“One day you might find cause to ask yourself what the limit is to some pain you’re experiencing, and you’ll find out there is no limit at all. Pain is inexhaustible. It’s only people that get exhausted.” — Detective Ray Velcoro, True Detective1
“You’re just generating more pain, more penance for the one sin you couldn’t help commit. The sin of being born.” — Jerry Stahl, Permanent Midnight2
“Pain’s a secret no one keeps.” — Publicist UK, “Levitate the Pentagon”3
“Pain looks great on other people. That’s what they’re for.” — The Sisters of Mercy, “Wrong”4
If there’s anything that will bring you hurtling back to your body, it’s physical pain, a ready reminder that your physical form is inescapable. Even so, pain is intoxicating. We seek it out. We can’t live without it. It makes us feel alive in a way that nothing else does. Happiness, elation, ecstasy, excitement, contentment—these feelings are elusive and fleeting. Pain is certain and ready at hand whenever we need it.
After a bicycle wreck in the busy streets of Chicago years ago, I spent several weeks in a leg brace and the first two weeks of those on crutches. The experience slowed me down in many ways, not all of which were bad. I’m not recommending cracking a kneecap to get reacquainted with the everyday, but a good jarring of the sensorium might help us all once in a while. Nothing brings reality crashing back in like crashing back into reality.
Gas face for the leg brace.
In addition to my patella, I also broke my phone. The cracking of its screen left it useless for texting or taking pictures. Ironically, the only thing it would do was send (provided I knew or could find the number) and receive calls. I also stopped wearing headphones as my injury already made me an easy mark. These two things—no texting and no headphones—reconnected me with aspects of my days I’d been avoiding or ignoring.
Also, I had to change up my commute. For one thing, I obviously wasn’t able to ride my bike to work, which is what I was doing when I crashed. I wasn’t able to take the train because I lived almost a mile from the closest station, and I couldn’t walk that far on crutches. It should also be noted that there are only a few Chicago Transit Authority train stations with elevators. Stairs were out of the question for a few weeks. This put me on a multiple bus-route commute that took me through parts of Chicago I’d never seen.
Possibly the most important factor that made breaking my kneecap an enlightening experience was sociological rather than technological. Collectively we tend to other the impaired among us. That is, there seems to be a clear delineation between the impaired and the normal; however, if one of us is only temporarily injured, we sympathize, empathize, or pity them.
In the month that I wasn’t texting or listening to music and had a bum leg, I had countless uplifting and informative conversations with people whom I wouldn’t have spoken to otherwise and who wouldn’t have spoken to me for one reason or the other. All of the above made me feel far more connected to my fellow humans than any technology or so-called “social” media.
My smashing my knee into the pavement at the origami triangle fold of traffic that is the intersection of Elston, Fullerton, and Damen in Chicago shoved me out of my comfort zone in several ways. One thing I noticed one day on my temporarily revised, much-longer commute to campus was a lot of needless anger: a man walking by the bus stop, angry at his dog for being a dog; a lady with her children, angry at them for being children; people on the bus, angry about being on the bus; the bus driver, angry about the people on the bus; and on and on. I wasn’t exactly happy that my right patella was fractured in two places, I certainly had good and bad days recovering, and I’m not better than any of those mentioned above, but I tried to smile at everyone, laugh at my fumbling around on crutches, do my work, and generally let others carry the anger. Getting out of your comfort zone doesn’t have to be quite so uncomfortable, but sometimes being forced is the only way for it to happen. It felt like I needed it.
With that said, a physical therapist saw me out hobbling down the sidewalk in Logan Square with my leg brace on one day. He stopped and asked me about my injury with genuine and professional interest. He then informed me that a broken patella is the most painful kind of injury, which, he added, is supposedly why it is the chosen punishment for those late on their loan or gambling payments. I don’t recommend getting behind.
Pain is an early warning system, a physical sign of something larger gone awry.
Illicit Metabolism
“I’ve had minimal drug experiences because of fear,” says the artist Peter Gabriel. “I can trust machines, yet I can’t trust pills… A machine you can always switch off or get out of… whereas when a pill gets hold of your metabolism, you have to ride through.”5 Pain is the counterpoint. You either ride out the pain, or you ride out a drug to relieve the pain. But David Cronenberg reminds us, “We absorb all technologies into our bodies.” Drugs aside, we have to metabolize more and more of our gadgets and gear.
David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future (2022)
“Body is reality,” reads the catchphrase for Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future. The writer and director says that the film “is about the crimes committed by the human body against itself.” He says it’s “a meditation on human evolution […] the ways in which we have had to take control of the process because we have created such powerful environments that did not exist previously.”6 He goes on to ponder, “At this critical junction in human history, one wonders — can the human body evolve to solve problems we have created? Can the human body evolve a process to digest plastics and artificial materials not only as part of a solution to the climate crisis, but also, to grow, thrive, and survive?”7
Channeling his former teacher Marshall McLuhan, Cronenberg reminds us, “Technology is always an extension of the human body, even when it seems to be very mechanical and non-human. A fist becomes enhanced by a club or a stone that you throw — but ultimately, that club or stone is an extension of some potency that the human body already has.”8 As Douglas Rushkoff puts it, “Our technologies change from being the tools humans use into the environments in which humans function.”9 Erik Davis adds, “Because the self is partly a product of its communications, new media technologies remold the boundaries of being. As they do so, the shadows, doppelgängers, and dark intuitions that haunt human identity begin to leak outside the self as well — and some of them take up residence in the emerging virtual spaces suggested by the new technologies.”10 I belabor the point here because we don’t tend to think of our technologies as an environment. We don’t tend to think that we’re reshaping ourselves—and our bodies—with every new contrivance. In his introduction to Crash, J. G. Ballard wrote that “what our children have to fear is not the cars on the highways of tomorrow but our own pleasure in calculating the most elegant parameters of their deaths.”11 Warning labels and warding spells: a future defined by risk assessment models and worst-case scenarios.
In The Idiot, Fydor Dostoyevsky wrote,
Now with the rack and tortures and so on—you suffer terrible pain of course; but then your torture is bodily pain only (although no doubt you have plenty of that) until you die. But here I should imagine the most terrible part of the whole punishment is, not the bodily pain at all—but the certain knowledge that in an hour—then in ten minutes, then in half a minute, then now—this very instant—your soul must quit your body and that you will no longer be a man—and that this is certain, certain!
While pain connects us to our own flesh, it isolates us from others. In her book, The Body in Pain, Professor Elaine Scarry writes that to have pain is to be certain.12 To have pain is to be certain of your physical existence, to be certain of your living and being, and to be certain of your mortality. To have pain is to be alone in your body. Scarry writes, “Whatever pain achieves, it achieves in part through its unsharability, and it ensures this unsharability through its resistance to language.”13 She also points out that to hear of another’s pain is to doubt them, thus exacerbating their pain and isolating us, each from another. J. Robbins adds that part of Jawbox’s song “Motorist” was about “imagining being stranded and injured in a place where you suppose nobody will help you.”14
Others might not hurt you on purpose, but they will let you.
“He thought with a kind of astonishment of the biological uselessness of pain and fear, the treachery of the human body which always freezes into inertia at exactly the moment when a special effort is needed.” — from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four
Mythology of Self
“I’m here to express the pain I feel,” Godflesh’s Justin Broadrick says in a 2023 interview with Decibel Magazine, “and I don’t take much pleasure in that at all.”15 There is a pain inherent to life, the pain of existence. “Pain is also a vehicle of knowledge,” says the poet Ocean Vuong. “It may very well be knowledge itself.”16 To many of us, to be alive is to suffer.
