Popular Music and the Modernist Dystopia: Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four

Abstract

This essay explores musical references in Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four, including music imagery and allusions to popular songs of the 1920s and 1940s. Huxley used the popular music of the Brave New World as an indicator of its emotional shallowness, represented by such immortal songs as “Hug Me Till You Drug Me, Honey.” Brave New World’s scorn for popular music, and for popular culture in general, situates Huxley’s famous dystopia as a high Modernist work. In Orwell’s case, implicit references to World War II hits such as “We’ll Meet Again” and “I’ll Be Seeing You” reflect ironically upon the relationship of Winston and Julia and their terrible situation at the end of the novel. His treatment of the musical thrush and the singing Prole laundrywoman plays a more hopeful note, and a positive attitude to popular songs and popular culture situates Nineteen Eighty-Four on the cusp of Post-Modernism. With respect to the critical discourse about hope and despair in these dystopian texts, the essay suggests that signs of hopefulness in Brave New World are very slight, although they do exist. The music of Nineteen Eighty-Four, and some other factors, lend support to the view that Orwell’s novel is not so despairing as it is sometimes made out to be.