Escape Velocity

by Mark Dery

  If Moorcock attempted to play Beatle-esque psychedelia and Hendrixian black light voodoo on the printed page, the cyberpunks aspired to the buzzsaw strumming and heart attack tempos of punk and heavy metal. In an interview with the SF critic Takayuki Tatsumi, Sterling likens Schismatrix to the “thrashing noise” of the band Husker Du, remarking, “I’ve heard critics compare [it] to hardcore punk. . . . It goes a hundred miles an hour.”54

  Similarly, Shirley’s fiction is shot through with the sounds, semiotics, and agitprop of rock. His first novel, the protocyberpunk Transmania-con (1979), is dedicated to the sci-fi biker metal band Blue Oyster Cult, which is a constant presence in the book: The book’s title and three of its characters are taken from the BOC song of the same name, and the emblem of the book’s occult conspiracy, the Order, is the portentous glyph familiar from Blue Oyster Cult record covers.

  Music seeps beneath the surface of the plot, which revolves around the agent provocateur Ben Rackey’s insurrectionist use of the stolen Transmaniacon, an infernal machine that facilitates “the telepathic transfer of mania,” turning “a street-brawl into a raging mob and a border skirmish into a full-scale war.”55 Rackey is able to steal the device from Dr. Chaldin’s high-security palace because his skills as a Professional Irritant are “sufficient to overcome even the universally pacifying influence” of Chaldin’s insidious euphonium, whose saccharine Muzak neutralizes “the capacity for rebellion.”56 Rackey is able to counter the euphonium’s enervating effects by means of his mental discipline, but his coconspirators must resort to less subtle means:

  They took small black plastic cusps from their pockets and inserted them in their ears. The cusps played tapes of heavy-metal rock ‘n’ roll, an electric-music art form extinct for a century; extinct-but the only known musical structure capable of countering the euphonium.57

  Chaldin’s pleasure dome is Shirley’s caricature of the society of the spectacle: The “social games . . . and contrived, innocuous conflicts which Chaldin’s activity schedules and peripheral media stimuli subtly introduced into the crowds,” in concert with the subliminally seductive euphonium that keeps partygoers “malleable and ignorant,” constitute the “experiment in large-scale crowd manipulation” that is consumer culture, to Shirley.58 The author prescribes the punk cure-all for its creeping mind rot: “[Rackey] didn’t need the cusps. . . . his capacity for hostility was both healthy and intact.”59 Explosive rage, bottled under high pressure, shields Rackey from the brainwashing influence of commodity culture. The cosmic struggle in Shirley’s Manichaean moral universe is constituted as a pitched battle between heavy metal and Muzak.

  Agitpop

  As Transmaniacon makes clear, cyberpunk SF often dramatizes its politics in pop music allegories. Here, however, a conflicting story is told: In most cyberpunk fiction, postmodern rock-symbolized by the synthesizer-is portrayed as a joyless, juiceless thing, a taxidermic approximation of an extinct “electric-music art form” by button-pushing technicians. The antipathy that swirls around the image of cyber-rock in cyberpunk fiction-an echo of Shiner’s thinly veiled disdain for “guys in black leather who use synthesizers . . . and digital sampling”–reveals a contradiction at the heart of the genre.

  Cyberpunk, it turns out, is in part a struggle for the meaning of the sixties, even as it is, by Shirley’s reckoning, a survival strategy for “adapting to future shock, a way of dealing with the tsunami of changes coming down on society.” Most of the canonical cyberpunks (that is, those anthologized in Mirrorshades) were old enough to remember the sixties even as they responded to the technocultural milieu of the eighties-a milieu dominated by MTV, in which the marching music of youthful rebellion and the promotional video clip are resolved in a whirl of junk sex, consumer icons, and kinetic energy that reduces politics and personalities to sensuous surfaces.

  Superficially, MTV and cyberpunk were congruent. In his Mirrorshades preface-cum-manifesto, Sterling asserts that cyberpunk is the “literary incarnation” of an aesthetic common to rock video and “the synthesizer rock of London and Tokyo.”60 He invokes those MTV-related forms in an attempt to relocate science fiction in the real world, distancing it from the technocratic elitism of earlier decades, “when Science was safely enshrined-and confined–in an ivory tower” and “authority still had a comfortable margin of control.”61 To him, rock video, synth-rock, and by implication MTV signify an in-your-face engagement with streetwise technoculture.