Godflesh has always induced a furious form of suffering on their listeners, and a lot of Broadrick’s music comes from some severe shade of anxiety. After years of self-medicating with drugs and alcohol, which only made it worse, he was diagnosed with autism and PTSD at 52-years old. With that revelation, he was finally able to properly deal with his mental health, decades of compounded pain eased with new tools for coping and care.
“I’ve spent a lifetime trying to please everyone, to make myself feel comfortable,” he says, “a lifetime of not doing things because I’m uncomfortable. Now I’m not masking it so much anymore.”17 On “Nero” from 2023’s hip-hop beat-infused Purge, he barks, “Restrain yourself/ Betray/ Your needs,” and on “Land Lord” he says, “Bad seeds/ Own you/ Shape you/ Slay you/ Control/ Divide/ Enslave/ Destroy.”18 If ever his lyrics were masking his discomfort, they certainly aren’t anymore. Bassist Benny Green adds, “Our general abhorrence at the monstrous injustices humans have always inflicted on each other still impacts us to this day. We’d both quite happily hide away in a remote forest or cave in order not to have to deal with the horrors of mankind.”19 He finds solace in the sonorous: “For me, music, sound, tone, whatever you want to call it,” he continues, echoing Robert Fludd’s idea of a celestial monochord, “is the single most powerful and liberating thing there is, and the whole universe exists through vibrations and waves, music included.”20 Call it Godflesh, an all-encompassing energy that connects us all, each to another and beyond.
Notes:
1 Nic Pizzalatto [writer], TrueDetective (New York: HBO, 2014).
2 Jerry Stahl, PermanentMidnight (Port Townsend, WA: Process, 1995).
3 Publicist UK, “Elevate the Pentagon,” from ForgiveYourself [LP] (Los Angeles: Relapse, 2015).
4 The Sisters of Mercy, “Wrong,” from VisionThing [LP] (Los Angeles: Elektra, 1990).
5 Quoted in Daryl Easlea, Without Frontiers: The Life and Music of Peter Gabriel (London: Overlook Omnibus, 2014), 152.
9 Douglas Rushkoff, Team Human, New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2019, 52.
10 Erik Davis, “Recording Angels: The Esoteric Origins of the Phonograph,” in Rob Young (ed.), Undercurrents: The Hidden Wiring of Modern Music (pp. 15-24), London: Continuum, 2002, 17-18.
A quick reading of the first two paragraphs from Post-Self on Radio Panik episode #516, “Adrift Reentry Norther,” December 14, 2025.
It goes as follows:
We are all perpetually holding ourselves together. Our breath, our blood, our food, our spit, our shit, our thoughts, our attention—all tightly held, all the time. Then at death, we let it all out, oozing at once into the earth and gasping at last into the ether.
What if we let it slip before then? What if we were able to let ourselves loose and be as free as we can be? What if we got lost somewhere out there beyond ourselves? If it’s all going down, why aren’t we trying to push ourselves as far out as we can? If we try to hold ourselves together as we watch our world fall apart, we’re holding ourselves back for nothing.
In a mode appealing to members of any subculture, Roy Christopher’s dense but slim The Medium Picture charts the changes in culture as dictated by technology on both a personal and intellectual level. Like the history of our media itself, he first references large monolithic examples — radio/music and television shows — that have become embedded in our culture, then complicates and fragments our relationship to them. One example focuses on how the change from record to tape in the music industry helped to alter our cultural expressions and how we synthesize information. He moves through post-modern history and shows how more technology can create corrosive representations and information, like a copy of a copy of a copy.
A sort of punk rock luddite — Christopher has never owned a TV and hasn’t had a car since the 1990s — he draws from subculture crossover icons like Gang of Four, Laurie Anderson, and Ian MacKaye as well as well-researched academic theories from people like Marshall McLuhan to show how things like zines and mixtapes led to the tiny screens of today. The theory is sprinkled in references; I personally was drawn in with the often-cited works of William Gibson, a robust establishing of skateboarding’s relationship to his topic, and the dozens of chapter-opening quotations from films, poems, music, or authors like Kim Stanley Robinson.
Spike Jonze making marks in The Medium Picture. Photo by Rodger Bridges.
This vast collection of references is supported by well-referenced theory and research that mesh with the book’s easily readable format. Christopher’s claim of lifelong journaling seems very likely given the easy, conversational manner in which he delivers so much information. It is our insights into his own relationships to the theories at hand that make this book most compelling, and Christopher exudes a real love for the things he talks about. I maintained interest through loftier, hard-to-grasp ideas with clearly illustrated connections between seemingly disparate topics like metaphor and technology, while receiving new insight into everyday things such as walking.
The Medium Picture probes many of the questions and desires that we feel as people and may not have words for. The extremely clever title gives a very accurate idea of what the book is about — a play on words that folds in on itself from multiple angles. There is even a nicely designed title page logo calling attention to these interlocking angles, not to mention the pleasing chapter and section headers. Importantly, at only 162 pages, Christopher makes a seemingly intimidating topic appear tackleable and packs a lot into his punch. Perhaps the best thing The Medium Picture does, though, is recognize that it is a piece of a larger whole — a very important and often forgotten thing for cultural theory to do. For that and much more, it is worth your read.
Post-Self is a grim survey of all the ways we attempt to escape the limitations of our physical forms—technology, rapture, drugs, death—with a Foreword by the cultural critic Mark Dery titled “Welcome to the Misanthropocene.”
“We are all perpetually holding ourselves together. Our breath, our blood, our food, our spit, our shit, our thoughts, our attention—all tightly held, all the time. Then at death we let it all out, oozing at once into the earth and gasping at last into the ether.” — from POST-SELF
The back cover copy reads as follows:
In the 21st century, the body has become a prison—a problem to solve, a boundary to break. Post-Self plunges into the dark urge to escape flesh and mortality by any means necessary: technology, cybernetics, drugs, death, or pure rapture.
From horror movies to heavy metal, from radical philosophy to science fiction, this book explores how artists, writers, and visionaries have imagined transcending the human form. What drives our desire to shed our bodies? What lies beyond the self?
Bold, unsettling, and fiercely intelligent, Post-Self journeys through the shadowlands of the modern imagination—where dissatisfaction becomes inspiration, and escape is the ultimate creative act.
“Once the soul looked contemptuously on the body, and then that contempt was the supreme thing — the soul wished the body meagre, ghastly, and famished. Thus it thought to escape from the body and the earth.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra
What other people are saying about it:
“Too often philosophy gets bogged down in the tedious ‘working-through’ of contingency and finitude. Post-Self takes a different approach, engaging with cultural forms of refusal, denial, and negation in all their glorious ambivalence.” — Eugene Thacker, author, In the Dust of This Planet
“Using Godflesh—the arch-wizards of industrial metal—as a framework for a deep philosophical inspection of the permeable human form reveals that all our critical theory should begin on the street where wasted teen musicians pummel their mind and instruments into culture-shifting fault lines. Godflesh are not just a ‘mirror’ of all the horrors and glories we can inflict on our bodies, but a blasted soundscape of our moans. Roy Christopher’s book is a thought-provoking and delightful crucible of film, music, and the best kind of speculative thought.” — Peter Bebergal, author, Season of the Witch
“In his trademark breezy yet precise style, Christopher discusses everything from stimoceivers to Southland Tales, everyone from Henry Lee Lucas to Brummbear, and all without ever losing sight of his central points of reference: our all too malleable somatic limits and Godflesh’s Streetcleaner. And the combination here could not be more apposite, for however much we stretch and augment the reaches of our physicality, imagining ourselves the theophanies of some as yet speculative deities, we get no closer to getting away from ourselves, becoming Godly it seems only in the sense of becoming increasingly empty.” — Gary J. Shipley, author, Stratagem of the Corpse
“Through the lenses of Godflesh, J.G. Ballard, UFO phenomena, psychedelics, serial killings, and so much else, Christopher investigates humanity’s growing inclination to escape our bodies, to escape our species, to escape life itself.” — B.R. Yeager, author, Negative Space
“A peculiar hybrid of Thomas Ligotti and Marshall McLuhan.” — Robert Guffey, author, Operation Mindfuck
“An interesting read indeed!” — Aaron Weaver, Wolves in the Throne Room
I am proud to announce that the University of Georgia Press has deigned to publish The Medium Picture. To wit, I was born in Georgia, and I attended UGA briefly during my first attempt at grad school. This project is very close to my heart, and I am stoked to have the UGA Press putting it out.
