MAGIC POP FILE: THE UFO RECORD THAT STOLE ROCK & ROLL

In 1956, flying saucers were everywhere.

Not necessarily in the sky.

They were in newspapers, movies, paperback books, radio broadcasts and the increasingly overheated American imagination. The UFO had become a cultural virus.

Then Bill Buchanan and Dickie Goodman figured out how to make it dance.

Their record was called “The Flying Saucer.”

The premise was beautifully crooked.

A radio announcer reports that a flying saucer has landed on Earth. Reporters rush to interview witnesses and participants. But whenever somebody answers a question, the response isn't performed by an actor.

It's a piece of somebody else's hit record.

Little Richard.

Elvis Presley.

Fats Domino.

The Platters.

The record jumps frantically between fake news reports and tiny pieces of songs the audience already knew.

Today we'd call it sampling.

Or a mashup.

In 1956, the record business had another expression for it:

What the hell are these guys doing?

Buchanan and Goodman physically assembled their creation in the age of magnetic tape, cutting fragments from existing recordings and inserting them into their comedy routine. They called the resulting form a “break-in” record.

Then The Flying Saucer became a hit.

And the music industry came after them.

Publishers argued that Buchanan and Goodman were using copyrighted compositions without permission. The dispute reached federal court, where an attempt to stop distribution failed. The judge concluded that the record was sufficiently transformative to stand as a new work.

Think about that for a moment.

It was 1956.

Two maniacs had essentially wandered into the future carrying scissors.

Decades before hip-hop producers built new music from old records, before Negativland attacked the boundaries of copyright, before digital sampling, before YouTube remix culture, Buchanan and Goodman were already asking one of the defining questions of modern media:

How much of somebody else's culture can you steal before you've created something new?

And naturally, they asked it with a UFO.

That's what makes The Flying Saucer perfect Magic Pop.

The UFO isn't merely the subject of the record. It's the delivery mechanism.

Flying saucers had already become a shared cultural language. Buchanan and Goodman understood that immediately. They hijacked America's UFO anxiety, hijacked rock & roll, hijacked the authoritative voice of radio news and smashed everything together into one ridiculous little piece of vinyl.

There is even something accidentally prophetic about it.

The announcer sounds authoritative.

The information arrives in disconnected fragments.

Familiar voices are removed from their original context.

Reality and entertainment become indistinguishable.

Everybody reacts instantly.

Nobody knows what the hell is actually happening.

Sound familiar?

The Flying Saucer wasn't predicting extraterrestrial disclosure.

It may have predicted the Internet.

And somewhere above Earth, the aliens are probably still arguing over the publishing rights.

FMPU calls that Magic Pop.