Like a Record: The Muse and Mimesis of The Forensic Records Society

ABSTRACT

What is the correct way to appreciate art and specifically the art of the pop song? This is the question at the heart of Magnus Mills’s 2017 novella The Forensic Records Society which reads like an absurd comic parable of how men (specifically), repeatedly fail to appreciate art and reduce even the most inoffensive acts of creativity to dysfunctional bureaucracies. This paper briefly discusses how the book tackles aesthetics, community, gender and commodity fetishism and outlines its uncanny parallels with Adorno’s Sociology of Music (1976). Most significantly, the argument put forward here is that this deceptively brief and simple novella is truly an artfully-constructed postmodern performative text – a work of histiographic metafiction which manipulates time, evades period setting, and questions historical certainty; a concrete-poetry inspired novella that deploys mimetic cover art, musical allusions, numerology, nominal characterization, melodic repetition and affirmative character arcs to replicate, and pay homage to, the subject of the book – the iconic 7-inch three-minute pop single. The conclusion asserts that The Forensic Records Society is an intermedial text that ironically benefits from the perpetual online distractions of the internet and pop music, thus providing a novel 21st century reading experience.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. “The peak year of vinyl record sales [was] back in the late ‘70s” (Swanson); and “By 1990 … record companies began discontinuing the 45”” (Waldbillig).

2. https://open.spotify.com/playlist/43qoWTnUxiifEg5ksjKkBH.

3. Mills has a Spotify playlist to accompany the book: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/43qoWTnUxiifEg5ksjKkBH.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jason Mark Ward

Jason Mark Ward teaches literature, film adaptation and popular culture at Yaşar University in Izmir, Turkey. His main research interest is intermediality, and he has written a book called The Forgotten Film Adaptations of DH Lawrence’s Short Stories.