I was re-reading my post about Grandy’s and I realized I had one other core memory around such fare. Somewhere around 1980, when I was a definitely still a tot, my Dad took me to the Popeye’s on Magazine street in New Orleans. It was on that visit that I heard, for the first time, the music of Queen as “Another One Bites the Dust” played. It must have been Summer because I remember my toddler’s legs sticking to the plastic bench as I waited and idly kicked my feet back and forth. Still waiting, I remember hearing another landmark memorable song: “Funkytown” by “Lipps Inc.

I’ve been wondering: What would a library look like in a culture that still communicated its most important cultural institutions through music versus prose?¹ What if the language of music were to define how that culture organized knowledge so that speaking (singing?) of the organization of knowledge imparted some metadata about the knowledge itself? What if we crossed solresol with the Dewey decimal system?

This idea was inspired by my playing, this past Spring, "Horizon: Forbidden West.“² With its superb world-building and the graphics/audio capabilities of the PlayStation 5, the development team at Guerilla games helps us imagine a world where music is a dominant and uniting cultural thread:³

The game’s heroine, Aloy, entersin the Utaru tribe’s home village of “Plainsong” to beautiful choral music.