Billy Joel and Frank Herbert: “The Stories Must Flow!”
Maybe people still need storytelling?
I. We’re All On Dune, Now
A month ago, Joel released his first new song — a ballad called “Turn the Lights Back On” (2024) — in 17 years; and I’m happy to report it’s an instant classic. They made a pretty cool video for it, too (a million views a week so far).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOf6CMbHPuA
So, in an era where a lot of music fans have no longer even heard of Joel, this septuagenarian released a hit that reached #3 worldwide and #2 in the U.S. And of course, with its subtext of rueful reminiscence back on one’s own life, it certainly struck a chord with my cohort. “It made me cry,” is the most-often used refrain in reviews.
Meanwhile, with yesterday’s release of Dune, Part Two, Herbert’s seminal science-fiction work, Dune (1965), has now been fully rendered in cinema in a masterful retelling.
For those who don’t know: from the Sixties through the Nineties, Joel and Herbert each had their own twenty year runs where they somewhat dominated their respective fields.
From 1973–93, Joel logged the lion’s share of his 160 millions records sold (29th most all-time of all music performers!) and was ubiquitous on the radio. Entire stations of ‘soft rock’ were referred to jokingly as “Rock and Joel”.
And, only a few years before that, before MTV brought music to our TVs, Herbert released his six-book “Dune Chronicles” between 1965–85. These were led by the first book “Dune” (20 million books sold, the most for any science-fiction novel, all-time). Both of these artists are considered masters. Legends, even.
These works of art (Joel’s latest song, the Dune movies, as well as the original novel “Dune” and the other five books in the “Dune Chronicles”) all touch a place in my soul that longs for this kind of long-form, heartfelt, classic storytelling in a world where pop culture doesn’t seem to have room for real storytelling, anymore. Recently, Ted Gioia, the great musiclologist/essayist/cultural observer shared a graphic to show how culture has been flattened and sped up across the board:
That looks about right to me. Right now, entire generations are too addicted and distracted to notice that the Internet — with its social media algorithms and vapid pursuit of our data in every second of our online lives — has become our desert planet.
But who are our Fremen (“free men”)? Who will be our “Voice from The Outer World”? Maybe it has to be us (writers)?
II. From Hardscrabble Childhoods to Success
We have examples. Both men came from humble beginnings. Joel’s dad had fled Nazi Germany, while Herbert was briefly a photo-journalist in the Navy during the war.
Herbert (b. 1920) had grown up in the Olympic peninsula of Washington state a very smart child — reading well before he was even in Kindergarten. For him, times were so tough during the Great Depression that he moved in with an aunt and uncle in Oregon, graduating from high school there. The Oregon Dunes (an amazing attraction to this day, well worth visiting) were the inspiration for his Dune novels.
Joel’s childhood (b. 1949) was tough enough that he learned boxing to protect himself on the streets of New York. A smart kid, also, he nonetheless dropped out of high school in favor of pursuing his music gigs as a teenager. Around his sixteenth birthday, he’d already played on the demo version of “Leader of the Pack” (a 1964 hit for the Shangri-Las). But by 1964, Herbert had been a semi-pro fiction writer for a dozen years to some critical, if not commercial acclaim. By 1970, Joel had been a pro musician for six years and his first record album was a flop (largely due to technical difficulties in the recording).
So, how good were these guys?
Well, Joel, never one to mince words, answered that question for himself in an interview around thirty years ago. He said: “I think I’m a good songwriter. But, in an era of lousy songwriting, that makes me a great songwriter.” Mind you: that was in the late 1980s! Since then? Hip-hop sampling, auto-tune, and computerized music producing has flattened pop music to the extent that only one number one song in the entire decade of the 2010s had a key change.
The punch-line: If you think that all music today sounds the same, that’s probably because it does. This is why Joel’s ballad shines through like a lighthouse beacon in a fog. Turn the lights back on, indeed.
III. Dune-Wop! Shoo-bee, Doo-Bee Dune-Wop!
But, that’s just me spouting off as yet another fan — I am no musician. I do, however, partake in some writing now and again. This is why the story of Dune’s rise to prominence is one of my favorites. If you’ve read this far, you probably already know that Herbert — even after getting large chunks of the novel published in Analog magazine — had it rejected by twenty different publishers before famously getting it accepted by Chilton Books, a house most famous for printing auto repair manuals. It’s a great story.
But you might not know that then, just as now, it faced a lot of criticism by the literati — that is, before a consensus formed about its greatness.
And, of course, even after Dune garnered a Nebula and a Hugo, it had to be slowly assimilated by (probably Earth Day conscious) readers across the country before it really had a resurgence in the mid-70s. For the record, it was the publication of the third book, Children of Dune, that seems to spark the surge in sales for all three books, overall. Maybe there’s a lesson there, too.
Upon Dune’s release: In Galaxy Science Fiction, Algis Budrys, a oft-time hugo-nominated author himself and probably the top SF critic in the field at the time, lambasted it (while also throwing shade at Heinlein, Poul Anderson, and Rudyard Kipling (?!)).
