Glenn Branca and the Lost History of Cyberpunk
James Reich, Published by Fiction Advocate, May 29, 2014
I first connected to the Internet in 1998. There was nothing hip about it, no mirrorshades, no chilled Kirin, no hacker’s cant, no rude-boy antagonism against the frozen walls of malefic corporations, but merely weeks of frustration waiting for a freelance Dell engineer wearing greasy blue overalls to inform me that my machine had been shipped from the factory with its modem already burnt out. In my apartment, the engineer held the device up to the light, a cloudy patina of carbon wrapped around it, as suspect as O.J. Simpson’s black glove; planned obsolescence making its end run. He unwrapped a new modem from a foil packet, checking it for scorch marks. With this hardware replaced, I returned to the inexorable negotiations of early dial-up and an uncomprehending telephone operator at British Telecom. My admittance to cyberspace required a dozen hours of listening to Vangelis loops as hold music, “Chung Kuo” with its anticipation of Blade Runner.
But, this was not the Tokyo-ized, Hammett-hacked sprawl of transnational prosthetics, nor the sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll of William Gibson’s “consensual hallucination”. Of course it wasn’t. Gibson’s fiction of the early eighties, published in Omni, was the map that preceded the territory. Even in the 1930s, before his pulpy serial The World of Null-A, had made the transition fromAstounding Stories magazine to hardcover, A. E. Van Vogt (quasi-Scientologist, and Alfred Korzybski acolyte) had declared “the map is not the territory.” In turn, postmodern theorist Jean Baudrillard hacked that notion. In 1998, the actual aridity of the virtual territory was still remote from the glamor of the map drawn by science fiction writers. Yet, my early explorations of the Internet connected some things that continue to fascinate me. At the time, I was working as a bookseller and those wages and a new credit card purchased both the computer and an important visit to London twelve months earlier. What did the Internet have to say about music?