Escape Velocity (12 page)

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 wdth 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," as "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."-^^

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 14^rrior-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?"^'

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 Shirley^'^

"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."^^ 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

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evident its excesses."^"* 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)" (Truthtahk, 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.^^

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 uniquely 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 w^onder if the knife-w^ielding 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.^^

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,"^^

The Downward Spiral includes "The Becoming," a suffocating song about someone who is graducilly being colonized by a machine that fiinctions

like a parasitic organism: "the me that you know is now made up of wires."^^ As in so much science fiction, the invulnerabiUty that comes with being borged ("all pain disappears it's the nature of my circuitry") is purchased at the price of the singer's humanity ("even when i'm right with you i'm so far away").^^ Simultaneously, the metamorphosis of human into machine is mirrored by the transformation of dominant into submissive in the song's S and M subtext: "I beat my machine," declares the narrator as the song begins, but by the end he despairs, "i can try to get away but i've strapped myself in."^^

Incongruously, a religious motif also recurs throughout Reznor's work. On Pretty Hate Machine he assumes so many messianic poses that he seems to be acting out the Stations of the Cross: "I gave you my Purity. . . i'm just an effigy to be defaced," he laments in "Sin," and in "Ringfinger" he accuses a lover of leaving him "hanging like Jesus on this cross."^' There is more than a hint, here, of the union of sadomasochism and religious rapture epitomized by St. Sebastian, the Catholic martyr usually depicted as an androgynous youth in a loincloth, pincushioned by arrows.

All of the themes noted thus far come together, to shattering effect, in the controversial video for "Happiness in Slavery" (Broken, 1992). Shot in black and white by Jonathan Reiss, Happiness was banned on MTV due to its gore and nudity (a few brief glimpses of a flaccid penis). The five-minute video sits squarely in the tradition of cyber-horror pioneered by H. R. Giger, the British writer-director Clive Barker in his Hellraiser movies, and Skinny Puppy, whose songs about torture and vivisection echo with thumps and clangs and gurgles that sound like blood sluicing through hoses.