Escape Velocity (15 page)

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]oin-ing 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. ■^^

"Freezone," an excerpt from Eclipse included in Mirrorshades, is convulsed by a gag reflex at the artificially sw^eetened 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 LightAVhite Heat.")^^ 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 a 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. ^®

Listening to this epicene BioMusician, Rickenharp musters a halfhearted enthusiasm, allowing, "It's another kind of rock 'n' roll, is all."^^ 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."^^

Shirley 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."^' 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."^^ 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."^^ 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."^'' The company employs

platoons of shrinks and unemployed former Pentagon psy-war spooks to think up best-selling scenarios for their songhacks and VoxBox mercenaries to turn into lyrics and music. . . . Muzik, Inc., had turned hit-making into a science. . . . the psychological profiles of the total mass audience had been broken down into fine demographic slices.^^

Muzik, Inc., bombards the benumbed viewers of its unmistakably MTVish twenty-four-hour rock video channel, MUZIK, with faceless product such as the "dead-ass plastic max metal thing with a ton of swagger and rubber underwear and a spec sheet for a soul" that Glorianna OToole wrinkles her nose at, early on.^^ Glorianna is described, in the thumbnail sketches of the novel's main characters at the front of the book, as

the Crazy Old Lady of Rock and Roll. She remembers Woodstock and Altamont and Springsteen. Technology put her out to pasture . . . until [she was] hired to create [a] computer-generated rock star.*^

Billy Beldock, president of Musik, Inc., inveigles her into adding the ineffable intangible missing from Project Superstar's attempt to create a million-selling AP (Artificial Personality)-a video rock star conjured from "raw bits and bytes or stock footage" and brought to singing, dancing life by an "image organ player." He cajoles, "Aw, come on, Glorianna, you know that APs have to be the future of the industry. . . . It's too cost-effective not to be inevitable."^^ Beldock needs Glorianna to discover why none of Musik, Inc.'s APs have "shipped gold or cracked the charts with a megabit," a mystery she unravels posthaste:

"That soulless crap is to the real thing as white bread is to pumpernickel," she declared from the bottom of her heart. "It's-"

"I know, I know," Billy sighed, joining her on the chorus.

"It's just not Rock and Roll."^^

Which is to say that Musik, Inc., could not by definition counterfeit "the great voice of that spirit which had now all but vanished from the world" because real rock 'n' roll was "music that kicked their kind of ass"-in other words, rock and rebellion (whether teen angst or sixties-style radicalism) cannot be disentangled.^^

Challenging Sterling's assertion that the movement is in every way consonant with the eighties ("an era of. . . old notions shaken loose and reinterpreted with a new sophistication"), cyberpunks such as Cadigan, Shirley, and the New Wave alumnus Norman Spinrad (who deserves the title of "honorary cyberpunk," at least) betray an unexpectedly reactionary anti-postmodernism when it comes to the changes wrought by cyberculture on popular music.^'

They inveigh against the supersession of the authentic by the synthetic, of the visceral by the cerebral: the supplanting of human performance by computer-controlled MIDI instruments; of "real" sounds by digital samples or synthesized substitutes; of traditional musical skills by computer literacy; of live performance, experienced communally, by rock video or pay-per-view TV, experienced privately; even of outsized, unwieldy technology by small, sleek devices (Rickenharp mourns the passing of the imposing "stacks" of amplifiers that made the twentieth-century guitar god such an imposing sight). The transcendentalist raptures familiar from cyberpunk evocations of the insertion of the human into the technosphere via cyberspace or, conversely, of the invasion of the body by what Sterling calls "visceral" technologies are nowhere in evidence here.

But while such creeping technophobia is obviously contrary to the cyber term of the cyberpunk dualism, it is entirely in keeping with its punk aspect. Punk's cynical embrace of modern consumer culture-a Warholian mockery of hippiedom's failure to build a New^ Jerusalem among the dark, Satanic mills of industrial modernity-concealed a yearning for a lost authenticity of its own (that of fifties rockabilly and sixties garage rock) that

was no less romantic simply because it reeked of hot rod exhaust and jounced to the twang of electric guitars. According to Mary Harron, a one-time contributor to the New York underground magazine Punk, the phenomenon "was about saying yes to the modern world. Punk, like Warhol, embraced everything that cultured people, and hippies, detested: plastic, junk food, B-movies, advertising, making money."^^ Simultaneously, and contrarily, punk-informed in part by the return of Teddy Boy culture and the mainstream rock 'n' roll revival of the early seventies (Grease, That'll Be the Day, American Grajffiti)-looked back to the raucous, frenzied mavericks of fifties rockabilly and the garage rockers of the mid-sixties. In its own way, punk was no less nostalgic for the fast-receding Real than hippie: Punks like Tony James, the Generation X bassist who sported an Elvis T-shirt, or the Ramones, wearing leather jackets in homage to The Wild One, recalled their audiences to a fabled time when rock was lean and hungry, uncorrupted by the mainstream influences that had made it fat and fatuous by the late seventies.