  Paralleling Sterling’s attempts to distance cyberpunk from traditional SF, MTV cast itself as network TV’s punky offspring, wrapping itself in the ragged mantle of adolescent rebellion. Of course, MTV’s definition of rebellion is fundamentally apolitical. “[T]he underlying message of MTV,” asserts Ken Tucker, in Rock of Ages: The Rolling Stone History of Rock & Roll,

  was that rock and roll was merely entertainment, fun; its endless chains of surrealistic video imagery suggested that rock music had nothing to do with the real world. [Robert Pittman, the executive vice president of MTV’s former owner, Warner Amex Satellite Entertainment Company], never one to opt for subtlety, put it succinctly: “In the ’60s, politics and rock music fused. But there are no more political statements [in rock]. The only thing rock fans have in common is the music-that’s the coalition MTV has gathered.”62

  Of course, there are those who dismiss the notion that “politics and rock music fused” in the sixties. “Woodstock made it clear that rock would spark no revolutions,” writes the cultural critic Mark Crispin Miller.

  Rock fans are hedonists; they want to luxuriate in fine blasts of sound. They may curse and break chairs if the concert doesn’t start on time, but they do not run outside and embrace wild dogmas. Woodstock’s (and rock’s) defining moment came when Abbie Hoffman clambered onstage to address the woozy multitudes and Pete Tbwnshend of the Who, the act in progress, stepped up behind him and kicked him off.63

  The cultural critic Andrew Goodwin rejects outright the baby boomer article of faith that MTV skinned the semiotics of rock, leaving the meat of the matter-the political innards-to rot. MTV is indeed a “master manipulator,” he grants.

  But that is different from making the often-heard complaint that music video has ‘sold out’ the hitherto unblemished soul of rock and roll. Such arguments are nonsensical. Rock and pop were commodified practices of mass mediation long before the introduction of music television.64

  Even so, as Miller points out in his dry-eyed eulogy for rock, “Where All the Flowers Went,” the music “may have been ‘co-opted’ all along, handled by shrewd producers from the beginning, but it was exciting as long as nobody knew this depressing fact.”65 After 1981 (the year MTV went on the air), “rock and roll, once too wild for television, became . . . a necessary adjunct of TV’s all pervasive ad.”66 He chronicles the refunction-ing of rock, from the drumbeat of the electric bacchanal into “the music of technological enclosure,” experienced singly, passively, and, more often than not, remotely. MTV’s decision to inaugurate its first broadcast with “Video Killed the Radio Star” by the Buggies proves prophetic: Technology (“a pervasive neutralizing medium”) is implicated in the domestication of rock, argues Miller. “Like cinema, rock has become dependent on fine gadgetry,” he maintains.67 The music is

  no longer strummed, blown, and banged, but programmed, and then received in solitude by immobile millions watching TV, or driving to work, or “plugged into” Walkmans, or sitting through live performances as ‘silent watchers’ lost in memory of the video.68

  As noted earlier, Sterling applauds the very developments (music video, “rock tech”) that Miller contends are sapping rock of the rebelliousness cyberpunks hold dear. Noting the supreme irony that “in order to function as a successful service for the delivery of viewers to advertisers and record companies, MTV must promote countercultural and antiestablish-ment points of view,” Goodwin argues that MTV is “simultaneously involved in the incorporation and the promotion of dissent.”69

  So, too, i
s cyberpunk. It speaks the antiauthoritarian language of the sixties, replete with visions of “street-level anarchy” and rapacious multinationals, even as it celebrates the ingenuity of the military-industrial-entertainment complex that enables the “integration of technology and . . . counterculture” (Sterling). It rejects organized politics in favor of a ruggedly individualistic techno-libertarian survivalism while at the same time contemplating, with something approaching relish, the obsolescence of the human being in the coming age of intelligent machines.

  Such conundrums are dramatized by cyberpunk’s relation to popular music. The “lurking contradiction” Sterling sees at the heart of the “rural, romanticized, anti-science, anti-tech” counterculture of the sixties-an incongruity symbolized, for him, by the electric guitar that was simultaneously a symbol of resistance to a soulless technocracy and a technological artifact-endures in cyberpunk fiction that incorporates “rock tech” and rock mythos. Such writings highlight the unresolved paradoxes at play in cyberculture at large.

