by Mark Dery
Information Society invites the cyberpunk classification with records such as Hack, whose cover features a Road Warrior–style scrapmobile festooned with corrugated tubing and whose lyrics are larded with references to cyberculture (a cassette single features “virtual reality” and “phone phreak” versions of a song, a phone phreak being a hacker obsessed with the intricacies of the phone system and skilled in the illegal art of making longdistance calls for free). Paul Robb, who has since left the group, once observed, “We’re musical hackers. What we do is similar to computer hackers breaking into sophisticated systems to wreak havoc.”14 But the band’s glossy dance tracks, which swaddle funk lite and disco rhythms in swooning vocal harmonies, are more robopop than cyberpunk.
The label seems more appropriate in Sonic Youth’s case. Lee Ranaldo, one of the band’s two guitarists, has used the c word to describe Sonic Youth’s avant-garage rock, an eruption of crackling static, clotted feedback, and sweetly dissonant drones. The liner notes to the group’s album Sister (1987) cite SF novels such as K. W. Jeter’s The Glass Hammer and Philip K. Dick’s The Owl in Daylight as influences, and the SF critics Richard Kadrey and Larry McCaffery dubbed Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation (1988) the “ultimate cyberpunk musical statement to date,” an evocation of “the confusion, pain, and exhilaration of sensory overload, via chaos theory–produced blasts of sound.”15 Says Ranaldo, “The cyberpunk writers all hate the term, so we’ll take it.”16
According to Paul Moore, a software engineer who edits a desktop-published “cyberpunk/electronic/techno/noise fanzine” called Technology Works, “cyberpunk” best describes the folk music of cyberculture. “I appropriated the term from science fiction and applied it to this music because, although nobody seemed to be talking about these bands in terms of a movement, there seemed to be a link between cyberpunk’s hard-edged writing style and the edgy music made by bands like Clock DVA, Front 242, and Skinny Puppy,” he says. “In a musical sense, [cyberpunk] means using electronics to express yourself. You don’t have to be a traditional musician to program machines and get some music out of them. Cyberpunk music is about using high technology to express a ‘street’ sensibility.”
The music that Moore and his readers call “cyberpunk” is characterized by pile-driver rhythms, rammed home by drum machines or clanged out with the sampled sounds of heavy industry or the big city. The music’s only concession to melody consists of synthesizer arpeggios that sound like a Touch-Tone phone autodialing. The lyrics, hoarsely barked or recited in a future-shocked monotone, are electronically processed to give them a fuzzy, metallic quality that makes them sound as if they’ve been synthesized by a computer. Hemmed in on all sides by machines, the claustrophobic vocals embody the human condition in technoculture. A tumult of panicked voices sampled from science fiction, horror, or suspense movies evokes the sensory overload of the media landscape and the growingly surreal violence that is a sign of our times. In much of the music, a paranoia about social control is counterweighted by a perverse fascination with masculinist pathologies–the dehumanization of the individual, the discipline and regimentation of the body.
A distant relative of Metal Machine Music (1975), Lou Reed’s essay in ear-piercing, mind-numbing noise, cyberpunk rock is more immediately descended from the “industrial” movement that rose from punk’s ashes in the late seventies. Throbbing Gristle’s Second Annual Report (1977), a grainy, white-noise sound track for a Ballardian landscape of cloverleafs and concrete high-rises, is the seminal “industrial” album. In the neo-futurist music of Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire, and SPK, created with the aid of electronic instruments, power tools, scrap metal, and industrial noise, the journalist Jon Savage heard “the true soundtrack to the final quarter of the 20th century.”17 As TG’s Genesis P-Orridge tartly observed, “[U]p till then the music had been . . . based on the blues and slavery, and we thought it was time to update it to at least Victorian times-you know, the Industrial Revolution.”18
In a similar vein, cyber-rock uses factory clangor as an ironic metaphor for an information society whose technological totem, the computer, resists representation. Sealed in a smooth, inscrutable shell, the computer’s inner workings are too complex, too changeable, for the imagination to gain purchase on them; only when it is imaged in the cold, hard boilerplate of the machine age can this postindustrial engine be grasped. At the same time, cyberpunk rockers draw on SF concepts and iconography. In so doing, they take their place alongside David Bowie in his Ziggy Stardust period, the android synth-rocker Gary Numan, and the mohawked, stiletto-heeled cartoon droogs Sigue Sigue Sputnik in the subgenre formed by the confluence of science fiction and rock, both forms of gadget pornography and unbridled power fantasy that speak powerfully to pubescent males.