Here’s the brief overview:
The ever-evolving ways that we interact with each other, our world, and our selves through technology is a topic as worn as the devices we clutch and carry everyday. How did we get here? Drawing from the disciplines of media ecology and media archaeology, as well as bringing fresh perspectives from subcultures of music and skateboarding, The Medium Picture illuminates aspects of technological mediation that have been overlooked along the way. With a Foreword by Andrew McLuhan, itshows how immersion in unmoored technologies of connectivity finds us in a world of pure media and redefines who we are, how we are, and what we will be.
The book uses ideas from William Gibson, Marshall McLuhan, and Brian Eno, examples from Fugazi, Radiohead, Gang of Four, and Run the Jewels, and artists like Christian Marclay, Richard Long, and Laurie Anderson. It’s post-punk media-theory!
We are all perpetually holding ourselves together. Our breath, our blood, our food, our spit, our shit, our thoughts, our attention—all tightly held, all the time. Then at death we let it all out, oozing at once into the earth and gasping at last into the ether.
In the 21st century, the body has become a prison—a problem to solve, a boundary to break. Post-Self plunges into the dark urge to escape flesh and mortality by any means necessary: technology, cybernetics, drugs, death, or pure rapture.
From horror movies to heavy metal, from radical philosophy to science fiction, this book explores how artists, writers, and visionaries have imagined transcending the human form. What drives our desire to shed our bodies? What lies beyond the self?
Bold, unsettling, and fiercely intelligent, Post-Self journeys through the shadowlands of the modern imagination—where dissatisfaction becomes inspiration, and escape is the ultimate creative act.
Advance Praise:
“Too often philosophy gets bogged down in the tedious ‘working-through’ of contingency and finitude. Post-Self takes a different approach, engaging with cultural forms of refusal, denial, and negation in all their glorious ambivalence.” — Eugene Thacker, author, In the Dust of This Planet
“Using Godflesh—the arch-wizards of industrial metal—as a framework for a deep philosophical inspection of the permeable human form reveals that all our critical theory should begin on the street where wasted teen musicians pummel their mind and instruments into culture-shifting fault lines. Godflesh are not just a ‘mirror’ of all the horrors and glories we can inflict on our bodies, but a blasted soundscape of our moans. Roy Christopher’s book is a thought-provoking and delightful crucible of film, music, and the best kind of speculative thought.” — Peter Bebergal, author, Season of the Witch
“In his trademark breezy yet precise style, Christopher discusses everything from stimoceivers to Southland Tales, everyone from Henry Lee Lucas to Brummbear, and all without ever losing sight of his central points of reference: our all too malleable somatic limits and Godflesh’s Streetcleaner. And the combination here could not be more apposite, for however much we stretch and augment the reaches of our physicality, imagining ourselves the theophanies of some as yet speculative deities, we get no closer to getting away from ourselves, becoming Godly it seems only in the sense of becoming increasingly empty.” — Gary J. Shipley, author, Stratagem of the Corpse
“Through the lenses of Godflesh, J.G. Ballard, UFO phenomena, psychedelics, serial killings, and so much else, Christopher investigates humanity’s growing inclination to escape our bodies, to escape our species, to escape life itself.” — B.R. Yeager, author, Negative Space
“A peculiar hybrid of Thomas Ligotti and Marshall McLuhan.” — Robert Guffey, author, Operation Mindfuck
“An interesting read indeed!” — Aaron Weaver, Wolves in the Throne Room
Of all the technologies we take for granted, electricity has to be near the top of the list. Though it shouldn’t ever be interrupted, we’re not that suprised when the wifi is down. Streaming services still regularly buffer. Pinwheels, hourglasses, ellipses—an entire semiotics of technology’s foibles, failures, and inconveniences. But when the power goes out, everything stops. Everything. And even though they’re not that uncommon, we’re not prepared. As the former broadcast journalist Ted Koppel puts in his 2015 book Lights Out: A Cyberattack, A Nation Unprepared, Surviving the Aftermath, “We tend to come up with funding after disaster strikes.”
The New York Times on July 14, 1977 during a 24-hour blackout in New York City.
With historical contrast, in his 2010 book, When the Lights Went Out: A History of Blackouts in America, the technologist David E. Nye writes that “by 1965, many New Yorkers regarded a blackout as a violation of the expected order of things. Yet it seemed an anomaly without long-term implications, and the paralysis of that night became the occasion for a liminal moment.” Such liminal moments are hard to come by, as the machinations of the city regularly work against the freedom they afford. Increasingly, the spaces required for dreaming, for creation, and indeed for freedom, are the product of artifice. They have to be intentionally assembled and deployed. Kodwo Eshun writes,
The technological conditions for intervention in the present have to be artificially constructed. They are not spontaneously available. To embark on a project that is set in the present, you have to renounce digital abundance by undergoing a temporal diet or media famine. You have to turn yourself into a castaway marooned on an island of the present separated from the abundance of digital archives and previous musical eras that continually saturate the contemporary.1
The idea of an outside or in-between space of dreaming recalls Hakim Bey’s temporary autonomous zone (TAZ). That is, the creation of temporary spaces that allow for moments of freedom, acts of creativity, and the availability of otherwise nonexistent autonomy outside the reach of established authority. Though certainly not the same thing, these spaces are similar to William Gibson’s idea of bohemias: subcultural backwaters that allow for new forms to flourish outside the influence of hegemony (Gibson cites Haight-Ashbury in the 1960s and Seattle in the 1990s as examples). Co-opted and all but defanged by the rave culture that followed its inception in 1991, the TAZ deserves a reassessment in our post-globalized world.
One can imagine assembling one of Bey’s pirate utopias, but it’s easier to see them happening unintentionally. That is, when the mechanizations of modernism break down, leaving us alone in the moment, in an unintentional TAZ. The unintentional TAZ’s most recognizable form might be the blackout: a sudden inescapable shadow of spontaneity and creation.
Writing about a power blackout that affected 50 million people in North America in 2003, Jane Bennett defines assemblages as follows:
Assemblages are ad hoc groupings of diverse elements, of vibrant materials of all sorts. Assemblages are living. throbbing confederations that are able to function despite the persistent presence of energies that confound them from within. They have uneven topographies, because some of the points at which the various affects and bodies cross paths are more heavily trafficked than others. and so power is not distributed equally across its surface. Assemblages are not governed by any central head: no one materiality or type of material has sufficient competence to determine consistently the trajectory or impact of the group. The effects generated by an assemblage are, rather, emergent properties, emergent in that their ability to make something happen (a newly inflected materialism, a blackout, a hurricane, a war on terror) is distinct from the sum of the vital force of each materiality considered alone.2
Admittedly borrowing from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (A Thousand Plateaus), as well as Baruch Spinoza (Ethics), Bennett’s assemblage doesn’t lack intention. It lacks human intention. The blackout as monster, overtaking the city in a lumbering lack of light.