It was this investment in authenticity that accounted for punk's deep-dyed suspicion of "rock tech"-at least, of any technology more advanced than the electric guitar-even as it said yes to the modern world. It explains Lewis Shiner's reflexive resistance to "a lot of guys in black leather who use synthesizers . . . and digital sampling," as well as the instinctive aversion to the cyborging of rock in the fiction of Shirley, Cadigan, Spinrad, and others. As Sterling confirms, cyberpunk, "[IJike punk music ... is in some sense a return to roots."^^ Allowing that groups such as Cabaret Voltaire "used synthesizers, sequencers, and drum machines to produce rudimentary avant-punk music," Goodwin notes that

despite the occasional use of machines, the emphasis in punk was always on real performance. . . . Indeed, an overreliance on advanced technology was taken as a sign of "progressive rock"— the very music that punk was supposed to displace.'^''

The irony of punk's rejection of high technology in favor of that blunt instrument of modern primitivism, the electric guitar, is self-evident, as Norman Spinrad points out in his essay "The Neuromantic Cyberpunks." Conceding that rock has "always been the music of libidinal anarchy and the

romantic and transcendental impulses," he contends that it has "also always been by definition technological music, for without the electric guitar and the synthesizer, it ain't rock and roll either.'"^^ Ergo, "the expression of the romantic impulse through high-tech instrumentalities is the heart of rock and roll."^^ In a sense, then, rock has been cyberpunk-or, to use Spinrad's punning coinage, "Neuromantic"-from the very beginning. Spinrad reads Rickenharp's triumph in Eclipse as a ''cyborged triumph"; made possible by "the electronic augmentation of [Rickenharp's] fleshly musical powers," it "demonstrates . . . that cyborgs, romantic cyborgs, Neuromantic cyborgs, have in fact been using technological augments for transcendental purposes ever since Dylan picked up that electric guitar. When it comes to the characteristic music of our times, we have all been accepting Neuromanti-cism as a given for a quarter of a century."^^

To Sex Pistols-era punks (and the cyberpunks who are their standard-bearers), the electric guitar symbolized the raw, the real; synthesizers, by contrast, were synonymous with the flaccid, the bathetic. Now, however, with cyberpunk's "virus-like" infestation of mass culture, there has been a semiotic slippage: Gibson's claim, in an interview with NPR's Terry Gross, that he "gave [computer nerds] permission to wear black leather" applies equally to electronic musicians, specifically those who play synthesizers, once the most painfully unhip of pop instruments.^^ Heedless of Shiner's misgivings, the black leather synth-rockers have claimed cyberpunk as their own. The mainstream finds its own uses for things, too, it seems.

3 / WAG I N G A Tl N KE R E R ' S WAR

Mechanical Spectacle^

Matt Heckert'sWalk and Peck Machine, customized with horse remains.

Photo: Bobby Neel Adams

Manufacturing Dissent

Mark Pauline, Chico MacMurtrie, and Brett Goldstone are waging a tinkerer's war.

Pauline builds engines of destruction. He is the founder and director of Survival Research Laboratories, a loosely knit organization which, since 1979, has been perfecting a heavy metal theater of cruelty-scary, stupefyingly loud events in which remote-controlled weaponry, computer-directed robots, and reanimated roadkill do battle in a murk of smoke, flames, and greasy fumes. MacMurtrie fabricates puppetlike robot musicians, warriors, and acrobats that perform in ecotopian dramas. And Goldstone builds junkyard whimsies driven by steam or powered by water: a horseless carriage with a fat-bellied, wood-gobbling boiler for an engine; a Water Bird brought to life by water pumped down its vacuum-cleaner-tube gullet, causing its tin wings to flap excitedly.

Costly, complicated, and sometimes even hazardous, the performances mounted by these Californian artists are infrequent and usually take place on the West Coast or, on occasion, in Europe. All three take advantage, through "Dumpster diving" and what Pauline euphemistically calls "aggressive scrounging," of the machine parts and electronic components generated by the computer and aerospace industries.