3rd cycle - the future is already here, it just ain’t cute (or; messages you won’t read.)
Growing up in the digital age. by dean (Originally Posted on the Start Press Substack on Feb 15, 2024)
Welcome to the 3rd cycle of playlist name pending.
The other day, I woke up with a phrase bouncing around in my head: “some kind of anonymous sense.” I thought it was an interesting sentence, and I wondered if I should include it as a candidate for the playlist name! Some anonymous sense… a knowledge or understanding out there in the ether that hasn’t revealed its true nature to you yet.
It certainly is part of the theme of what I’m going for, but I feel like I haven’t written or explored enough through this project to settle on that as the title. It’s not conclusive and we’re only 2 months in! Let’s move on with the music, shall we?
Influential science fiction author William Gibson said that “the future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed.” Tim Rogers, somewhere deep in his Action Button Review of Cyberpunk 2077, punched the quote up a bit. "The future is already here, it just ain’t cute.”
This cycle is all about computers, growing up with the internet, life in the digital age, and like, so many sci-fi robots.
hi (hannah diamond, 2015.)
This is a syrupy sweet pop song that really understands growing up in the digital age. Staring at screens, sending messages, waiting for hours for a response. The night drags on, and you lose sense of the existence of any humanity on the other side of the fiber-optic strands you spend your time talking to. Will they respond? Are the reading these messages? Are they real?
A lot of my best relationships were either formed entirely online or used the internet for cultivation. “Social Media” is a valuable tool, and has brought a lot of good into my life. It is easy to hate on it. If you’re not plugged-in, it seems odd and strange, it seems like people get really crazy about it. There are different social rules, new kinds of language and tone to parse through. And every day, it gets worse and worse under the reign of the companies that own the platforms.
I yearn for a second coming of websites, smaller spaces just a bit more focused on community and less reliant on influencers or algorithmically-generated ads, catered to our browsing history. That is part of the reason why I’m doing this! E-Mail-based personal blogging? Hell yeah. I love reading friends blogs and we can all talk about our interests and share things and it’s low-pressure, like the internet should be.
This song makes me think about all that.
gold star for robot boy (guided by voices, 1994.)
Another short and sweet hit by GBV. The twisted guitars and catchy vocals draw me in, and I end up listening to it twice when it shows up in a shuffle.
I like the title lyric, it’s a sarcastic eye-roll to conformity.
If I waited for you to show me all the actions I should take,
would I get my break? Gold star… for robot boy!!
Alright, I’ll stop pushing Guided by Voices on everybody. Last one for a few cycles, I think!
mexican radio (wall of voodoo, 1982.)
If you haven’t’ been able to tell from the few playlist cycles so far, I am a huge fan of one-hit-wonders. The more inexplicable, the better. Wall Of Voodoo’s 1980’s classic “Mexican Radio” goes unbelievably hard in how weird it is.
The butt-wild arpeggio synths, the spaghetti western guitars, and Stan Ridgway’s annoying cowboy vocals take over your ears in this song about a cool cowpoke near the US/Mexico border, picking up hazy radio signals from the unregulated AM stations nearby.
Wall of Voodoo take a funny film-school college boy approach to New Wave music, making everything oddball and themed around Italian spaghetti westerns. I can identify with that attitude!
I wish I was in Tijuana eating barbecue iguana!
If you’re curious why I’ve linked the music video instead of the Spotify preview for this one, its because Spotify refuses to attach the proper album artwork for Wall of Voodoo’s Call of the West and instead uses the art for a one-hit-wonder compilation album called GUILTY PLEASURES and I hate it. Hopefully, this doesn’t happen too often with the other songs from that compilation album, because I’d like to write about some of the other songs on there.1
are friends electric? (gary numan & the tubeway army, 1979.)
Cold, mechanical, isolated, uncaring. The emotions of a sci-fi robot man. Or are they??? I’ve always been afraid that people’s feelings are not the same kinds of feelings that I have. It’s a push and pull with my brain to stop worrying. Of course, people are feeling the same thing as I am. Friends are not electric, they’re flesh and blood.
This song is from a concept album, so there’s like, a story going on here. I don’t know what the story of the album is. I think it’s sorta like that scene in Blade Runner 2049 where Ryan Gosling has sex with Mackenzie Davis but she’s like wearing the hologram of Ana de Armas because he’s a robot guy and he loves his hologram girlfriend but she’s even less ‘real’ than he is so Davis (another robot!!) offers to be like, a stand-in for their touch. It’s so much sci-fi going on. None of these people involved are humans, but they’re all having some crazy experience that only humans can have. That’s a great movie!
oblivion (grimes, 2012.)
Grimes, oh, Grimes. You were the coolest. From, like, 2012 to 2015, the world was yours.
Oblivion is (according to Pitchfork) the 2nd greatest song of the 2010s. It’s dark synth, it’s cyberpunk. It’s really cool. There’s some GREAT usage of the Orchestra Hit in this song. I like that it is so hypnotic and the synth sequence might be slightly off-time and it lulls you into a sense of danger but at the same time it’s just so cool. I love Grimes’ vocals, I love that you can hear her Canadian accent AND her lisp so clearly. It adds a ton of charm, it’s just so cool. This song is cool. I really want to emphasize that.