“I think bohemians are the subconscious of industrial society. Bohemians are like industrial society, dreaming.” — William Gibson
David E. Nye argues that public space transformed by New York blackouts is not an instance of technological determinism, a topic Nye has explored in depth previously.3 His take seems to flip one of Gibson’s well-worn aphorisms: The street finds its own use for things. If the technological use is culturally determined, then the use finds its own street for things. Nye writes,
By the beginning of the twenty-first century, blackouts were recognized as more than merely latent possibilities. They were unpredictable, but seemed certain to come. Breaks in the continuity of time and space, they opened up contradictory possibilities. From their shadows might emerge a unified communitas or a riot. The blackout shifted its meanings, and achieved new definitions with each repetition. For some, it remained a postmodern form of carnival, where they celebrated an enforced cessation of the city’s vast machinery.4
The Daily News front page on July 14, 1977.
Echoing the massive 1965 blackout, after an 11-day heat wave, on the evening of July 13, 1977, successive lightning strikes strained New York City’s already overtaxed power grid, shutting it down for 24 hours. A blacked-out bohemia pushed the already simmering hip-hop subculture to an overnight boil. Emcee Rahiem of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five says, “The blackout of 1977 is what helped to spawn a multitude of aspiring hip-hop practitioners, because prior to that, the majority of aspiring DJs didn’t have two turntables and a mixer or the speakers. So, when the blackout happened, it just seems that everybody got the same idea at the same time. And when the lights came back on in New York City, everybody had DJ equipment.” Latin Quarter club manager Paradise Gray adds, “Not too many people in the Bronx could afford big sound systems until after the blackout. Then, everybody had sound.” To retrofit an idea, the Boogie Down became an unintentional temporary autonomous zone that night.
“When you get to the blackout, it shifts hip-hop. It’s a pivotal moment, because like a week later, everybody was a DJ. Everybody.” — MC Debbie D
Easy A.D. of the Cold Crush Brothers sums it up nicely: “The Bronx went from being decayed into something beautiful. The vibration of the music and the combination of bringing all those elements together, you had to be in there to feel it, because most of the time people only experience the music. But when you have all those elements in one place together, then you understand the essence of the hip-hop culture.”5 The blackout didn’t spawn the culture, but the autonomy it afforded pushed it toward national prominence.
Quoted in Gavin Butt, Kodwo Eshun, & Mark Fisher (eds.), Post-Punk: Then and Now, London: Repeater Books, 2016, 20; Iain Chambers writes, “With electronic reproduction offering the spectacle of gestures, images, styles, and cultures in a perpetual collage of disintegration and reintegration, the ‘new’ disappears into a permanent present. And with the end of the ‘new’—a concept connected to linearity, to the serial prospects of ‘progress,’ to ‘modernism’— we move into a perpetual recycling of quotations, styles, and fashions: an uninterrupted montage of the ‘now.’”; Iain Chambers, Popular Culture: The Metropolitan Experience, New York: Routledge, 1986, 190.
Jane Bennett “The Agency of Assemblages and the North American Blackout,” Public Culture ‘7, no. 3 (2005).
See chapter 2 of David E. Nye, Technology Matters: Questions to Live With, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006.
David E. Nye, “Public Space Transformed: New York’s Blackouts,” in Miles Orvell & Jeffrey L. Meikle (eds.), Public Space and the Ideology of Place in American Culture (pp. 367-384), Leiden, NL: Rodopi, 2009, 382.
These quotations are from Jonathan Abrams’ The Come Up: An Oral History of the Rise of Hip-Hop, New York: Crown, 2022.
With its burnt-out buildings and broken windows, the South Bronx became an emblem of urban erasure, a wound of highway-bound white flight. It was late-night monologue fodder, a cautionary movie set, and a political pawn piece. Upon visiting the neighborhood on August 5, 1980, then-Presidential candidate Ronald Reagan commented that it looked like it had been hit by an atomic bomb.[1]
When Reagan took office in 1981, conditions were no better, but something was emerging from the area. Controversial on the streets, the Sugar Hill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” had brought hip-hop to the airwaves and subsequently the suburbs; Afrika Bambaataa and the Soulsonic Force and Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five were touring the country; and those groups and Kurtis Blow had radio hits. “I didn’t see a subculture,” artist and emcee Rammellzee once said, “I saw a culture in development.”[2]
Though I didn’t know what it was called, I first heard hip-hop around this time. Copies of copies of copies, it trickled down from the Big Kids on hissy cassettes, shared via handheld recorder, Walkman, and boombox. My friends and I called it “breakdance music.” We were in middle school, a time of tribe-seeking and experimenting with identity. I’d just chosen skateboarding and BMX. Later those things would lead to DJing and keeping graffiti piece books, but breakdancing had loose ties with flatland—the spinning, gyrating strain of BMX done in empty tennis courts and parking lots. That was my thing and my entry point to hip-hop.
When I first heard it, most of hip-hop culture that existed at the time was yet to be recorded. Coming out of the electro scene in 1981, a group called Positive Messenger did a rap song called “Jam-On’s Revenge.” It was meant as a parody, but when it was re-released in 1983 as “Jam On Revenge (The Wikki-Wikki Song),” after the group changed their name to Newcleus, it was my first favorite rap song.[3] Its wacky, outsized characters and their high-pitched, cartoon voices proved the perfect initiation for my young ears, and the song contains the hallmarks of early hip-hop: catchy hooks and rhymes you could easily learn and rap along to (“Wikki-wikki-wikki-wikki… diggy dang diggy dang da dang dang da diggy diggy diggy dang dang”), lyrics about hip-hop culture itself (“‘Cause when I was a little baby boy, my mama gave me a brand new toy / Two turntables with a mic, and I learned to rock like Dolomite”), and of course, a beat you could pop and lock to. Having been re-released several times since, it’s still the song the group is most widely known for.
Though superproducer Dr. Dre cites seeing Clinton’s Parliament-Funkadelic in concert in LA as the event that opened his mind to music without limits, he also says, “My first exposure to hip-hop was ‘The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel’. That’s what started me deejaying. I think I was about 15.”[4] Released in 1981, Flash’s “Adventures…” remains the ultimate DJ cut, a cut-and-pasted collage of bits, beats, basslines, and spoken vocal samples from Chic, Queen, Blondie, Michael Viner’s Incredible Bongo Band, the Hellers, Sugarhill Gang, Sequence and Spoonie Gee, and his own Furious Five. This record and Afrika Bambaataa and the Soulsonic Force’s “Planet Rock,” which combines everything from Kraftwerk to Sergio Leone, provide the cornerstone of hip-hop composition. “To understand the magnificent creativity of the hip-hop DJ and the logical progression of today’s masters is to listen closely to both these cuts,” writes CK Smart.[5]
Long before hip-hop went digital, mixtapes—those floppy discs of the boombox and car stereo—facilitated the spread of hip-hop from the South Bronx in New York to far-flung suburbs and small towns. Hiss and pop were as much a part of the experience of those mixes as the scratching and rapping. Though we didn’t know what to call it, we stayed up late to listen. We copied and traded those tapes until they were barely listenable. As soon as I figured out how, I started making my own. A lot of people all over the world heard those early cassettes and were impacted as well. Having escaped from New York City to parts unknown, hip-hop became a global phenomenon. Every school has aspiring emcees, rapping to beats banged out on lunchroom tables. Every city has kids rhyming on the corner, trying to outdo each other with adept attacks and clever comebacks. The cipher circles the planet. In a lot of other places, hip-hop culture is American culture.
