, an isolated, underutilized and ultimately lonely late-night disc jockey – and a post-atomic world in which to place him, both of which feel real and alive, and both of which are represented in Hash.
Though the emotions in the album run the racetrack from wide-eyed optimism (“I.G.Y.”) to the resignation at accepting a last cigarette before a firing squad (“The Goodbye Look”), the archipelago of settings – Cuba, Baton Rouge, Chinatown, New York, Paris – are held together as a collective of fragments by Lester’s into-the-ether radio broadcasts “from the Foot of Mt. Belzoni”; a mysterious location hinted to be in the middle of largely nowhere. Lester himself receives call-ins on his radio show from the type of paranoids that hint at a coming cultural apocalypse.
Hash adopts and modernizes this theme of cultural islands in the desert of time and space, and its characters, like “Nightfly”‘s Lester, find both connection and further isolation in the creation, distribution, and reinterpretation of music, relying upon the updated tools of their trade as skillfully – and tenuously – as Lester relied on his.
There are more examples coming over the next few weeks. Hash is a big world, full of connections back to our shared cultural history as creators, remixers, and communicators. Stay tuned – the broadcasts will continue.