Front Line Assembly offers a textbook example of cyberpunk rock. The Canadian duo’s 1992 release, Tactical Neural Implant, is typified by “Mindphaser,” a techno-tribal stomp about mind control and mechanical mayhem strewn with references to “implanted brain cells” and “digital murder,” along with a sampled voice from RoboCop 2 talking about “cyborg technologies” and “destructive capability.”19 Another song, the quasi-symphonic “Biomechanical,” grew out of Bill Leeb’s fascination with H. R. Giger’s “necromantic illustrations involving alien females and cyborgian penis machines.”
Says Leeb, “I really romanticize the bionic dream of becoming one with technology. What journalists are calling ‘cyberpunk’ rock stems from the idea of using machines to make music as well as the integration of technology into the human body, like in The Terminator.” Rhys Fulber adds, “There are similarities between cyberpunk fiction and our music, especially this idea of breaking down the division between human and machine. Most people are afraid of society’s obsession with technology, what with pollution and other global crises, whereas [we feel that cyborging] would increase possibilities for individuals.”
In FLA’s music, a wariness of technology’s ability to render the effects of power ubiquitous and instantaneous blurs into a fetishizing of kill technology and military discipline; it’s not at all clear whether the band believes a tactical neural implant is a fearful prospect or a seductive one. Even so, like many cyberpunk artists, they espouse the oppositional politics of the appropriation aesthetic. “We’re interested in using technology for our own ends rather than being dogmatic military mutants, following orders,” says Fulber. “In the same way that the characters in Road Warrior weld together whatever usable parts they can find amidst all the garbage, we’re stitching together sounds taken from every imaginable media source. We see ourselves as broadcasting information.”
By contrast, the electronic musician David Myers italicizes the cyber in cyberpunk, emphasizing the eerie sublimity of out-of-body experiences in cyberspace. “There are many musicians who feel that they’re making cyberpunk rock, but I would disagree with most of them rather strongly,” asserts Myers. “What do mechanical, stomping dance bands have to do with William Gibson’s vision of the levels of experience available in the datastream through human-computer interface? I just don’t see the relationship between Front 242’s ‘Neurodancer’ and Neuromancer. These bands, in my opinion, have simply latched onto a label that only vaguely relates to their music.”
Myers is the inventor of the “Feedback Machine”–a black box whose circuitry is wired to generate feedback loops. By fiddling with its knobs, he is able to conjure withering blasts of distortion, banshee wails, volleys of staticky hiccups. In “Penetrating Black Ice” (Fetish, 1990), long, sustained rasps unfurl in slow motion, glittering with harmonics; buzzes and beeps bounce weight-lessly, like marbles in zero gravity. Listening, one feels like a hacker brain-plugged into his computer, turning victory rolls in utter darkness.
Which is no coincidence, since “Penetrating Black Ice” was inspired by the scene in Neuromancer where Case hacks his way through the last, deadliest level of cybernetic security-Black Ice, which Gibson describes, in “Burning Chrome,” a
s “Ice that kills . . . Some kind of neural-feedback weapon, and you connect with it only once . . . Like some hideous Word that eats the mind from the inside out.”20
Says Myers, “What really turns me on in cyberpunk literature is the idea of a data thief having a virtual reality experience. My music, as a result, is more a swirl of electronic otherworldliness. Sure, some cyberpunk novels incorporate mean, grungy, almost Road Warrior-type imagery for which you would probably need a soundtrack of thumping drum machines and unintelligible, screamed vocals, but that isn’t what interests me about these books. For me, the cyberpunk sensibility isn’t about leather and studs; it’s about total immersion in an electronic reality. And, in the same way that virtual reality is created by manipulating electrons, its musical analog has to be created electronically.”