We watched hip-hop go from those scratchy mixtapes to compact discs to shiny-suit videos on MTV, from Fab 5 Freddy to Public Enemy to P. Diddy, from Run-DMC to N.W.A. to Notorious B.I.G. Others lost interest along the way. I never did, and it all started in 1981.
The above is an edited excerpt from my book Dead Precedents: How Hip-Hop Defines the Future (Repeater Books, 2019). In this form, it was originally published in the Winter 2022 issue of Pulp Modern. The year 1981 was the theme of the issue. Many thanks to Alec Cizak for the opportunity to correct a few factual flubs.
Notes:
[1] Parts of this piece were adapted from my book, Dead Precedents: How Hip-Hop Defines the Future, London: Repeater Books, 2019. This is a detail I got wrong in there: I said he was already president when he visited the South Bronx in 1980. Shout out to Josh Feit.
[3] In my lone TV interview so far, I mistakenly called the song “Joystick,” which was another early jam I liked in middle school. Such are the perils of memory and live television.
[4] Quoted in S. H. Fernando, Jr., The New Beats: Exploring the Music, Culture, and Attitudes of Hip-Hop. New York: Anchor Books, 1994, p. 237-238.
[5] CK Smart, A Turntable Experience: The Sonic World of Hop-Hop Turntablism, SLAP Magazine, pp. 74-75.
My friend Dave Allen passed away the other day. Like most people who knew him, Dave was not only a friend but also a mentor to me. Through his music and his thinking, it’s difficult to take measure of the influence he’s had on us. I last saw Dave in 2022 when I spent a week at his and Paddy’s house in Portland, collaborating with them on a book idea.
Me and Dave goofing and laughing in Portland in 2022.
In tribute, I’m sharing a piece I wrote about Dave and Gang of Four a few years ago and an interview I did with him in 2008. There’s really no way to do his influence justice, but this is all I have.
Rest in peace, Dave. You’re already sorely missed.
Return the Gift: Gang of Four
To create a spike of novelty high enough to be seen by history depends on a lot of things aligning: an open-armed zeitgeist, an interested public, a little bit of chaos, and a lot of charisma. Sometimes they become folklore, affecting only those who were there, like Woodstock, Altamont, or the June 4, 1976 Sex Pistols show in Manchester: Supposedly everyone there left that show dead-set on starting a band. There’s even a book about it. Other times these events are recorded, as great performances, works of art, books, or records.
Once the smoke cleared after the detonation of punk, there was still so much work to be done. Gang of Four’s original line-up tapped into a tectonic shift in the times. As Mark Fisher writes in The Ghosts of My Life, “It has become increasingly clear that 1979-80… was a threshold moment—the time when a whole world (social democratic, Fordist, industrial) became obsolete, and the contours of a new world (neoliberal, consumerist, informatic) began to show themselves.” It was also the dawn of post-punk. In tangents like tentacles, Joy Division, Wire, The Fall, PiL, Talking Heads, Television, and Gang of Four, among others, were stretching punk in ever new directions.
Gang of Four Entertainment! (Warner Bros, 1979)
One of the more significant of these, Gang of Four combined the lean muscle of punk with the bare bones of funk. Lyrically social and political, their lanky limbs swung hard and wide against the “middle-class malaise” of the 1970s. The first time I heard Gang of Four’s Entertainment!, suddenly much of what I was already listening to made much more sense. Fugazi had a lineage. Naked Raygun had context. Wire had contemporaries. During the post-Lollapalooza package tour phase, I finally saw them live in 1991. It was a woefully crippled line-up that only included Andy Gill from the original Four, sharing the stage at Atlanta’s Fox Theatre with a motley mess of bands: Young Black Teenagers, Warrior Soul, Public Enemy, and The Sisters of Mercy. The fact that Gang of Four was considered viable in that line-up ten years past their prime is significant though.
Woven as an influence and wielded as an instrument, Entertainment! remains a relevant strand of modern music. Frank Ocean sampled “Anthrax” for the song “Futura Free” on his 2016 record, Blond, and El-P sampled “Ether” for “The Ground Below” from Run the Jewels’ 2020 record, RTJ4. It was #81 on Rolling Stone magazine’s 2013 “100 Best Debut Albums of All Time” list, and in 2012, when they updated their 2003 list of the “500 Greatest Albums of All Time,” Entertainment! moved up from 490 to 483, a seven-spot jump in a decade, over 40 years after the record was released. It stands at number 8 on Pitchfork’s “Top 100 Albums of the 1970s” list for 2004.
So, when the original four reformed in 2004, as if to prove how strident those early records were, they rerecorded those classic songs. The result was Return the Gift, which features predominantly tracks from Entertainment! And its follow-up, Solid Gold, performed live on a soundstage. Even 2021’s retrospective boxset represents their earliest era: Gang of Four 77-81.
The Gang of Four box set (Matador Records, 2021)
By the time they released Return the Gift in 2005, there were bands that had drawn direct influences from the original Gang of Four. People were comparing Franz Ferdinand and Bloc Party to them. “Those bands helped us get back into the limelight with a whole new generation of music fans,” says Dave Allen, “who came along thinking they were going hear Bloc Party or Franz Ferdinand and then got their minds shattered.” Though they are often considered overtly political, Dave bristles at the connotation. “People would say, ‘Rage Against the Machine is just like Gang of Four.’ As much as I respect those guys and what they do, our aims were very different. We weren’t revolutionaries. We were dissecting everyday life.”
After touring with the original line-up, Jon King and Andy Gill had set their sights on a new record, but Hugo Burnham and Dave didn’t think the world needed a new Gang of Four album. Dave, having spent many intervening years consulting bands on negotiating the music industry’s new digital landscape, wanted to do something new, something different. He told me at the time, “If we don’t own the idea, there’s no point in doing it.” He continues,
What I’d wanted to do instead was set up cameras in our rehearsal room in London and do what Radiohead did. This would have been a perfect Gang of Four moment: You can check in on our working methods, you can check in on the arguments that take place. You’d get the chemistry of the band, and then I just felt like, let the crowd decide: What do you think is worth following up on? We’d still never make an album, just complete these songs and leave them up on YouTube so millions of people could stream them forever, and you don’t have to pay a thing. Meanwhile, our cachet goes up in the world for touring, and we can go out again. That’s what the Web’s for. In music, I think the Web gives you this massive distribution system out of the hands of radio, out of the hands of distributors, out of the hands of record labels. What could be better for rock ‘n’ roll than that?
This sense of independence, the lingering influence of punk, runs through Dave’s many endeavors. The novelist Rick Moody writes of him,
In calling Dave Allen an Internet strategist, or a pundit of the digital realm, or a high-tech agit-prop genius, you would be leaving out the job he had before that, when he was Dave Allen the bass player, first in Gang of Four (on their first two albums, and then for a couple of years during their reunion victory lap), and later in Shriekback. As such, he has experienced all of the vagaries of the music business as a player, producer, label owner, and now as a copyright owner of a great number of great songs from the seventies and eighties that are routinely streamed online. Few people of my acquaintance are better situated to talk about distribution and the difficulties thereof without romanticizing the story.
