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Soul Music (novel): Difference between revisions
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The 16th ''[[Discworld]]'' novel, and third in the Death theme: much more a sequel to the first Death book, ''[[Discworld/Mort|Mort]]'', than the second, ''[[Discworld/Reaper Man|Reaper Man]]''.
There are two interconnected plots: in the first, the deaths of Mort and Ysabell in a car(t) crash cause another case of [[Death Takes a Holiday]] after a [[Heroic BSOD]], leading to his "granddaughter" (Mort and Ysabell's daughter) Susan taking over The Duty, and incidentally becoming one of Disc fandom's favourite characters. She only met her grandfather once or twice as a young child, and afterwards was raised by her parents to take a very cold and rational view of things, which is not much of a survival trait on the Disc.
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Unfortunately for the young [[The Rock Star|"Musics With Rocks In" Star]], supernatural forces have conspired that he should live fast...and die young. Can Susan fight fate and save his life?
Was made (along with ''[[Discworld/Wyrd Sisters|Wyrd Sisters]]'') into an [[Animated Adaptation]]. The L-space entry is [http://www.lspace.org/books/apf/soul-music.html here], and explains the numerous sly references to famous bands and songs. A fan-created expanded version is [http://wiki.lspace.org/wiki/Book:Soul_Music/Annotations here] and picks up the slack since the official annotated Pratchett file has not been updated for six years.
[[Don't Explain the Joke|This novel's title is a pune,]] [[Running Gag|or play on words,]] on (of course) [[Soul Music|the kind of African-American music that arose in the '50s and '60s and enjoys a bizarrely high level of popularity in Britain today]].
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** Quoth the Raven, on why he wanted to come to a battlefield: "Carrion regardless"
** The Archchancellor calling music "a world of hertz".
* [[Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking]]:
{{quote|"[Music With Rocks in It] made you want to kick down walls and ascend the sky on steps of fire. It made you want to pull all the switches and throw all the levers and stick your fingers in the electric socket of the Universe to see what happened next. It made you want to paint your bedroom wall black and cover it with posters."}}
* [[Awesome but Impractical]]: Sort. At the rate at which the band are making him money, Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler will be richer than his wildest dreams... in several billion years.
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* [[Department of Redundancy Department]]:
{{quote|"mumblemumbledon'tseewhymumble," mumbled the Dean}}
* [[Deus Exit Machina]]: Death. It doesn't take long for the story to resolve itself once he's done soul-searching.
* [[Does This Remind You of Anything?]]: Buddy's behaviour when the Music takes him over is ''a lot'' like a musician on drugs.
* [[Dreadful Musician]]: Crash, Noddy, Jimbo and Scum and their everchanging band names.
* [[Early-Bird Cameo]]: We see Ponder and Adrian working on the early prototype of what will become the [[Magical Computer]] Hex in the next book, ''[[Discworld/Interesting Times|Interesting Times]]''. It uses a small version of the stone circle computers seen in ''[[Discworld/The Light Fantastic|The Light Fantastic]]'' and also ants, as seen in later books ("it may work, if we can get all the bugs into it").
** Cliff and Glod make a brief mention of a Golem called [[Discworld/Feet of Clay|Dorfl]]. With an early [[Title Drop]], too!
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* [[The Grim Reaper]]: Naturally.
* [[Groupie Brigade]]: Acknowledged. Glod worries if the crowd will tear off Buddy's clothes.
* [[ISophagus]]: Mentioned. Some pennywhistle guy played without the Guild's consent. He now plays a scale every time he hiccups.
* [[It Tastes Like Feet]]: Ridcully says that an electric guitar sounds ''exactly'' like a cat taking a crap with a sewn-up bum, to Ponder's much alarm.
* [[Literal
* [[The Little Shop That Wasn't There Yesterday]]: A musical-themed version of the same type seen in ''[[Discworld/The Light Fantastic|The Light Fantastic]]''.
* [[Legion of Lost Souls]]: The Klatchian Foreign Legion.
* [[Magical Computer]] and [[Magitek]]: We get our first glimpse of what will, in later books, become Hex.
* [[Medieval Stasis]]: This is the last book to really use the plot that an alien element threatens to break the Disc's stasis but is then subject to [[Reset Button]]. Notably the Patrician mentions it in ''[[Discworld/The Truth|The Truth]]'' in a rare case of being [[Wrong Genre Savvy]].
* [[Mood Whiplash]]: The same page with a funny moment involving Glod and the band's '''<big>FIVE THOUSAND D</big>'''--''mmfmmf'' leads into {{spoiler|the spirit of Music making the final parallel between Buddy and real rockstars: Live Fast, Die Young.}}
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* [[Shaped Like Itself]]: "You can't see the infinite. 'Cos it's infinite."
