Pride and Prejudice, as a funk musical
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a company in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a language.
The Bennet sisters as programming languages, each with her beast off the O'Reilly cover. The suitors as companies. The assembly ball as the accomplishment showcase — stand up in a hot room, demonstrate the thing you are actually for, and be discussed. Twenty numbers across nine chapters, with Miss Austen watching from the balcony. The novella lives in Omega Three.
House law: the band is the household. Constraints lift in ensemble; alone, in a passage, there is no band.
The Bennet breakfast — ensemble
Bright, bustling morning funk: clavinet, walking bass, horn stabs under the breakfast clatter. Clenched and domestic; the heat is being saved.
Mr. Google
Old-school party rap over electro-funk, delivered with total sincerity and no self-awareness whatsoever.
Jane, with Javier
Warm orchestral soul-funk sung gentle and level — until the tiger's chorus arrives as a gospel-scale detonation.
Miss Darcy, with Kuji
Hushed slow-burn funk, patient and entirely controlled — the only number of the evening that asks the room for nothing.
Lydia, with Ditto
Raw electro-funk at full volume with a sax break nobody asked for. Sloppy, joyful, impossible to ignore.
Mr. Darcy
Strutting mid-tempo funk-blues, sung with a drawl and a curled lip by a man who has never had to finish a sentence quickly.
Elizabeth, with Semper
Almost nothing: electric piano, brushed drums barely present, no ornament of any kind. Sung quietly, to nobody.
Mr. Darcy, outdoors
The whole band relocated to a terrace in November. Enormous, cold, and grand — a private thing said at continental volume.
Elizabeth
Opens as a slow smoky simmer and then detonates into a fast rolling strut. Sung by a woman who has decided to raise her voice exactly once.
Miss Caroline
Solo harpsichord, prim and metronomic, conducted entirely above the floor — until the funk arrives in the last eight bars and takes her.
Wickham
Hard, bright, expensive-sounding pop-funk built entirely out of hooks. Immaculately produced and about nothing; every word of the confession is in the mix.
Mr. Bennet, alone, at speed
A Savoy-opera patter song in a dead room, every verse a hair faster than the last. The wit is the confession.
Javier, alone
One quiet instrument and a low string, no groove of any kind — the first number that stands entirely outside the band. Sung at half-voice, entirely straight.
Suno will not render this one, and the lyric will not be changed to appease it. So it goes to you: sing it yourself, half-voice, entirely straight, every J where it belongs. There is no band in a passage anyway.
Performed by the readerThe band, for nobody
An underscore, and it does not sing — the Rhodes figure from "Always There," played alone, with nobody singing over it. He does not know he is being heard.
Elizabeth, in the long room
A plush early-sixties torch ballad. Her sisters answer from nowhere, because there is no "me" anywhere in it.
Mr. Darcy & Elizabeth
A plaintive oboe, no horns anywhere, the swagger entirely gone. On the hook they sing the same four words and mean two different sentences.
The Chaos Monkey & Semper, by the fire
A forties cocktail duet, jaunty on top and slightly wrong underneath. Charming. Not safe.
Lady Catherine, in the wilderness
Symphonic power-metal at cathedral scale: pipe organ, double-kick, a demonic choir answering in liturgy. She is magnificent, and she is wrong, and neither fact touches the other.
The band, through the whole of the morning
Nothing in it is new — the payoff is recognition. Four planted figures enter in succession and run at once, and the fourth voice has to be made up, badly, in the moment.
The whole church
Four-on-the-floor, handclaps, everybody on the same eight words, nobody carrying a separate line for the first time in two hours. It should not sound like a beginning. It should sound like arrival.