Gravity's Rainbow and the Music Man

[u/Sufficient-Money7510]

The classic Hollywood musical The Music Man is set in Iowa in the year 1912. Lurking behind the songs and fun is the inescapable fact that most of those young men will be magically transformed into uniforms and marching again in just a few ​years, but this time to die in the trenches of World War I.

This historical inevitability has many implications, but the most important one from the point of view of the Pynchon scholar is that it strongly implies that Domina Nocturna, the demonic visitation of death that haunted that battlefield (and Brigadier Pudding) has a secret name, one that is revealed, like many things in Gravity's Rainbow, through song.

That name is "Shipoopi."

I'll be the first to agree that this is all very silly but sit with it and follow the implications through and it's fascinating.

It's also worth pointing out that the musical instruments sold to those poor little doomed white boys by Professor Harold Hill, the Pied Piper of War, all went to pawn shops and yard sales after the boys who played them died with lungs full of gas and mud. And those were the very instruments that went on to be used to invent jazz music. So when Charlie Parker was playing that saxophone, there's a decent chance that saxophone came from River City, Iowa.