As this contentious Presidential election draws to its conclusion, let’s hope Royce Flippin’s election-inspired political thriller, “Soundscape,” takes on a life of its own after the election, like Joe Klein’s “Primary Colors” after the 1992 Clinton campaign.
In the spirit of Carl Hiaasen’s popular novels, “Soundscape” is both a fast-paced tale of suspense, and a political satire. The year is 2024. Hillary Clinton, the democratic candidate of 2016, has lost the Presidential election, due to an engineered terrorist scandal. The Republicans have run the country as a fascist regime ever since. Pot is legal, but rock and roll is banned, at least in recorded form. The major cities have become blue states, but even they keep all the Bohemian activities restricted to walled Urban Zones, or “UZs.” 2024’s Bernie Sanders-like Democratic Presidential candidate is under house arrest, due to another manufactured scandal.
In this mix comes a young, otherwise apolitical physicist, who happens to love rock music and has a stash of banned recordings. He has invented a means of long distance communication, using quantum physics, which cannot be monitored, or tracked. The government has gotten wind of it, and of course, wants to control it. They use possession of banned music as pretext to arrest him, but he escapes just in time and flees to the Urban Zones. There he is helped by a network of activists, many of them musicians, who are determined to bring the truth to light and bring down the Republicans. Most of the musicians in the UZs are “channelers,” who take on the personae of classic rock artists, much like today’s crop of tribute bands, except that they must pass the music down in a kind of oral tradition, since the recordings are banned.
Meanwhile, the Democratic candidate is going to be allowed to make a speech, but since the government controls the airwaves, no one will hear it except a small live audience in New York, unless our scientist hero and his friends can get his invention there in time. So begins a perilous cross country chase from California to New York. “Soundcapes” is filled with suspenseful plot twists, a host of colorful characters, and even a bit of sex and romance. It also has a thought-provoking sub-text about the role of popular music in American culture, political and otherwise.
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