Book Soundtrack?
My newest brainchild could incur me the hatred of literary novelists everywhere if it caught on with the publishing industry’s Six Sisters. Including myself.In my fantasies – (I emphasize fantasies), one of my many brainstorms (I emphasize brainstorms) to throw out to my publishing team is a brand extension in the form of a music soundtrack…to a novel, as opposed to a film or musical production.
“Oh,” my chiropractor brightened as she pulled my joints. “You mean a soundtrack for readers to listen to as they follow along with your book.”
Um, no. Although that’s a viable idea in itself, I don’t mean background music compiled specifically for the reading experience. Nor am I suggesting a jazzed-up Book on Tape. I mean a compilation CD of works that capture the essence, atmosphere, ideas, rationale, time period, and cultural nuances of my novel. It takes place in Miami-Dade and echoes what the Guardian calls “the juxtaposition of showy wealth with dire pennilessness, the tussle of glitz and decay ” — more specifically, a grittily depressed neighborhood that’s being rapidly transformed into a sybaritic tourist mecca. One obvious choice is to combine throbbing electronica with raw rap numbers..CDs with lyrics in Spanish but “Parental Advisory — Explicit Lyrics” in English.
And we’re thinking outside the box here. Not just salsa, but music representative of the Pan-Latin melting pot outside Little Havana: Dominican merengue, Colombian porro, Puerto Rican bomba and Haitian compas…thrown in with the Europop of the German tourists and entrepreneurs. A little “Shalom Aleichem” and “Avinu Malkeinu” would punctuate the Jewish holidays (and corresponding themes) threading through the text. A Broadway-style standard would represent the recurring showiness of the media industry as well as a literal show key characters promote (a Broadway musical).
Hopefully there really is nothing new under the sun, and if this little golem I made out of clay turns on me, I can point the finger on some other hapless guerilla marketer for this potential onus overload.
But I’m just being hypothetical here.
They actually did that very thing for the Star Wars book “Shadows of the Empire”. The “soundtrack” was composed by somebody named Joel McNeely. I haven’t listened to it in ages, but at one time it received near constant play in my CD player.
Jessica Menn
May 9, 2006