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August 25, 2021
Seb Doubinsky's Playlist for His Novel "Paperclip"
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Seb Doubinsky's novel Paperclip is a dark, funny, and disturbing dystopian view of our future.
Brian Evenson wrote of the book:
"Paperclip, Doubinsky’s latest edition to the deft political scalpel that is City-States Cycle, offers a collage of competing voices that perfectly encapsulates the underbelly of our contemporary moment. Bleak, dangerous, and grimly funny, this novel moves at a rapid clip into a place that our own future seems to be leading us."
In his own words, here is Seb Doubinsky's Book Notes music playlist for his novel Paperclip:
Paperclip was inspired by an exhibition I saw in 2018 on the pop-art painter James Rosenquist. The title of my novel actually comes from one of his paintings. I felt, at the times, that it was extremely relevant with the pre-Covid world in which we were/are living. I wanted to write a novel about the notion of “wish”, declined through various characters, and the pop-art collage style seemed to fit perfectly, as well as its dark humor. In his autobiography, Rosenquist says that his art should actually be called “anti-pop art” - and my book is exactly that. My characters are all caught in their dream, and either brutally wake up from it, try to resist it, die, or perpetuate it. It is a tragi-comic criss-cross in which all the walls that we call “reality” are shattered, one way or another. It isn’t, at the same time, a totally pessimist book, but it doesn’t buy into the “pursuit of happiness” mythos. It actually tries, very humbly, to destroy it.
1) The Fall - “Extricate”
I have always loved The Fall since I discovered them in 1984 (which was, actually, the perfect year to discover them) and their music could be the entire soundtrack of the novel, with Mark E. Smith gargling in the background. Provoking, annoying, mesmerizing, this song that reveals what language really is about: to extricate meaning. Or, at least, some sort of meaning.
2) Powersolo - “Plasma Crystal Dope”
I have known Kim, the founder and lead singer of Powersolo since 1992. He was a young Danish psychobilly at the time, but open to all sorts of musics. I gave him an LP of Pussy Galore, “La Historia De La Musica Rock”, not knowing that twenty years later he was back John Spencer during his European tour. Powersolo is one of the very few bands that have kept their musical integrity while foraging new sounds and styles. Not one album is similar, which is the same with my own novels. As the drug Synth plays an important role in Paperclip, this song is the perfect choice.
3) Grant Hart - “Wernher Von Braun”
I used to love Hüsker Dü, and when they split, I thought that Grant Hart’s sole projects like Nova Mob, were fabulously interesting. This song hits two birds with one stone for me: Nova Mob, the name of Grant hart’s band, is lifted from one of my all-time favorite writers, William S. Burroughs, and one of the main characters in “Paperclip”, Kurt Wagner, is the grandson of a Nazi rocket scientist, directly inspired by Wernher Von Braun. Double whammy.
4) Ween - Little Birdy
This song is one of my all-time Ween favorites - lazy, funny and very weird. It actually illustrates perfectly one of the characters, Waldo, who transforms into a bird and reflects about the world under his wings. But not in a Jonathan Livingstone kind of way. At all.
5) Tweak Bird - Sky Ride
I recently discovered this incredible band, which was produced by the Melvins’s frontman. Their wacky hippie-metal is perfect for the zany aspects of the book, and works especially well for the couple Jet and Velma, who are into magick and the occult.
6) Rokia Traoré - Dounia
A part of my novel takes place in the imaginary African city-state of SankaraVille, where a group of women rebels have led a revolution and seized power. Rokia Traoré’s songs could be the perfect background music to all the scenes taking place there.
7) The Velvet Underground - Heroin
To me, the Velvet Underground has always been the '60s reality-check. While the hippie movement was dying out in a LSD bubble, the Velvet Underground bluntly sang about bad drugs, gay sex, violence and murder. I see “Paperclip” as a sort of a parent to that attitude. Just replace hippies with young professionals and LSD with mindfulness.
8) Jimmy Cliff - You can get it if you really want
The secret theme behind “Paperclip” is “wish”. To wish is to want to transform one’s reality. Everybody wishes good or bad things. All the characters in the novel have a wish. But you always have to be careful what you wish for. Or not. But the last ones are the happy few.
9) Federico Balducci - Poèmes sans titre III
Federico Balducci is a fabulous avant-garde and ambient musician, who has written two musical scores based om my novels (“Tout Descend”, which is an adaptation of “Absinth”, and “Vita”, which was inspired by “Missing Signal”). Federico Balducci’s soundscapes are absolutely perfect for the urban atmosphere of the book, both challenging and playful. I imagine well a movie based on “Paperclip” with this number in the soundtrack.
10) Trees Speak - Chamber of Frequencies
Very recently discovered this amazing band, whose alliance of math rock and Kraut leads to hypnotic melodies. There are a lot of mind-bending things in “Paperclip” and energy. And some melancholy, too, if you scratch the surface. Life always win, but the victory is always bitter.
11) Juka Trashy - Have a brunch
This shoegaze number by Danish artist Juka is, in my eyes, the perfect concluding number for “Paperclip”, with its mixture of melancholy and rage, fitting well with the sarcastic vision built in the fiction. I want “paperclip” to be a novel that makes the reader re-connect with reality, but through a 10 000 volts electrical jolt. This song is an excellent illustration of that feeling and my intention.
Seb Doubinsky is a bilingual writer born in Paris in 1963. His novels, all set in a dystopian universe revolving around competing cities-states, have been published in the UK and in the USA. He currently lives with his family in Aarhus, Denmark, where he teaches at the university.
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