Hammerjack(off): or, Cyberpunk is as Dead as Industrial

June 23rd, 2005

Waaaaaaaaaaaay back when in the Year 1990, while I was still in highschool learning how to kludge together a simple databasing program in BASIC on one of my school’s ancient Apple ][e’s, I discovered - through the auspices of a friend of mine much more in touch with the audiovisual underground than I was thanks to his involvement in our school district’s “gifted” program–two artistic milieuxs which would come to define my own personal aesthetic for the next decade: cyberpunk fiction and industrial music. More specifically, William Gibson’s seminal Neuromancer, and Ministry’s The Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste.

At the time, that book and that album were like microscopic bombs smuggled into my brain and detonated, shaking loose a lot of ideals and concepts that had been drifting formlessly in my head for a while, and literally opening up another world for my imagination to explore…one saturated with the chromeplated, circuit-ridden fascination of The Future that I’d come to adore by my exposure to lots of sci-fi and Gary Numan’s music, but at the same time filthied over with the everpresent shadow of human greed, apocalyptic disaster, and eternal nastiness that even then I recognized to be a constant Sword of Damocles dangling over this planet. Cyberpunk fiction melded the gritty grime of 1940s Film Noir and 1980s post-apocalyptic survivalism with ultrahightech visions of a transhuman world in which the line between Man and Machine had all but vanished, and life was lived hard, fast, and brutal along that razorblade-edged interface. Ministry’s music the same thing in a different medium: it brought together the rusty, crunching growl of metal guitars together with futuristic samples, voices, and a metric ton of Very Bad Attitude to create an album that…well, it wasn’t metal, exactly, but it wasn’t synthpop: it was street music for the world of Neuromancer - screeching sounds and voices sliding hard, fast, and brutal along the razorblade-edge of what was, in 1990, just beginning to be called “alternative music.”

Cyberpunk and industrial were perfectly complementary visions of one another, one ingested by the eyes, the other by the ears. In the heady glory of discovery, when both forms of art were completely new to me and unbelievably exciting for being so amazingly different than everything else I was reading/listening to, I went nuts and sought out Gibson’s other novels, the collection Mirrorshades, Pat Cadigan, Bruce Sterling, Walter John Williams - and everything else I could find from Ministry, Front Line Assembly, Skinny Puppy, Tool…anything and everything that could be considered either “cyberpunk” or “industrial.” Even then, I was discovering that amid the beautiful shards of heat-ruined mirrorplastic and the scrapyard of sampled beats and distortion, there was Good Stuff and Lame Stuff: Good Stuff was original, crafty, and shared certain genre elements with its fellow stories or albums, sure, but always did something new and interesting with those basic core concepts; Lame Stuff, obviously, just ripped off the basic core concepts of cyberpunk/industrial and just churned out generic xeroxes of much better works. For example, if I could say, “Wow, this is like Count Zero only cooler!“…well, Good Stuff. On the other hand, if I came away from a book or an album thinking, “OK, this was just like Count Zero,” Lame Stuff.

I never imagined that, a mere fifteen years later, both genres–once so fecund and promising–would be so exhausted, so saturated with The Lame, as to have become parodies of themselves. But one need look no further than the latest Big Promotion Savior-of-Cyberpunk novel, Hammerjack, by Marc D. Giller, and just about every contemporary “industrial” band’s work to realize that both genres are dead…and that anything being put out these days under the monikers “cyberpunk” or “industrial” is little more than a wretched, zombified revenant of past glories recycled one time too many.

By Derek C. F. Pegritz on June 23rd, 2005 | Scategory: Sci-Fi |