14 - Making Nineteen Eighty-Four Musical

Summary

Nineteen Eighty-Four does not seem to offer the most promising material for singers, rock stars, and opera performers. There is, nevertheless, a vast history of adaptation and appropriation of Orwell’s text, a sub-genre referred to here as ‘rock’n’prole’. This afterlife in music encompasses a wide range of forms and styles, from albums such as David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs (1974), Rage Against The Machine’s The Battle Of Los Angeles (1999), and Muse’s The Resistance (2009) to individual songs such as John Lennon’s ‘Only People’ (1973) and Radiohead’s ‘2+2=5’ (2003). There is also the controversial opera 1984 (2005), composed by Lorin Maazel, which demonstrates yet another vector for musical response to Orwellian dystopia. This chapter traces the history of these responses to Nineteen Eighty-Four in order to consider how musical adaptation brings into focus a key tension in dystopia more generally: that between entertainment and instruction. Does the act of taking Orwell’s novel as source material strip it of its critical content, once transmuted into song? Or does the act of adaptation reveal and make possible new kinds of criticism, aided and abetted by the confluence of text and music?