Worldbuilding Weekend Prompt #176 - Music and the State
Welcome to the next in an ongoing series of writing prompts in the Worldbuilding community !
I'm aiming to post one of these each Sunday. They aren't a replacement for the excellent daily prompts from @worldbuilding they're just an extra opportunity if you have a writing itch you want to scratch. 😀
Image generated by AI in Wombo.art
The prompt this week is - Music and the State
I'll be interested to see people's thoughts on this ! Music is one of the most powerful emotional drivers I can think of; the right tune can change a mood, inspire people, or calm anxiety. It is also something which gets widely forgotten when it comes to worldbuilding.
But how the state and music interact is a fascinating subject all of it's own. On one level, the state can commission or encourage music to support it's goals - think about national anthems, and the incredible way Soviet Russia used patriotic songs to motivate it's citizens and soldiers. Sometimes, the state can co-opt popular songs to it's service. The Marseillaise is a prime example, one of the world's bloodiest national anthems adopted by the state after Rouget de Lisle wrote it to encourage the levee en masse.
But on the other side of the coin, music can be a devastating weapon against the state. Revolutionary anthems can motivate the masses and mock those in power (for example La Carmagnole, which used a traditional country dance melody with new lyrics totally insulting Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette). Even now, governments periodically try to ban certain songs and tunes or persuade the media to not play them. The Sex Pistols Anarchy in the UK is a prime example.
Tell me about a song from your sci-fi or fantasy setting ! Who wrote it ? Why ? Did the government pay them to, or are they opposed to those in power ? Who listens to it or sings it ? What is it's message and it's power ?
Just to add a bit of spice to things, the two entries I most like (and are linked in comments to this post, so I can find them !) that are posted by midnight (GMT) next Saturday will each get a prize of one Hive SBI.
This link will take you to the FAQ where you can read more about Hive SBI - it's a project I thoroughly support because it gives both the donor and winner a steady trickle of passive income paid out in the form of upvotes on posts.
Guidelines
I stole these guidelines straight from @worldbuilding prompts (I hope that's okay !), I couldn't have written them any better myself....
- Prompt replies may be anything! Art, game assets, stories, worldbuilding details, fake wiki entries, maps... whatever you want to create!
- Please ensure you reply to this post with a link to your reply
- Posting in or cross-posting to the Worldbuilding community is highly encouraged
- Use the hashtag #worldbuilding
- Prompt replies can be any length.
- AI images to illustrate your posts are fine, as long as they are credited to whichever software you used to make them
- Posts using AI to create the text are not acceptable; these prompts (and community) are a way to expand and have fun with human imagination, and I firmly believe AI will never be able to replicate the human spark.
Some other neat communities for writing that you might want to check out are:
It can be a lot of fun to mix and match our prompts with some of these other community prompts.
People who have asked to be tagged;
@sherah
If you'd like to be tagged in on these prompts, let me know and I'll happily add you 🙂