Glenn Branca, an avant-garde composer steeped in postmodern SF and computer culture, has contemplated the notion of a cyberpunk music. In a 1992 Mondo 2000 interview, he told me, “To be honest, I don’t think I’ve ever heard a musical analog for cyberpunk literature. . . . The closest I’ve come to cyberpunk music is [the composer and music theorist] Dane Rudhyar’s description of music that he would have loved to have heard. In The Magic of Tone and the Art of Music, he imagines a techno-mystical hyperinstrument called the Cosmophonon. He describes it as a field of energy forces which is ‘played’ by touching various colored crystals. The music is all-encompassing for the player and the listener-capable of invoking true synesthesia. [But really], what is the proper modern music to accompany cyberpunk? I mean, is it some futuristic-sounding electronic beep-boop music, or what?”21
Two answers come immediately to mind: Elliott Sharp and Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails.
Elliott Sharp: Mindplayer
“They’ve long known that there was a Professional Irritant at work, an undesignated one.”
–John Shirley22
“IRRITANT,” reads the warning label stuck to Elliott Sharp’s battleship-gray metal door. Originally intended for caustic substances, it perfectly describes the composer’s self-appointed role in New York’s noisy, contentious, Lower East Side music scene and in the larger mediascape.
Of all the musicians mentioned in this chapter, Sharp is perhaps the most deserving of the cyberpunk label. With his bald head, engineer’s boots, and standard-issue Gotham wardrobe (it runs the gamut, from black to black), he looks like central casting’s idea of one of Gibson’s Sprawl dwellers. His cramped East Village apartment is stuffed with computers, samplers, ad hoc instruments, and miscellaneous flotsam: a giant rubber ear of unknown origin, scavenged sewer pipe couplers, and Road Warrior noisemakers such as the Pantar (a steel canister lid fitted with a guitar neck and strings) and the Nailimba (a mutant marimba fashioned from “huge nails and pieces of a towel rack I found in the street”). “I’m a pack rat,” says Sharp. “These shelves are filled with instruments and carcasses of instruments-junk, just tons of junk.”
Sharp invites comparison to Rubin, the avant-garde roboticist who reanimates industrial rubbish in Gibson’s story “The Winter Market.” Rubin is a Gomi no sensei–a. “master of junk,” a trawler in “the sea of cast-off goods our century floats on.”23 Sharp, too, is looking for meaning in society’s Dumpster, but where Rubin makes his manic contraptions out of lithium batteries, breadboards, and the severed heads of Barbie dolls, Sharp fits big-city bedlam, the meshed rhythms of African drumming, the electric shriek of acid blues, and countless other puzzle pieces into a jigsaw music that is much more than the sum of its parts. Gibson has said that his work tends to be “about garbage, the refuse of industrial society” because “my real business has less to do with predicting technological change than making evident its excesses.”24 Thus, to the extent that cyberpunk is synonymous with Gibson’s writings, it is about “junk, just tons of junk,” by which definition Sharp’s pack-rat music is undeniably cyberpunk.
It is cyberpunk, as well, in its reconciliation of science and the street. True to cyberpunk form, Sharp is both closet anarchist and hard-headed rationalist. As a teenaged “suburban science nerd,” he “used to blow things up, using timed fuses so that you’d hear these explosions and I’d be about half a mile away.” He spent the summer of ’68 at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie-Mellon University on a National Science Foundation grant, creating spliced-together sound collages and altering his consciousness with a little help from his friends in the chemistry department when he was supposed to be conducting experiments.
Opposition politics, enlivened by an acid wit that is equal parts Jonathan Swift and H. L. Mencken, are a constant in Sharp’s music: “Shredded” (Bone of Contention, 1987) features the sampled Ollie North on lead vocals, coyly admitting that his “memory’s been shredded”; “Free Society” (Land of the Yahoos, 1987) uses a particularly ominous quote from the televangelist and former presidential candidate Pat Robertson–“in a free society, the police and the military are God’s special envoys”—to flush out the religious right. With his rock band, Carbon, he records brainy, bludgeoning songs-call them “neurocore”–with titles like “A Biblebelt in the Mouth” and “L.A. Law (Not a TV Show)” (Truthtable, 1993). An abiding obsession with abuses of power and networks of control runs through Sharp’s entire oeuvre; in the liner notes to Abstract Repressionism 1990-99, he writes,
Elements of control (government, police/military, religion, entertainment/news media, educational institutions, the artistocracy) continue to tighten up their absolute ability to shape what people think and do-not so much through overt means (although these are certainly being practiced) but by selecting against and undermining the ability of humans to process information and [abstract it]. This we must battle.25
Even so, Sharp remains as much a “science nerd” as an agent provocateur. In the mid-eighties, the composer wrote dissonant, slam-banging instrumentals whose compositional architecture, tuning systems, and rhythms were generated using the Fibonacci series (mathematical ratios derived by summing a number and its precedent-0, 1, 1,2, 3, 5, 8,13, and so forth). The spiky, swirling music on Fractal (1986), which seems to grow like crystals or eddy like currents, was inspired by Benoit Mandlebrot’s fractal geometry, in which mathematical formulae are used to generate surprisingly convincing renderings of snowflakes, coastlines, and other natural forms and phenomena. And his computer music sounds like no computer music ever: Consisting, for the most part, of raw scrapes and granitic rumbles, it is as tough and grungy as the works turned out by most academic electronic composers are tidily formalistic.
