How a 19th century natural disaster led to a new form of alt-rock
[This was my weekly column for GlobalNews.ca. – AC]
If you’re into alternative history — thought experiments regarding things that might have happened to alter the course of history — you’ve run across the term hinge points.
The most common probably have to do with the Second World War (Like, if Hitler won, if the Americans didn’t drop the atomic bomb, and so on) plus the gigantic knock-ons from the death of JFK, but I’ve got a couple of not-so-well-known favourites.
Napoleon, for example, suffered terrible migraines. At the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, it’s said that his head ached so much that he wasn’t able to conduct his troops, with some reports having him moaning in a cold sweat in his tent while his incompetent generals ran things. This is a controversial theory, but it’s still interesting to imagine what might have happened had Napoleon been feeling well that day and was able to defeat the Duke of Wellington’s British forces.
Across the channel, a pregnant Queen Victoria survived an assassination attempt in May 1840. What would have become of Britain had she died? What if the South had won the U.S. Civil War or at least fought the North to a stalemate? What if Archduke Ferdinand’s driver didn’t take the wrong turn into a blind alley in Sarajevo that allowed an otherwise inept assassin to kill him.
And what if Mount Tambora didn’t explode the way it did?
Let’s follow up on this last scenario because it was a delayed hinge point for music.
