Work Text:
America did not ask much of them.
America accepted the coffin, the shoes, the hair, the fur coats and sunglasses that still remembered the white tundra. It didn't care, it asked only that they kept moving and keep changing the sound that they'd brought with them. They had left the tundra because no one wanted their music. The agent in New York said the same thing in a different language: change it or starve. So the band learned Rock n' Roll the way immigrants learn a second language - roughly, urgently, their first language still echoing underneath.
Assimilation was not an immediate decision. It was a gradual shift, little changes here and there, until nothing original remained. They played the songs that bought food. The original songs, the sounds of their home, waited in the silent spaces between the songs that brought cheers. No one wanted to hear them. Eventually, they could speak the language of Rock n' Roll better than those who'd known it first, every performance becoming a small death of the first language, every round of applause a receipt proving they were successfully adapting to a culture that hadn't accepted their own.
Assimilate, America had demanded of them.