Escape Velocity (14 page)

ruled "by the gun, the guitar, and the needle, sexier than sex."^^ A quantum-leaping superhero who lives in Swinging London, he battles villains whose James Bond redoubts are booby-trapped with LSD gas and throws parties that last for months.

In all four Jerry Cornelius novels, references to sixties bands and snatches of period songs intensify the books' already oversaturated pop art colors in the same way that the brand name-dropping of Don DeLillo or Donald Barthelme lends their novels a hyperreal quality The climactic scene of the second novel, A Curejor Cancer (1971), is a necromantic ritual involving a "chaos machine" that taps the life force of the living to reanimate the dead. Hooking the device up to his dead sister, Cornelius conducts a psychedelic resurrection:

Swiftly Jerry increased the entropy rate to maximum, preparing himself for the ensuing dissipation. ... He began to flood through the universe and then through the multiverse, to the sound of the Beatles singing "A Day in the Life," throbbing in time to the cosmic pulse. . . . Faster and faster flew the particles and Jerry hung on. . . . He looked about him and waited as "Helter Skelter" echoed through the infinite. ... He felt a moment's concern before the switch clicked over, Jimi Hendrix started to play "Are You Experienced?," and things began to come together again. Soon he would know if the experiment had paid off."

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 vsdth the SF critic Takayuki Tatsumi, Sterling likens Schismatrix to the "thrashing noise" of the band Husker Du, remarking, "IVe heard critics compare [it] to hardcore punk. ... It goes a hundred miles an hour."^"*

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 Trans-maniacon, an infernal machine that facilitates "the telepathic transfer of mania," turning "a street-braw^l into a raging mob and a border skirmish into a full-scale war."^^ 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."^^ 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. ^^

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. ^^ 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."^^ 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

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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 Mirror-shades 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."^^ 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."^* 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. "[TJhe underlying message of MTV," asserts Ken Tucker, in Rock of Ages: The Rolling Stone History of Rock S^Rolh

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."^^

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 Townshend of the Who, the act in progress, stepped up behind him and kicked him off.^^

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.^"*

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."^^ 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."^^ 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.^^ 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.^^

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 view^ers 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."^^

So, too, is 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 accomphshed. . . . 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 7°

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 w^ell as the punning sense: a worse-for-wear survivor of the sixties and a brain-socketed Synner w^hose video dreams transform even no-talent nonentities into rock gods. On the run from Man-O-War, a video star w^hose 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.^' Ignoring her protestations, the band v^^ires 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 screeils whenever they wanted. ^2

A w^isecracking 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 RolUng 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."^^ 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."^"*

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 McCaflfery'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. ^^ 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.