  “Rock technology was the thin end of the wedge,” declares Sterling, in Mirrorshades:

  As the years have passed, rock tech has grown ever more accomplished. . . . Slowly, it is turning rebel pop culture inside out, until the artists at pop’s cutting edge are now, quite often, cutting-edge technicians in the bargain. . . . The contradiction has become an integration.70

  But seen from the “street level” that is cyberpunk’s supposed perspective, the contradiction is far less integrated than he suggests.

  In “Rock On,” Pat Cadigan’s contribution to Mirrorshades, “cutting-edge” technology has severed rock’s connection to its musical roots in the deep, dark loam of folk and blues, and to its sociocultural roots in the rough-and-tumble of street culture. Cadigan’s alter ego, Gina, is a “40-year-old rock ‘n’ roll sinner” in the literal as well as the punning sense: a worse-for-wear survivor of the sixties and a brain-socketed Synner whose video dreams transform even no-talent nonentities into rock gods. On the run from Man-O-War, a video star whose business acumen far outstrips his meager abilities as a musician (“He couldn’t sing without hurting someone bad and he couldn’t dance, but inside, he rocked. If I rocked him.”), Gina is kidnapped by the aptly named Misbegotten.71 Ignoring her protestations, the band wires her for sound and vision in the hope that she can turn them into hitmakers:

  And then it was flashback time and I was in the pod with all my sockets plugged, rocking Man-O-War through the wires, giving him the meat and bone that made him Man-O-War and the machines picking it up, sound and vision, so all the tube babies all around the world could play it on their screens whenever they wanted.72

  A wisecracking parable about rock’s fall from grace, into that postmodern purgatory of pure simulation, MTV, “Rock On” harks back to a mythic sixties-before soul had been synthesized and the counterculture commodified, ostensibly. The story is a series of dualisms, counterpoising the authentic with the synthetic: rib-sticking “real food” served at a greasy spoon is juxtaposed with “edible polyester that slips clear through you so you can stay looking like a famine victim”; Gina’s memories of “rocking in my mother’s arms” to the Rolling Stones’ “Start Me Up” with an elevator music version of the same song; the I-Want-My-MTV “tube babies” suckling at the glass teat with Gina, searching for a dive bar where she can “boogie my brains till they leak out the sockets.”73 But as Man-O-War reminds her,

  “[A]ll the bars are gone and all the bands. Last call was years ago; it’s all up here, now. All up here.” He tapped his temple.

  “It’s not the same. It wasn’t meant to be put on a tube for people to watch.”

  “But it’s not as though rock ‘n’ roll is dead, lover.”

  “You’re killing it.”

  “Not me. You’re trying to bury it alive.”74

  Cadigan’s story betrays a mystical humanism that places its faith in the ghost, rather than the machine: “Rock tech” may have “grown ever more accomplished,” reducing the act of making music to pure cerebration (“up here”), but even on-line cyber-rock is dependent on the shamanistic Synner’s ability to access “some primal dream spot.” Despite McCaffery’s thesis that science fiction, specifically cyberpunk, is the preeminent literature of postmodern culture, in which “reproduced and simulated realities . . . have begun subtly to actually displace the ‘real,’ rendering it superfluous,” Cad-igan is an unregenerate romantic: She accepts no substitutes (Muzak, rock video, synthesizers) for the inviolate, irreducible real to which all referents supposedly point.75 Like Gina, she is a fortysomething “rock ‘n’ roll sinner” whose “poor old heart” has been broken by what she perceives to be the commodification and cybernation of rebellion.

  Published a year after “Rock On,” in 1985, John Shirley’s Eclipse is, like Cadigan’s story, a reexamination of the meaning of rock ‘n’ roll and the values of sixties counterculture in the MTV eighties, when videogenic prettiness became as important as–if not more important than-musical ability. In his essay “The Eighties,” the Rolling Stone editor Anthony De-Curtis writes,

  Videos, video compilations, long-form videos, corporate sponsorships, product endorsements . . . began to envelop what was once considered a rebel’s world. . . . By the mid-1980s . . . [j]oining a rock band had become a career move like any other, about as rebellious as taking a business degree and, if you got lucky, more lucrative.76

  “Freezone,” an excerpt from Eclipse included in Mirrorshades, is convulsed by a gag reflex at the artificially sweetened confections of the eighties: MTV staples such as Culture Club, Thompson Twins, Wham! and, archetypically, Duran Duran, which owed its success to videos that were equal parts Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, soft-core porn, and haute couture fashion ad.