* [[Shout-Out]] / [[Hurricane of Puns]]:
** As with ''[[Discworld/Moving Pictures|Moving Pictures]]'', an enormous number, particularly band names We're Certainly Dwarfs for [[They Might Be Giants]], Insanity for Madness, Surreptitious Fabric for the [[Velvet Underground]], The Whom for [[The Who]], Suck for [[Kiss]], Lead Balloon for [[Led Zeppelin]], &U for [[U2]], and so on. One band in particular goes through about a half dozen of these, and on one occasion a member buys for the group a [[Def Leppard|leopard with hearing problems]]... They also miss one of the greatest potential band names of all time, when a member mentions that [[Rolling Stones|"a rolling stone gathers no moss"]].
** [[The Blues Brothers|"He can't stop us. We're on a mission from Glod."]]
*** Another Blues Bros. Reference is mixed with an ''[[A Night at the Opera]]'' [[Shout-Out]] at the diner scene: Glod continually orders "four fried rats," and Cliff is insisting that he would like some Coke. Imp, however, likes his "Two hard-boillled eggs."
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** In the [[Animated Adaptation]], Buddy manages to hit the [[Berserk Button]] of the entire city of Quirm ([[Fantasy Counterpart Culture]] of France) by saying "[[The Beatles|We're more popular than cheeses.]]"
** The dwarves and trolls don't get along, but they share a tradition of hole music.
** And then there's the Dean's pants, which will not be named after the Archchancellor...
** Speaking of the Dean's clothing, there's an incredibly subtle but allegedly deliberate [[Shout-Out]] when Death asks to borrow his coat. Or, to put it another way, it's "[[Don McLean|A coat he borrowed from [the] Dean]]". And he 'borrows' it by striding in and informing him {{smallcaps| "[[The Terminator|I need your clothes.]]"}} And the coat itself reads [[Bruce Springsteen|Born to Rune]].
** Pterry even managed to [[Shout-Out]] to [[Looney Tunes]] and [[The Far Side]]! One of the wizards reads books of cartoons of cows and dogs....
** [[The Grateful Dead|The grateful Death]].
** At one point, the Dean was referred to as a "[[Rebel Without a Cause|rebel without a pause]]".
** Once the guitar maker discovers that his guitars are selling like hotcakes, he orders his assistant to hire a troll as a guard, and to make sure that no one comes into his store to try to play "Pathway to Paradise". Not only did Pratchett give a shout out to "Stairway to Heaven", he even brought up the fact that it's the number 1 song that non-musical people will try to play when they enter a guitar store.
** ''"You can't break somebody's wall down just to make music!"'' - [[Pink Floyd|it don't need no education to see what this alludes to]].
** The [[Bilingual Bonus]] points out that Imp y Celyn, AKA Buddy Celyn {{spoiler|1== [[Buddy Holly]].}}
** At the very start it's mentioned that if the Gods want to destroy someone, they hand him "[[Looney Tunes|the equivalent of a stick with a fizzing fuse and]] [[Acme Products|Acme Dynamite Company]] written on the side"
** Susan is mentioned to have gotted a [[My Little Pony|My Little Binky]] set on her third birthday.<ref>[[Hilarious in Hindsight|Funnily enough]], a bit later Susan's expectations of time travel are described as being very similar to a [[My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic|Sonic]] [[My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic/Recap/S1
** The [[The Little Shop That Wasn't There Yesterday|music shop]] owner warns Glod not to try out a flute, or they'll be "knee deep in rats". Presumably, it's the one used by (the Disc's equivalent of) [[The Pied Piper of Hamelin]].
** The Librarian is playing [[Space Invaders|Barbarian Invaders]].
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* [[Human Resources|Troll Resources]]: Lias/Cliff pays most of the Band's expenses by knocking out and trading away his own diamond teeth (another [[Shout-Out]]: shine on, you crazy diamond....).
* [[Unusually Uninteresting Sight]]: At one point, Dibbler is standing outside the Cavern, thinking of how to make profit out of the free concert. Up comes Susan, in full regalia, scythe and horse, and asks him how to get in. He says quickly that all the tickets are sold out. Susan, then, walks through a wall, while Dibbler calculates. It earns no more thought from him than a passing "...where's she gone, then?" And again, somebody breaks through a [[Pink Floyd|Wall]] in the service of Music....
* [[Welcome to the Big City]]: As buskers do, Imp puts a few coins in his bowl as "seed money". The next time he looks down, they've gone.
* [[What Happened to the Mouse?]]: The fate of Glod, Cliff and Asphalt is left even more ambiguous than that of Imp.
* [[Xtreme Kool Letterz]]: A troll band [[Exactly What It Says on the Tin|calls itself "Trolls"]]. Dibbler tells them to spell it with a Z.
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