My favorite review was from Spider Robinson, who summed up Dune’s greatness pretty well, later on in 1976, after re-reading it as part of his review for the first three books of the Dune Chronicles: “But minor beefs got swept away by the sheer brilliance of the writing, the astonishing depth of background and characterization, the incredible scope of Herbert’s imaginative vision. Dune is a tapestry so vast and intricately worked you excuse the fact that the third unicorn form the left has five legs…”
Of course, these days even the ‘sheer brilliance of the writing’ becomes a sticking point. This is because genre fiction has also been flattened and sped up by our modern tech and algorithm culture.
I hate to say it, but more and more, the modern reader maybe simply can’t handle what used to constitute great writing. Try finding a science-fiction novel on amazon today that uses True Omniscient narration — the hardest one to do well, btw — the way Herbert does. Or what about Dune’s 187,000 word-count, roughly double the size of the average sci-fi novel today?
I have to wonder, are people doing the same thing with Joel’s song? Are they getting 25 seconds in and going, “ugh, this this — what’s the word I’m looking for? …MELODY. These LYRICS, it’s all so wordy. I-I just can’t take it. It kicks me out of the song.” Gosh, I hope not.
What passes for merit in the literary criticism today? No one seems to really know.
IV. Conclusion and Solution: “Show Them Paradise.”
The funny thing is, using Herbert’s novel length as an indication of it’s epic scope probably undersells it. That’s because his prose is undeniably dense. It’s a fire-hose of world-building, but done so deftly that you can still absorb it without any kind of anaphylactic reaction. Here are a couple excepts from Chapter One:
“He’s awake and listening to us,” said the old woman. “Sly little rascal.” She chuckled. “But royalty has need of slyness. And if he’s really the Kwisatz Haderach … well….”
Within the shadows of his bed, Paul held his eyes open to mere slits. Two bird-bright ovals — the eyes of the old woman — seemed to expand and glow as they stared into his.
“Sleep well, you sly little rascal,” said the old woman. “Tomorrow you’ll need all your faculties to meet my gom jabbar.”
And she was gone, pushing his mother out, closing the door with a solid thump.
Paul lay awake wondering: What’s a gom jabbar?
In all the upset during this time of change, the old woman was the strangest thing he had seen.
Your Reverence.
And the way she called his mother Jessica like a common serving wench instead of what she was — a Bene Gesserit Lady, a duke’s concubine and mother of the ducal heir.
Is a gom jabbar something of Arrakis I must know before we go there? he wondered.
or
The Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam sat in a tapestried chair watching mother and son approach. Windows on each side of her overlooked the curving southern bend of the river and the green farmlands of the Atreides family holding, but the Reverend Mother ignored the view. She was feeling her age this morning, more than a little petulant. She blamed it on space travel and association with that abominable Spacing Guild and its secretive ways. But here was a mission that required personal attention from a Bene Gesserit-with-the-Sight. Even the Padishah Emperor’s Truthsayer couldn’t evade that responsibility when the duty call came.
Damn that Jessica! the Reverend Mother thought. If only she’d borne us a girl as she was ordered to do!”
I compare this with what is supposedly the best thing going now, Rebecca Yarros’s Romantasy, “Fourth Wing” and its clunky world-building. I won’t quote it but it went something like…’I am in fear for my life, what shall I do? I know — I’ll calm myself by mentally reciting the backstory of my kingdom and its politics…’ I mean, that’s just sophomoric.
// Yarros fans: Don’t be alarmed — I think Yarros’ writing is fine. I’m enjoying it well enough — all I’m saying is that she’s obviously on more solid ground with the romance aspects of storytelling than the Fantasy elements.
So far, it’s Twilight with Dragons, which isn’t so bad. It’s still in my TBR pile. I’m picking away at it. Peace. //
But just as with everything else, the entire genre fiction ecosystem seems to be deteriorating — the skills of both writers and readers. What do to?
Well, as Paul says: “You cannot back into the future.” (p. 585).
I suggest we all start working on new stories; but, doing them in a way that recaptures genre fiction (I recommend Science Fantasy, like Dune, for starters) using classic stories and classic techniques, like omniscient POV (I truly never get tired of championing that).
Just as with Star Wars in the 70s and Harry Potter in the 90s, maybe the world is once again ready for a return to basics. And, just as with Herbert (and Stephen King, and J. K. Rowling, and Stephen R. Donaldson, and on and on) such writing can probably expect to face resistance from the publishing establishment.
But let’s tell the stories that demand telling and not just the ones desert jinn are asking for.
~~~
I also wanted to link to a few of my science-fiction works here on Medium and elsewhere:
√ The War to End All Wars (speaking of “Twilight”)
√ Checking it Twice (Christmas in March)
√ Edgelord (noir, dystopian…maybe more spec fic than sci-fi)
Spring is coming, folks! BE well.
_Mark