Dave in a Willamette Week cover story, “Pentium Punk“ by Zach Dundas, 2001.
If you know Dave Allen, you probably know him from his time in Gang of Four, but from post-punk and the music business to the post-internet, Dave has been ahead of every curve. A life and lessons from over four decades traversing the interstices of not just music and technology but also art and culture, Dave Allen is one of our most outspoken innovators and advocates.
Every Force Evolves a Form An Interview with Dave Allen, 2008
I can’t remember the first time I heard Gang of Four, but I do distinctly remember a lot of things making sense once I did. Their jagged and angular bursts of guitar, funky rhythms, deadpan vocals, and overtly personal-as-political lyrics predated so many other bands I’d been listening to. Dave Allen was the man behind the bass, and now he’s the man behind Pampelmoose, a Portland-based music and media blog.
I sat down with Dave in May 2008 for a lengthy beer-soaked session over Mexican food, and I managed to glean the following dialogue from it. We talked about Gang of Four, Dave’s personal history from forming that band to running Pampelmoose, the questionable state of the music industry, and why Portland is the place to be.
An update was planned, but now that Dave has parted ways with Gang of Four (along with drummer Hugo Burnham) again, I figured I’d go ahead and run this interview as-is. Dave’s ideas about the state of the record industry (about which he’s written extensively on Pampelmoose) and how Gang of Four should release their music clash with the band’s more traditional leanings. The seeds of his departure can be seen germinating in the talk below.
Dave Allen portrait by Laura Persat.
Roy Christopher: Seeing all of the sound-alike bands around, you guys originally got back together and did your old material.
Dave Allen: Yeah, the point that that was really validated was when we played in the West of England at the All Tomorrow’s Parties “Nightmare Before Christmas” show, curated by Thurston Moore, and we were the co-headliners. We’d already played with them the previous summer at the Prima Vera festival in Barcelona. We actually followed them that night, and I was really concerned, but what I realized was, although that band puts out new albums every now and again — Nurse, Rather Ripped… They make great records. They never stopped. Now, you might argue that nothing changes with Sonic Youth, so their style is the same: You just get a new batch of songs from Sonic Youth. And there’s something remarkably comforting about that, but at the same time, the moment when they launch into something from Daydream Nation, and they expand on it because they’re a jam-band at times, but the most interesting jam-band ever to be seen live. They are such a superb band. Forget everyone else. But it dawned on me, we and they are legacy bands. People don’t necessarily come to hear the new material. So, you better be sure to pack your set with a lot of old material. They’ve got twenty albums to draw on, right? We’ve only got two. Really. It limits the amount of time we can be on stage, but at the same time, we’re not ones to overstay our welcome. Live, those songs are more intense than ever before. They have a new vibe that I really like.
Anyway, point being, once you realize that people are coming to see you to hear the old songs — including the new crowd that turns up, by the way — then you’re okay.
If we do record twelve new songs, six of which are really good, then how do we put that out? My argument would be that we’re Gang of Four, and we’re supposed to do things a bit differently. So, do we do it through a cell-phone provider? Something different. Or should we give it away digitally and just press some heavy-gram vinyl to sell at shows? The days of doing a CD are over. That’s my argument. Now, I don’t know if Jon and Andy would agree, but the point being that the material can be used in many different ways. One idea that we’ve been kicking around with this new song that I really like. Jon’s got this thing about caffeine culture and it’s a really cool direction we’re going in, and it’s good, old-fashioned Gang of Four. I’m really enjoying it. Now, what if we perversely actually went to Red Bull or whoever and see if they want to release it? It’s not available anywhere else except in their ad. Then make it viral online where you can download the Red Bull/Gang of Four video, and so on. That way it gets spread around the globe in different ways. And the point being not to sell anything, but Red Bull would pay us for the campaign, and we get back on the road, which is where we do best. We play live, we get paid well, we can sell t-shirts and vinyl, so the concept of signing to a label, putting something out, and touring on it is so ridiculous to me. If we don’t own the idea, there’s no point in doing it.
RC:Right, it’s just like the legacy idea. You used the Rolling Stones as an example. The new records are just an excuse to get out on the road and play the old songs live.
DA: That’s all it is.
RC:Do they really realize that? You say they do, but I think it’s that you realize that. I don’t think the Rolling Stones think of themselves as a legacy band. I think they’re still trying to make another “great” Rolling Stones record.
DA: I think you’re right. That’s the counterpoint, right? They may not have realized it and I think all bands want to keep creating, and what I’m saying is—
RC: “We’ve done our good stuff. Let’s just keep doing it.”
DA: Right. There are other ways to be creative, so I would argue that doing my label, trying to find new bands is creative, and now I’ve got my heavily trafficked blog.
RC:Right. You have an outlet, and you get to play live.
DA: Yeah, why would we kill ourselves to do a new record when no one wants to buy it anyway?
RC:There’s no good way to say it.
DA: It’s all downhill. It’s retreat.
RC:Yeah, when you first mentioned the legacy band idea, it really resonated with me, but I finally got around to watching the Metallica documentary, and wow. Those guys are just so obviously past their prime and just killing themselves trying to make a new record. It just ends up being a parody of what they once were, and I think that really speaks to your idea of being a legacy band –- and realizing it.
DA: I would argue that who’s to blame here are the labels. The labels are to blame. It’s like when Coldplay decided not to make an album because Apple was about to be born, and Chris couldn’t write songs or whatever, EMI’s shares dropped 15%, because it was all about the biggest band on the label. Well, Metallica are huge, so it’s the same thing. All the heads of Warner Brothers will be pushing them, “Look at the share price! We need an album from you guys!”
RC:It was totally like that in the film! When James left for rehab, the label freaked, like “Oh my god, our cash cow is falling apart!”
DA: Well, didn’t Geffen pretty much go away after Kurt killed himself? Nirvana was Geffen’s cash cow.
RC: Not like they lost any when he died… In 1995, Sub-Pop’s second biggest seller was Sebadoh’s Bakesale. Their first? Nirvana’s Bleach! In 1995, Sub-Pop could’ve not released anything, just kept Bleach on the market, and made money.
DA: So, my point about these legacy bands making records is, the Rolling Stones will be given a million dollars every time they want to make a record. The label can recoup that money. They’re not going to get rich off of the record, but it revitalizes the back catalog, and puts the band on the road. Otherwise, why would they bother to get out of bed to record? They’re past their prime as songwriters. I’m sorry, there’s not anything redeeming about it.
I think it’s interesting that Sting got The Police back together but didn’t bother to make a record with those guys. And Sting is the consummate songwriter. Meanwhile, the cheapest ticket on the Police tour is a hundred dollars.
RC:You know how much the good ones are? Nine-hundred…
DA: Are they?! Let’s go back to that one-hundred dollars: There goes the music industry! The live side of it is growing, but there goes the recording industry. The back catalog is the only money to be made.
RC:What about Mötley Crüe? They had to prop Mick Marrs up, and Vince Neil is huffing and puffing and barely making it through one of those tours. They made millions of dollars and didn’t even do a new record!
DA: You don’t need to.
RC:Kiss did what, three reunion tours? And all three of those years, those were the biggest tours of the year.
DA: People don’t want to hear the new material.
RC:They want to hear “Rock and Roll All Nite.”
DA: It’s a reminder of your youth.
RC:It’s nostalgia marketing.
DA: Absolutely.
RC:It’s one of the strongest things out there.
DA: It’s what we did on our holidays, twenty years ago.
RC:Right.
Dave playing bass at a Weiden + Kennedy party in 2002.
