Various Artists: Brain In A Box: The Science Fiction Collection

Near the end of Brain In A Box, an extensive collection of science-fiction-themed music, there appears a track that benefits (intellectually, if not musically) from a change of context: Parliament's "Unfunky UFO," a song that bops by on the group's 1976 Mothership Connection without creating much notice. (UFOs Funk Business as usual.) Appearing as the penultimate song on this 113-track collection, however, it forces listeners to consider the strange cultural intersections that produced it, including a lineage stretching back from George Clinton through Sun Ra, Robert Heinlein, Earth vs. The Flying Saucers, Amazing Stories, H.G. Wells, and beyond. Or, more directly, to "(When You See) Those Flying Saucers," a piece of apocalyptic evangelical country by Buchanan Brothers & The Georgia Catamounts that provides the flipside to Parliament's utopian cosmology. "You better pray to the Lord when you see those flying saucers," the Buchanans warn. "It may be the coming of the Judgment Day." A niche genre more by technicality and tradition than by numbers—as a quick glance at a list of the highest-grossing films or most-enduring TV series would confirm—science fiction has proved far-reaching. Flying saucers and little green men, funky motherships, and harbingers of the apocalypse all serve as shorthand for humanity's deepest fears and hopes; they've combined, particularly over the last half-century, into the cultural equivalent of a shared secret. The five-disc Brain In A Box attempts, with considerable success, to capture the soundtrack to that public mythology, from its space-age movie themes through novelty songs such as Mojo Nixon's "UFOs, Big Rigs & BBQ." There's plenty of room to argue over inclusions and exclusions, but the collection proves extremely satisfying. While it contains plenty of good, or at least curious, music, the way the tracks speak to each other is far more interesting than any individual song. For example, lounge master Les Baxter's "Lunar Rhapsody" and "Saturday Night On Saturn," which re-imagine space as one big groovy source of exotica, contrast with the unvarnished dread of the 1959 theme to One Step Beyond, as well as its subsequent surfed-up '60s remake by The Ventures. Thoughtful packaging divides the collection into movie themes, TV themes, lounge music, pop songs, and novelty numbers, and an informative book, featuring contributions by everyone from Ray Bradbury to Julie Strain Eastman to Dr. Demento, helps shed light on the subject. One major quibble, the liner notes' failure to discuss many tracks, points to a deeper flaw: The collection's sweeping ambition occasionally gets the better of it. The pop disc, for example, suffers from the strain of covering too much ground in too little space. Stan Ridgway's 1991 song "Beyond Tomorrow" may be more illustrative than whatever jokey piece of Boomer-era kitsch it bumped, but, however briefly, it drags the collection down. Overall, though, Brain In A Box is remarkable. As Sun Ra said, "Space is the place." But the place for what The high-stakes debate rages on, in this box's musical contents and beyond.