I was a huge fan of Grimes from the moment I heard this song, saw that all her other songs were Dune references, and then heard her followup album Art Angels, which is a pop masterpiece. I feel like I spent most of 2016 driving around in my car with the windows down just blasting Art Angels.
Then other stuff happened and I don’t really listen to Grimes as much these days. Online things happened. A weird thing about Grimes is that she seems to be a fan of science-fiction and cyberpunk aesthetics but she doesn’t seem to have the literary comprehension skills to understand what those stories are saying. I just read that these days she’s really into providing her voice to AI toys or whatever, because she loves being a robot.
In Cyberpunk 20772, Grimes provides the voice of the character LIZZY WIZZY, a pop star who has replaced her entire body, Ship-of-Theseus-like, with chrome and cyberware. She keeps pushing the boundaries of her art, making more and more grotesque performances as she becomes more cybernetic (and… here’s some subtext… she’s making a lot of money,too!). It’s horrifying and scary and an obvious satire of millionaire brainrot and the removal of humanity through the installation of entertainment technology3. But sure, Grimes, just go be that character and lend your real, human voice willingly to AI scammers. I’m not trying to be mean to Grimes, I’m just disappointed by her words and deeds!
pocket calculator (kraftwerk, 1981).
When he presses his SPECIAL key, it plays a little melody. It’s sublime.
Got nothing else to say about this one.
Maybe subscribe while you’re listening to Pocket Calculator?
hello, world (louie zong, 2018.)
This is the cutest song in the world about a little computer who feels so much love.
Hello, world! Programmed to work and not to feel. Not even sure that this is real. Find my voice! Although it sounds like bits and bytes, my circuitry is filled with might!
I love him. I want to hold this computer. He is so strong!
bodega run (crying, 2014.)
It’s late at night, you’re at the venue seeing a local band and you’re a little drunk on heavy beers or maybe someone passed around some dank zaza and you’re having a good time with your friends. Someone grabs your hand and you leave the bar. You let out a big burp, your body is clear. Hunger sets in. Across the street, you see heaven:
Bodega run, ooo-ooh! Do you want to share a Yoo-Hoo?
Lil’ Debbie's giving me the eye down that aisle, so pass me a bag of the Hot fries, baby!
Ok, the Wawa isn’t a bodega in the classical sense, but the song just makes me feel like it’s a hot summer night and you step inside the convenience store to cool off and grab some snacks. It’s even better with loved ones around, laughing at jokes,supporting each other’s snacking choices, then waiting around too long for the hoagie that one friend ordered. Beautiful stuff. Human stuff.
Chiptune-infused power pop is definitely not in vogue these days, but I wish it made a comeback. There are some interesting sounds that only this style can produce! It’s so good for my ears!
Crying dropped a few EPs and then a debut album in 2016 and then haven’t made anything since?? Which is crazy! Where are they? Ryan Galloway, the lead guitarist, put out a really great EP with Japanese Breakfast in 2020, and they never did anything to follow that up either. I’m crying that I don’t have new Crying. Maybe one day, they’ll return when we really need them.
spirits in the material world (the police, 1981.)
The Police (the band) rock a lot. They got some reggae-fusion New Wave going on and it rules hard.
I’m including this song in this cycle because it fits the theme. We’re souls in a soulless world. Capitalism is turning our inventions of expression into tools for energy and gain. We are spirits! Anything is possible, but we have to overcome the limitations that systems, machines, put onto us.
digital love (daft punk, 2001.)
My favorite robots of all. Daft Punk, those funky French House Cyborg DJs, have finally made the playlist.
It’s a perfect dance song, there’s build-up to the best guitar solo of all time (I know its technically not a guitar solo but it’s clearly rendered to sound like it is), and its about dancing your heart out with your crush at the club! It’s a dream of love.4
BYE BYE (kim gordon, 2024!)
Kim Gordon, of Sonic Youth, at 70 years young, just dropped this trap BANGER about things she’s got laying around in her bedroom, I guess? It’s rad as hell and I can’t wait to hear the full album when it comes out.
Thank you for reading. I’ll be back soon with another installation of playlist name pending. Leave a comment if you have any thoughts about the songs or this cycle’s theme!
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Still don’t have a name for the bonus features section, but I’ve sorta combined it with the footnotes, so for now, the BONUS FEATURES section is called… THE FOOTNOTES.
- Dean, logging off.
1 Today, you’re getting a special BONUS TRACK. Wall of Voodoo made what’s possibly the greatest cover of all time with their DARK SYNTH NEW WAVE SPAGHETTI WESTERN TAKE ON JOHNNY CASH’S “RING OF FIRE.” 2 A video game adaptation of the tabletop role-playing game Cyberpunk 2020. 3 I’m working (I swear!) on a novel (a novella?) called OUR SLEEPING BODIES HOST IDLE WALLETS. It’s a cyberpunk story set in the near-future where a massive corporation is trying to proprietarize the human subconscious, and turn REM sleep into bitcoin mining energy. It is also, of course, about the human spirit. I truly hope that if I ever finish it and people ever read it, nobody will say “wow I’d like to be a bitcoin computer in my sleep.” 4 I wept when Daft Punk split up and watched the short film, after seeing it when it released with no-context, I thought they were dropping a new album. Turns out they were not.