RC:So, why Portland?
DA: In late 1999, I was living in Lookout Mountain with my kids, all computer kids, and I went to a friend of mine Nigel Phelps who’s one of the top art directors in the movies, he did Titanic and all sorts of big movies, English guy, — his eldest daughter, I saw that she was on the computer, on AOL, and she was talking to herself saying, “You’re on dial-up, you’re not on broadband,” and I asked her if she was arguing with someone about who was on dial-up and who was on broadband. She said, “No.” On Napster, when you selected a song it tells you the bandwidth availability. So, when it was really slow, she would IM the person and say, “You liar. You’re on a 28K dial-up. You’re not on broadband.” That was my first exposure to Napster, and I was like “What the heck is this?” I look and she’s got all of this free music. Now, I was at eMusic, where we charged 99 cents per song, and the next morning, I went into the office and emailed the head guys and said, “Guys, you’re done. Everybody is getting free music from Napster.” Their attitude was that it was illegal and that they’d soon be put out of business. And I was saying, “Not before we go out of business.” And that’s exactly what happened.
Then around 2000, when the market sank and the whole dotcom thing fell in the toilet, I got the call that they were closing the LA office. I got a call from a headhunter that some guys in Portland wanted to fly me up and talk to me and would like to hire me for a similar position. I liked Portland, I’d been here a lot, I had friends here already, but I wasn’t ready to leave the big city just yet. Anyway, it turned out to be Intel, and on the campus here right outside Portland, they had this thing called New Business Investments, or NBI, and I was asked to join the Consumer Digital Audio Services or something like that. It sounded interesting, so I joined up. They were looking at internet connected devices, an MP3 player—pre-iPod—and different ways to get your music, Home Entertainment servers, and the thing we were building that you see now was this bridging system that transmitted music files from your computer to your legacy Hi-Fi. 802.11b had just arrived, so we were working to get the music from there to there, wirelessly. My job was to go to Yahoo music and these other content providers and license them for our service. It was a great idea. The problem was, Intel is known for developing amazing stuff and then getting cold feet at the last minute and not bringing it to market. At home I’ve got five MP3 players that are better than the iPod. There’s a soundcard in them, engineered to perfection. They’re amazing. The only problem was it’s just a flash device, it only had a 128Kb flash card for memory, and no one had thought of a adding slot where you could upgrade the memory. Never came to market. That was that.
They’d paid for me and my family to move up, I’d bought a great house, and I think it’s a great city. I don’t feel the urge to move back. I’m a booster for this town. I love it.
RC:I’ve only been here for two months, but every other day there’s someone else here that I didn’t know was here, or some event that I didn’t realize happened here. I never thought about moving here because Seattle has been my adopted home for so many years, so I never thought about dropping down here, but since I did… It’s an amazing town.
DA: Anthony Keidis just moved here.
RC:Really?
DA: Ironic, huh? Now I can ask him about my royalties. [Laughter] “You can come to my barbecue. Please bring blank check.” [Laughter] Everyone’s here. The Shins, Johnny Marr…
RC:His being in Modest Mouse…
DA: You can say it, Roy.
RC:Okay, I hate Modest Mouse. [Laughter] I love Johnny Marr, but I hate Modest Mouse. It’s funny that the Mouse House is right over there.
DA: Yeah, I ran into Isaac Brock’s girlfriend, and he came by the office to get some stuff, and he said I should come over, that there’s someone there I’d probably like to meet. So, I went over there and I walk upstairs and there’s Johnny Marr. He sees me walk in and he’s like, “What the fucking hell are you doing in Portland?” And I said, “Well, what the fucking hell are you doing in Portland?” [Laughter]
They’re an interesting band to watch because they were a multi-platinum band, and now they’re not. You have to make money on the road.
RC:That’s another area that hip-hop is missing out on. Hip-hop is not known for big live shows – and it should be. The lyrical element of hip-hop is one of the most exciting things to see live, but the acts that excel at that part of it are not the acts that are selling the records and doing those tours.
DA: The underground aspect is interesting, like The Roots do well touring, Blackalicious… But the bigger it gets, the more it slows down. I mean, is T.I. going to do a big arena tour?
RC:No, but T.I. is one of the guys who’s still selling records.
DA: Yeah, he’s fine, but the minute it drops off, what can he fall back on?
RC:Right. Then he can go be Jay-Z.
DA: That may be one of the things that hurt live hip-hop: It was so easy to sell records, it was like why bother going on the road?
RC:Well, for a long time hip-hop had a hard time getting security for shows because it had been tainted with this “violence” tag.
DA: And it was never as bad really as your average big rock show. It’s just racism.
RC:Yeah, it’s a race thing and something the press loves to play up, and it’s completely untrue, but it keeps you from getting insurance for a hip-hop show. The reality is, the insurance company is like, “Ice Cube? Oh, hell no!”
DA: Right. Every black person is packing, and there are 50,000 of them in an arena, we’re not covering that. And then Guns N’ Roses comes to town and there are two stabbing deaths—
RC:And all of the seats in the arena are ripped out and thrown on stage.
DA: Yeah, but those are all white guys from the suburbs.
Me and Dave clowning in Chicago in 2017.
RC:So, what are your goals with Pampelmoose?
DA: It started it off like it did with my label World Domination, maybe a little too starry-eyed. I feel I’ve done really well in music, and I’m generally a very positive person.
RC:That’s one of the things I love about you, Dave.
DA: Aw, thanks [Laughs]. I look at bands and at the scene, and I feel like I’ve gotta give back. I volunteer a lot and I try and help, probably to my detriment, too much sometimes. So, I worry that I start off with great ambitions and sometimes let people down, because you get over-burdened and everybody wants a piece of it. You back up and think, “I can’t do everyone, so I shouldn’t do anyone.”
RC:It’s hard to find a balance there.
DA: It is. It’s so difficult, but I think we’ve found some kind of balance with Pampelmoose, and a group of friends and I were able to apply ourselves to a website that became a company that can help artists to sell some of their stuff, come on by anytime for free advice, bring their contracts -– I have a lawyer friend who charges very little to look over that stuff. Pampelmoose is also an extension of my social life. I’m very active socially. I can’t be at home. I’ve got to be out. I like being with people, and that’s no offense to my family. I like being with them, too. So, Pampelmoose has become an extension of my personality. I’ve tried things like this in the past with fanzines and writing, but it’s so difficult. You have to get them printed, get them out there.
RC:It wasn’t a fanzine, Dave. It was an art project. [Laughter]
DA: That’s true, and that’s my problem too, I get too deep into the project and it gets too ambitious and takes on a life of its own, then after the fall, I realize I over did it again. With Pampelmoose, the safety net was the blog. Because once the blog took off, and I believe it was January 2006 was the first post, and I have no idea where it’s going to go, but I did have the idea that I could open the doors to a community. That’s the thing I love about blogging, with the comments, people can call bullshit on me. The interesting thing for me was, six months go by, and no one’s calling bullshit, and then you get confident. And it wasn’t a lot at first, I think in the early days if we got a thousand visitors in a month, that was a lot, but it did pick up and start attracting visitors. Then I began to take it as seriously as everything else I was doing. I’m the editor. I’m the public voice. I’m the journalist. I’m the copy editor. I’m the layout guy. And at first, I thought I might be building something that I couldn’t maintain, so I hired a bit of a support team. Then I learned to fly. I learned some basic HTML code, I learned to crop photos… Every post has an image, any image. It doesn’t have to go with the rest of the story. So, it has a little art aspect to it, if you will. In the past eighteen months it’s morphed totally into this blog. Pampelmoose is the blog, and as a side note, we still sell CDs, T-shirts, and give advice to local bands. So, getting up every day and having an opinion and having people comment on it drives the whole thing, and now that the traffic is up, it’s like, “Oh, shit.”
