Many authors love to refer to popular music in their fiction; for novels like Bret Easton Ellis’ 80s classic, Less Than Zero, the book’s “playlist” was almost key to capturing a sense of time and place, though as the years roll on, I’m sure it just reads as dated and hard to relate to, for today’s college-age readers.
What’s worse is when a forty-something to sixty-something writer starts referring to favorite musical acts as though they are all the current rage in a present-day story setting. It pays to do the research of flipping on a Top 40 station, or firing up iTunes, just to see that Tiffany and Debbie Gibson are aging moms who’ve let themselves go, and gals like Katie Perry and Jessie James are currently all the rage. It’s a lot riskier, you see, than referencing modern furniture.
Of course, there’s a limit to the usefulness of pop music references in any work of fiction; even for top writers, it’s approximately two years from manuscript to publication, so anything they write is automatically doing to look dated if they include something too trendy. Will anyone remember Katie Perry in 2012?
Food for thought.
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