Guest post written by author Khan Wong
In past chapters of life, Khan has published poetry and played cello in an earnest folk-rock duo. As an internationally known hula hoop teacher and performer, he’s toured with a circus, taught workshops all over the world, and produced circus arts shows in San Francisco. He’s worked in the nonprofit arts for many years, most recently as an arts funder for a public sector grantmaking agency.
When I was 10 years old, I was obsessed with the band KISS. The songs were over my head, and the music harder than I really liked, but I was extremely taken by the personas of the band members. Gene Simmons’s demon character was scary, and Ace Frehley’s lightning guy and Peter Criss’s cat dude were cool, but it was Paul Stanley’s “starchild” that really captured my imagination. It was that star on his face, that suggestion of otherworldliness in a space-creature/scifi way, that particularly resonated with me. Later on, as the world moved into the ‘80s and I entered my teens, MTV blew up and a young woman named Madonna wiggled her belly button into the world’s consciousness. And while the images of KISS stirred up a vague sort of yearning to escape humdrum existence, it was the emergence of the grimy street urchin and her songs about lucky stars and holidays that connected music and persona for me. That is, the music I listened to, and my own persona.
From that connection rose an understanding of how the music one chose as the soundtrack of one’s life could provide a sort of guide to how to be in the world. I instinctively grasped, in a way I wouldn’t figure out how to articulate until later in life, how pop idols are blank slates for the projections of their fans’ own desires and fantasies and longing. I was simultaneously taken by the effect my favorite popstars had on me, and the socio-psycho-emotional process by which that effect took hold. From my current vantage point in life, as an adult looking back at his adolescent fandoms, I see how taste in music is a declaration of identity. It still kind of is for grown-ups, but not to the same degree as when we were kids.
My fascination with pop culture has come to encompass books, TV, movies and games, but none hold quite the same fascination for me as pop music (by which I mean all genres of popular music, not just category Pop) and its ancillary culture(s). A culture’s creative and artistic expression reveals how it sees itself, what it values, what it longs for. Sure, our museums and symphonies are generally lauded as ideals, as the pinnacles of human expression. Not without reason, of course. But for me, the real action, who we are as a culture in actuality, not just in aspiration, shows up in pop culture. Our pop stars (and movie stars and other types of celebrities) are screens upon which regular folk project their hopes and dreams. Pop culture, and music especially, is the vital, pumping heart and throb of life, without the intellectual remove of the so-called “high arts.” For me, pop music is an expression of our collective id.
Creating playlists is a common tool, along with mood-boards/aesthetics, that writers today use to get into the vibe of what they’re writing. (They can also serve as procrastination tools that allow us to feel like we’re working on the book without actually writing – but I digress!) Beyond vibe though, music can shape the specifics of the worlds we create. My taste in music has evolved as music has evolved, and I’ve come to particularly love beat-driven music, the sounds of techno and hip-hop and house – “futuristic” sounds, all – and I adore how today’s pop music incorporates all of these influences. My favorite flavor of pop would probably be what’s considered dance-pop (see: my love of early Madonna, who came to prominence in her club-kid phase). That kind of cross-pollination deeply informed the breakthrough moment when I was casting about for a new idea, seeking to build a new world for a project I hoped would be the One that got me published – what turned out to be The Circus Infinite.
Although she is not a major character in the book, the pop singer Jasmine Jonah was one of the first figures in my fictional world that came to me. In terms of her look and personality, I imagined a Star Trek-style alien version of Ariana Grande. (Even though she’s represented on the playlist by the songs “Strict Machine” by Goldfrapp and “Lights” by Ellie Goulding.) She’s that character that has a small, but key, role. She is physically in the presence of, and interacting with, the book’s main cast for only a brief time, but she appears throughout the book, an omnipresent pop culture figure whose image is everywhere, whose songs are always playing in the background. She is a hybrid, a mixed-species person who, in her art, draws from the musical and artistic traditions of all her (human and alien) heritages. But how would such a figure come to be?
This brings me to my favorite worldbuilding technique: to begin with the characters, and reverse engineer the culture(s) that produce them. This pop singer, although not a main character in this story, is representative of the broader cultural milieu in which the main characters operate. Her career and rise to fame, in story, is emblematic of the cultural shifts in the society the titular circus and its denizens operate within. Just as real life pop stars serve as a sort of screen onto which the culture at large, and their audiences in particular, project, so to is Jasmine a blank slate that embodies the longings and anxieties of the fictional alien cultures of The Circus Infinite. She’s more than that, of course, and should I get the opportunity to write more stories set in this universe, we’ll see her again and explore this idea in greater depth.
But for now, in this book, we see how different characters see her, we learn what makes her music and her stardom unique and unprecedented for this world, and in so doing we learn about this world, its social dynamics, its attitudes towards the cultural influence of others. All of this serves as the backdrop for the main storyline which is not about any of this stuff at all, really. But this is the world, this is the setting, and like our world, its pop music and its associated culture reveals a lot of what it values, of what it finds exciting, of what fuels the dreams of some, and the fears of others.