Much of Sharp’s music is colored by his lifelong science fiction fixation, a mania that began with his first visit to a library and continues to this day: Paperbacks by Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Norman Spinrad, Pat Cadigan, and Lucius Shepard, along with virtually “everything that’s available” of Philip K. Dick’s prodigious output, are crammed into his bookshelves. His fixation is evident in his band names (Scanners, after the Cronenberg movie about telepathic mutants) and in his song titles: “Kipple” and “PKD” allude to Dick, “Mindsuck” to Cadigan’s Mindplayers, “Dr. Adder” to the K. W. Jeter novel of the same name, and “Cenobites” to Clive Barker’s splatterpunk movie, Hellraiser.
There is an unexpected humanism at the heart of Sharp’s cyberpunk aesthetic, an embrace of the nonlinear dynamics of human intelligence that is ultimately antithetical to cyberpunk’s emphasis on the technological half of the cyborg equation. “I called my group Carbon because I’m interested in nonlinear, curved, continuous, carbon thinking, as opposed to squared-off, logical, rigid, silicon consciousness,” says Sharp. “Although I tend to be fairly logical, I try to have the tangential, the wild card, the intuitive, always accessible.
“I investigated computer-composed music at one point, but I decided that computers don’t make very interesting music, humans do. The mechanical intellect is very stupid; it’s artificial stupidity rather than artificial intelligence. It’s binary; we’re not. There’s always a chemical randomness in us. Some things are uni
quely suited to humans, and [the] composition of music is one of them. I guess the operative word here is ‘soul.’”
Nine Inch Nails: Sex, Death, God, and Technology
Charles Manson called it “getting the fear.”
When Trent Reznor lived at the secluded ranch house at the end of Cielo Drive in Beverly Hills, he saw things, late at night: a sudden movement in his peripheral vision, blurred figures on the security monitor that surveilled the front gate. In such moments, says Reznor, you wonder if the knife-wielding midnight ramblers are outside in the dark, trying the locks, or only “in your own head because you know what’s happened here.” What happened there made a nation deadbolt its doors: 10066 Cielo Drive is better known as Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski’s former home, the site of the Manson Family murders.
Reznor has since moved on, but the shadows in his head linger. As the one-man band, Nine Inch Nails, he is the nonpareil exponent of hummable angst-rock. His canny combination of ingrown neuroses, sinewy dance beats, and rusty, barbed melodic hooks landed The Downward Spiral (1994) at number two on Billboard magazine’s album chart. One reviewer called Reznor’s music “the unholy mutant offspring of cyberpunk and the pop song”–a fair characterization of art that revels in “the total misuse of technology.” For example, Reznor often lowers the pitch of sampled sounds by three octaves to bring out the “great grainy high-end buzz” that adds a pinch of itching powder to his songs.26
Rock critics have made much of the teenage spleen and freshman existentialism that suffuses Reznor’s lyrics, interpreting them as yet another dispatch from that media fiction Generation X. By and large, journalists have overlooked the cyberpunk themes that pervade his work: mechano-eroticism, body loathing, social control, and the fear of being superseded by machines. Which is curious, since these threads are woven through his lyrics, record cover art, and public statements. NIN’s first release, Pretty Hate Machine (1989), features an illustration that Reznor has described as “a turbine wheel. . . distorted so that it looks like a spine . . . kind of [a] human-versus-machines-type thing,” and he told a Mondo 2000 interviewer that he “wanted to express a kind of vulnerability-the idea that I was a person trying to keep my head above water, living in this machine which was moving forward.”27