Thanks for the recommendation on The Space Between Worlds, this looks interesting. I’ll grab this and read it over the break.
@rejj#11870 If you like it I would suggest Kameron Hurley's “the light brigade” as a companion read because they share a remarkable number of similarities. Instead of interdimensional travel a soldier comes unstuck from time every time the military tries to teleport them, so they experience the war non-linearly.
Both main characters are bisexual women who grew up in a ditch and were willingly conscripted to escape it.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40523931-the-light-brigade
I‘ve been twisting the word “cyberpunk” around in my brain after reading this thread, and I started thinking about cyberpunk music, but not in the way anyone might expect, because I was listening to Neil Young’s 1982 album, Trans, which I suppose a lot of people dislike but I think is quite interesting and cool.
Essentially, this album is the result of Neil Young learning what a computer is, buying a synthesizer and a vocoder, and just doing his thing in the most Neil Young way possible. A side note is that his son was born with cerebral palsy, and at the time, Neil was struggling to help him communicate, hence the distorted vocals. The album is kinda cheesy, but Neil Young is essentially a musical genius, so I think it has a strong resonance despite its silliness. It captures the "computers in space" musical trend, but does so with a more critical mode than something like Yellow Magic Orchestra.
Why is this cyberpunk? Well, I don't think it is really, technically, but I think it's an interesting adjacent work. "We R In Control" is about megacorps, "Computer Cowboy" is like if Neuromancer was a Western instead of a heist, and "Sample and Hold" is, I think, about corporate cloning.
You say in your post that cyberpunk is about analyzing late capitalism, which I think sums up Neil Young's ethos kinda well, with his environmental, anti-war, anti-celebrity, anti-corporate, anti-marketing, etc attitude. Not only that, but the album _Trans_ itself was involved in a lawsuit by which his record company attempted to sue him for making "deliberately uncommercial music," which kind of hits the nail on the head.
Anyway, I just like talking about Neil Young, so perhaps I'm not making any sense. I've just been thinking about this thread a lot, and this is what resulted in my head.
I think you're onto something: mod to switch out keanu for a trans-era neil young in cyberpunk2077
And not to disagree with you entirely about the guy and his anticapitalism, but I’ve always gotten the sense that his anti-corporate record label stance is more of a "they don’t pay me specifically enough money" position
@yeso#12409 Hmm, I would say that‘s bit of a mis-categorization. I think he’s been pretty vocal about his stance regarding large corporations and the ways they are destroying not only the environment, but also the livelihoods of workers and especially farmers. I‘m a huge fan of his music so I’m biased, and I don't really pay too much attention outside of the music, but it seems to me like he is the polar opposite of a lot of rockstars of that era who, as soon as they made a million dollars, quickly abandoned any social issues, started hating taxes, voting republican, etc.
He certainly made a lot of a lot of money from his records - at the time of the lawsuit I mentioned, they were paying him $1M per record for these "uncommercial albums." And yet he supported Bernie Sanders, for example - not that that makes anyone a saint or anything, but it shows what sort of opinions he has RE the accumulation of personal wealth. Just a few years ago he made a whole album about Monsanto, lol. I find it hard to think of that all as an act considering how personal a lot of his songs are.
@wickedcestus#12413 You‘re more informed than me I’m sure re neil’s politics. Don’t remember which documentary it was but recall footage of him bullying some poor schmuck record store clerk because he found a bootleg of the zuma tour or whatever in the rack. But that was decades ago and he contains multitudes for sure.
don’t know if you’re familiar with the cyberpunk77 plot, but the keanu character is a corporate-hating rock musician who nukes a corporate hq, so your neil young analogue is amusingly close to the mark
oddly enough, everyone in the game uses a pono
@wickedcestus#12403
If I was going to pick an album around which to style cyberpunk it'd be "Silent Shout" by The Knife, which despite coming out in 2006 still sounds more like 2036, to me. It has that "haunted house come to life" feeling sort of reminiscent of how vaporwave can feel haunted (with the unsettlingly rendered vocals and such).
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLfCf5y-R1T07UQ7XU4xw5p4dloBH9M5eg
At this point cyberpunk itself almost feels haunted, to me. I'd love to see someone get real dark and spooky with it.
anyone but grimes jesus christ
@yeso#12458 oh no, did she change her stage name to Grimes Jesus Christ?
As long as were talking about music, the story didnt appear in the marketing but this kind of stuff did
https://youtu.be/YAVvwv-YSJ4
Chrome was a neuromancer-contemporaneous band I think might fit
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJbyFMMlIDY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFG58XjHQak
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O89qZ9vRP6U
Incredible post. Thank you for this. I really enjoyed Mozart in Mirrorshades and I look forward to reading The Space Between Worlds and watching Genocidal Organ. I knew Facebook was bad, but holy heck I did not realize how bad.
@bone#12486
Thank you so much. Dont sleep on "sorry to bother you", either. It's something!
Edit: Also "genocidal organ" is just one of a trilogy of anime adaptations of itoh's work. "Harmony" is also worth checking out (it's kind of a sequel that takes place long after genocidal organ). I havnt yet seen "empire of corpses".
>
@Moon#12464 As long as were talking about music, the story didnt appear in the marketing but this kind of stuff did
Wow nothing puts the "punk" in Cyberpunk 2077 more than Cyberpunk 2077 presents: Rap Music Video, featuring Landlord "Killer" Mike
@Gaagaagiins#12495 killer mike is what happens when your heart is 100% in the right place but you're confused about how to proceed and have to rediscover shit on your own based on first principles
His netflix show is like watching him try to do this
Edit: it's been hard for me to avoid updating this thread with current "cyberpunk" activities by other corps but heres a couple
https://twitter.com/Reza_Zadeh/status/1344009123004747778?s=19
Soldiers dancing in the streets (known as a "war dance") is a "hearts and minds" tactic that has been used during our current an ongoing occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq. If you've seen cops doing it in america this year, that's where they got it from.
https://twitter.com/AP/status/1344468261505695744?s=19
Love to live in some better world's hell
@Gaagaagiins#12523
Hell is open, and all the devils are here
Amazing amount of information in this post, but it has reminded me that I‘m pretty sure Gibson wrote about seeing “cyberpunk pajamas” in a store window the first time he went to Japan, but I’ve been unable to track down any reference to this and I'm not sure if I imagined it.
Fantastic post, only read the first 65535 characters.
I just want to rep for Bruce Sterling's lovely 1992 nonfiction book on the l33t H/P/C scene,[ The Hacker Crackdown](http://library.lol/main/7757D2F09AC305EE062856E4197EFB4E). It's an incredibly readable overview of what it was like for 2600-types in the late 80s/early 90s -- covers Kevin Mitnick, [Operation Sundevil](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sundevil), the beginning of the EFF, and more. Very inspiring as a historical record of obscure cyber events and especially in hindsight, considering how the online landscape has changed.