  Shirley’s protagonist, Rick Rickenharp, is rock’s conscience incarnate, the angry, clanging guitar given human form (his comic-book name crosses the Rickenbacker, a bright, chiming, electric guitar popular with sixties groups such as the Byrds, with the Orphic harp). A “rock classicist” in Harley-Davidson boots and a “gratingly unfashionable” black leather jacket “said to have been worn by John Cale when he was still in the Velvet Underground,” Rickenharp is the singer-lead guitarist for a hard rock act left high and dry when the nostalgia wave ebbs away. He stands in staunch opposition to the effete, ersatz fare that passes for rock in the next millennium: “minimono,” short for “minimalist-monochrome,” a “canned music” of “stultifying regularity” that buzzes, gnatlike, at the edge of Rickenharp’s awareness, “a drill-bit vibration” in the spine. (Rickenharp’s tastes run, predictably, to the “collector’s-item Velvet Underground tape . . . capped into his Earmite” blaring the song “White Light/White Heat.”)77 The technofetishistic minimonos-Shirley’s wry send-up of the preening androgynes who populated the high-tech nightclub scene of the eighties-are deadpan, die-cut conformists who wear “flat-black, flat-gray, monochrome tunics and jumpsuits” and are “into stringent law-and-order.”

  Rickenharp’s self-named rock band is jarringly out of place at the Semiconductor, a minimono nightspot on the floating Las Vegas called Freezone. Wiredancers such as Joel NewHope, the “radical minimono” who opens the show, are à la mode:

  He was anorexic and surgically sexless. . . . A fact advertised by his nudity: he wore only gray and black spray-on sheathing. How did the guy piss?, Rickenharp wondered. Maybe it was out of that faint crease at his crotch. A dancing mannequin . . . The wires jacked into NewHope’s arms and legs and torso fed into impulse-translation pickups on the stage floor. . . . The long, funereal wails pealing from hidden speakers were triggered by the muscular contractions of his arms and legs and torso.78

  Listening to this epicene BioMusician, Rickenharp musters a halfhearted enthusiasm, allowing, “It’s another kind of rock ‘n’ roll, is all.”79 That said, he quickly adds, “But real rock is better. Real rock is coming back, he’d tell almost anyone who’d listen. Almost no one would.”80

  Sh
irley renders the contest between the real thing, rock, and its uncanny, android double, minimono, in gendered language that comes perilously close to homophobic caricature, in spots, and misogynistic self-parody in others. In an unfortunate resurrection of the Hitlerian trope of the mercurial, “feminine” masses secretly yearning to be mastered, the audience glowers at Rickenharp “with insistent hostility, but [he] liked it when the girl played pretend-to-rape-me.”81 Inevitably, he has his way with the unwilling crowd, his Stratocaster “discharg[ing]” the pent-up, sexual energy in the room, “nailing a climax onto the air.”82 Minimono, by comparison, is emasculated, sapless: no manly jet for Joel NewHope, who must urinate (if he urinates at all) out of a decidedly feminine “crease.”

  The subculture is not only decadent but dehumanizing as well: While Rickenharp dances “freestyle,” the minimonos interlock in “geometrical dance configurations,” “Busby Berkeley kaleidoscopings.”83 The clockwork movement of human cogs intermeshed in a flawless geometry is a hallmark of totalitarian spectacle, of course, from Fritz Lang’s crypto-fascist Metropolis to Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will. The fascist overtones of the minimonos’ disco drills are entirely intentional: Eclipse is an impassioned tale of rock ‘n’ roll resistance to a fascist bid for world domination. In the book’s climax, Rickenharp meets the fascist onslaught head-on; reborn as the bard of the resistance, he screams his heavy metal swan song from atop the Arc de Triomphe as the enemy bludgeons the monument to rubble.

  The cultural critic George Slusser’s pronouncement that “rock and roll has lost its soul and doesn’t know where to find it” is axiomatic for a body of cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk writings. In the near future of Norman Spinrad’s Little Heroes (1987), the megacorporation Muzik, Inc., has a virtual monopoly on popular music, which it mass produces with the aid of “VoxBox wizards who [can] replace bands, orchestras, and even backup vocalists, with a keyboard, a vocoder, and a black box full of wizard-ware.”84 The company employs