RC:Yeah, but it validates everything you’re doing there.
DA: Right, but just having explained it, it’s still weird. It’s not like we’re Wal-Mart, and we do this.
RC:Right, but with Wal-Mart, there’s a precedent. “Remember K-Mart? Like that, but better.” When you’re doing something like this, it’s more ambiguous. People ask me what my book is about, and I say it’s a collection of interviews. “Well, what’s the theme?” You have to read it. So, it’s frustrating, but if you read it, you get it. Even if you only read one interview per section, a theme emerges. I think Pampelmoose is the same way. If you go there and dig around, read, and become a part of it, it fits, but there’s no one-line explanation for what’s going on there.
DA: It is intriguing. It’s not Pitchfork, where they get a million hits a month, and it’s like, “What’s the point?” At the same time, I can’t deny their success. They’ve done it well, but now you’ve got this unfettered fan-boy day out where you can kill something before it even has a chance.
Dave’s old iPod.
These are excerpts from two upcoming books that Dave had a hefty hand in. The first bit is from The Medium Picture, a book heavily influenced by Dave and his thinking. That one comes out October 15th from the University of Georgia Press. The second is an interview I managed to record in 2008, when we both worked at Nemo Design in Portland. That one is in my second interview anthology, Follow for Now, Vol. 2.
Widely regarded as one of the original cyberpunks, Pat Cadigan’s science-fiction roots run deep. Two of her first three novels won the Arthur C. Clarke Award. She and Robert Heinlein were friends. She’s edited sci-fi and fantasy magazines all the way back to the late 1970s. She’s been thinking about the future of humans and technology longer than most of us have been around.
The best way to prepare for the future is to keep an eye on the sky. That’s where everything else is not. Meanwhile, information pours invisibly across its friendly expanse, and it is up to us to absorb as much of it as our systems can tolerate.
“Cadigan’s work makes the invisible visible,” Bruce Sterling writes with emphasis. “Certain aspects of contemporary reality emerge that you didn’t used to see…” Aptly enough, Sterling and Lewis Shiner both use blades and bleeding to describe her writing. She has a cutting style that could only come from a very sharp mind. She was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 2014, but I’ll let her tell you about that.
Though you’d be hard pressed to dig her out of her place in SF history, Cadigan has long since been looking up.
Roy Christopher:Given the techno-evangelism of the era in and form which it emerged, cyberpunk provided a cautionary corrective of sorts. Erika M. Anderson (who records under the name EMA) contends that we need cyberpunk’s skepticism now more than ever. Others claim we’re now living in the world that cyberpunk predicted and that it can no longer help us. Which is it?
Pat Cadigan: Damned if I know. I’m still skeptical but then, I’ve always been skeptical. I didn’t realize 2014 was the year cyberpunk broke—was there a memo or a newsletter? If it broke, how did it break?
Cyberpunk was identified as such only after it had been around for a while. The original writers, myself included, didn’t sit down and say, ‘Okay, what the world needs now is something called cyberpunk, and here it is.’ Cyberpunk was a reflection of the larger dissatisfaction and unrest in general, as well as a reaction against the old SF tropes.
I don’t disown cyberpunk, I don’t distance myself from it, and I’m still writing about things that interest and concern me, which is what I’ve always done.
RC:In response to the question, “What happened to cyberpunk?” you told Vice Magazine in 2012, “Nothing ‘happened,’ it’s just more evenly distributed now.”
PC: I remember saying that to someone, but I don’t remember when or why. I’ve experienced some memory loss since I had chemotherapy—there are things I no longer remember although I do know I used to remember them (If that makes any sense).
RC:Well, Cory Doctorow only pointed out that the older cyberpunks talk more slowly than the newer ones.
PC: The reason for Cory Doctorow’s observation is ridiculously easy: Older people talk more slowly than younger people because a) we do everything more slowly, and b) we’ve learned via experience the disadvantage of not thinking twice before we speak. Talking faster doesn’t mean you’re thinking faster—it just means you’re liable to blurt out something you’ll have to apologize for afterwards. I’ve dodged a lot of landmines by talking slowly.
RC:If we’re living in a cyberpunk world, how might we update the genre to help us through it?
PC: The genre updates itself. I started writing Synners in 1988 and finished it in 1990; it was first published in 1991. I wouldn’t write that book now—I’m thirty years older and so is the world. While I often deal with the same general themes, the trappings and details are different.
I’ve always been an end-user—i.e., I’m not a scientist or a technologist. I don’t build machines or write code; I’m the person who always gets the faulty monitor or the computer with the motherboard that shorts out, just like I always got the shopping cart with the wobbly wheel at the supermarket. So these are the things I’ve written about—how to cope in a world full of faulty equipment and unintended consequences. I’m still writing about that.
RC:In addition, your stories often play with the relationship between memory and identity. This strikes me as germane given our 21st-century media-madness. What initially invited you into that conceptual space?
PC: You would ask me that, wouldn’t you? I was always interested in the human brain, for one thing. And for another, when I was growing up, people always seemed to be telling me who I was, or who I was supposed to be. Or they’d assume I was whoever/whatever and expect me to confirm their assumptions—and then get put out when I didn’t. Women of my generation weren’t supposed to have the same ambitions as men. Men achieved, and we were supposed to help them achieve. There were women who achieved and there always had been, but in general, they were seen as anomalies. As society saw it, men had ambitions and women had biological clocks.
And those clocks were strictly regulated. As late as 1978, I was unable as a single woman to get maternity insurance along with my regular health insurance through my employer—I had to be married to qualify. When I was growing up, it was standard practice for health insurance companies to refuse to cover the birth of a child out of wedlock, or if the woman had a baby before she had been married for nine months, unless her doctor confirmed in writing that the birth was premature.
This probably seems far afield of your original question. But in fact, society has always been trying to tell me who I am. Now I’m a senior citizen and society is still at it, worse than ever. I went to a cell phone store one day to get some technical help—the sales person thought I wanted to know how to change the ringtone. It was all I could do not to clobber him with the phone. When my iPad went wonky after an update, I took it to the Apple store after re-setting it numerous times didn’t work. The man who helped me insisted on walking me through the re-setting procedure step-by-step, teaching me as if I had never seen an iPad before.
RC:Given our internet-driven aggregating and sharing, is all of this cultural recycling really that new?
PC: It may seem new to some people but no. In the old days, grasshopper, this was how we made textbooks and schools.
RC:I’ve been exploring similar territory in the context of hip-hop (i.e., sampling, nostalgia, etc.), and I’m finding lots of parallels between cyberpunk and hip-hop.
PC: Well, I can’t help you there. I listen to a lot of hip-hop, but I’m only a listener. For the last three-plus years, I’ve had my hands full with surviving terminal cancer for as long as I can. So far, I’m over a year past my original estimated date of departure. Still not doing what they tell me to.
RC: Is there anything coming up you’d like to bring up here?
PC: Just keep watching the skies.
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Works Cited:
Cadigan, Pat, 1991, Synners. New York: Bantam Spectra.
Mooney, Ted, 1981, Easy Travel to Other Planets. New York: Ballantine, p. 74.
Sterling, Bruce, 1989, Introduction, In Pat Cadigan’s Patterns. New York: Tor Books, p. ix.
