preprints.org > arts and humanities > humanities > doi: 10.20944/preprints202408.1716.v1 (registering DOI)

Preprint Article Version 1 This version is not peer-reviewed

Version 1 : Received: 23 August 2024 / Approved: 23 August 2024 / Online: 23 August 2024 (11:43:54 CEST)

Since ancient times, music has been instrumental in giving life to the stories we build our identities and cultures around. Music perpetuates myth by storytelling, retelling and updating old stories, and creating new ones. Many musicals, such as The Phantom of the Opera, Les Miserables, Wicked, and Hamilton, have been based on novels or epic poems. I will examine adaptations on a smaller scale, of rock songs based on novels, poems, and/or myths, and look at how, in our time, music creates myth by creating its own heroes and heroines through capital and the star system. In traditional literary and cultural analysis, a distinction was drawn between the natural and the supernatural when discussing literary mythology (Frye, 1957); in the twentieth century, an equivalent distinction was made in works of art that, in Baudrillard’s terminology, make use of the realms of the real and the “hyperreal” (1981). In today’s mythmaking, the supernatural has been largely replaced by the technological, and recent developments blur the line between science fiction and fantasy; tech has become megalotech. Examples can be seen in a number of recent and current songs, as well as films and television shows about music, musicians, and the music business.

music; myth; AI; holograms; science fiction; cults

Arts and Humanities, Humanities

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