Album Review: Billy Idol desperately wanted to hack the Gibson in CYBERPUNK

I was two years old when Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash was released into the hotbed of early nineties cyber-infused counterculture. Neuromancer was written half a decade before my birth; tabletop RPG Shadowrun was released when I was barely a zygote. So it’s only relatively recently that I got into cyberpunk, thanks to its resurgence in the last few years – also due to my devouring Ghost In The Shell and Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto at impressionable points in my life.

I’ve played in Shadowrun campaigns, read cyberpunk books, listened to cyberpunk music, seen cyberpunk films, I even own a copy of Timothy Leary’s Chaos And Cyberculture. But I had never heard of one particular album from everyone’s favourite(?) sleeve-shunning rock icon, Billy Idol.

That album, as I’m sure you’ve guessed by now, was Cyberpunk.

Just look at that cover art. LOOK AT IT.

Released in 1993 to terrible reviews and fan backlash, this album was a love-letter to hacker culture, to dystopian sci-fi in general. It’s a clear homage to William Gibson’s work of course, even though Gibson expressed complete befuddlement about Idol’s attempt:

I don’t see the connection. A London journalist told me when Billy did his ‘Cyberpunk’ press junket over there, he made it a condition of getting an interview with him, that every journalist had to have read ‘Neuromancer’…Anyway, they all did but when they met with Billy, the first thing that became really apparent was that Billy hadn’t read it. So they called him on it, and he said he didn’t need to…he just absorbed it through a kinda osmosis. I don’t know.

It’s a concept album that features hackers, megacorporations, drugs, cyberspace and techno-evangelism. It also features sick guitars, bizarre synths, church organs, pretentious vignettes, awkward lyrics, and an interminable cover version of Lou Reed’s Heroin. It’s a bloated, confusing, ill-conceived mess. I want to hate it. But I just can’t.

 

“Cyberpunks are the true rebels. Cyberculture is coming in under the radar of ordinary society. An unholy alliance of the tech world and the world of organised dissent. Welcome to the cybercorporation, cyberpunks.”

Thus the album’s introduction intones, in a digitally-corrupted narration that could have been ripped from a naff newsgroup posting. It certainly sets the tone, though: the lyrics on this album are cliched at best, distracting and bizarre at worst. They’re also really repetitive (try and get the tuneless refrain “NO RELIGION. NO RELIGION AT ALL” out of your head). Billy Idol seems to have taken a nebulous, surface understanding of cyberculture and written a 70-minute love-letter to it. References abound to a “cultural wasteland”, to the evils of megacorporations and accelerated culture. Over and over Billy croons and “ooh YEAH C’MON”s about being a lone saviour, to help rock the status quo and lift people out of their malaise, using the power of…technology?

Let’s try and break down a storyline here:

• CyberBilly is a disaffected cyberpunk youth(?) who yearns to be free of this dystopian nightmare future, where people have “no religion” but still riot and revolt in the streets, fruitlessly.
• CyberBilly sheds the facets of his old life in search of some kind of meaning or purpose.
• CyberBilly gets…hypnotised? Or jacks in?
• CyberBilly has an epiphany: He will get revenge on “you, girl” – a person? Cyber-society?
• It’s cyber-society. Cyber-society has denied CyberBilly his purpose, and the chance for real love – so, “trancing” (jacked in, I imagine), he goes mad with power.
• CyberBilly regrets the excesses of his backlash against Cyber-society.
• CyberBilly tries heroin! Or someone else gives him a dose. “SMACK ATTACK!” Then he has a psychedelic episode, because that’s what heroin does. Or perhaps it’s all just a metaphor for JACKING INTO THE INFORMATION SUPERHIGHWAY!!
• On the comedown, CyberBilly realises how to escape: SPACE! Or if not space, then down to the local club to take some GHB and party with cool kids and meet a Cute Lady!
• Finally, his night of debauchery over, CyberBilly realises that the only salvation from the nightmare Cyber-society of megacorporations, hackers, “rape, riot and revolution”…is to…uh…the Sun! Life…Earth…light? Uh, CyberBilly? Why is the distorted narrator-voice back? Why is someone yelling “CYBERPUNK!!!”??

If the narrative is incoherent, then the music is just bizarre. A queasy blend of 80s pop-rock and early 90s electronic sounds, it’s like Billy Idol fed some cool guitar (and sitar) noises through the soundtrack of an old Sierra adventure game. The tone is inconsistent, the energy is never quite enough to back up the punchy fight-against-the-Man lyrics, or sensitive enough to embrace the emotional moments on the album. It’s a weird mess.

Now, I could play devil’s advocate here, telling you how Idol deliberately chose this kaleidoscopic mishmash of timbre and tone in order to portray a soundscape of the near future, media-saturated and multicultural and paranoid. But I won’t, because Cyberpunk is about as deep as a NutriSoy puddle. It never feels cynical or self-serving, though. Many critics have called Idol out for co-opting the “cyberpunk” label, for jumping on a youth culture bandwagon to try and eke out some remaining scraps of media attention for himself. But I don’t see it. I just see a grandiose, swaggering naïveté. Billy Idol discovered a cool thing that clearly resonated with him enough to base an entire album and subsequent multimedia promotional venture around it.

Cyberpunk was recorded using early music recording software, Billy Idol’s Apple Macintosh computer (as they were called back in the day) being the master of ceremonies. The album was released with a slew of interactive content, a promotional CD-ROM, and unprecedented online marketing. As a media object it’s a warped, bloated mess, a damp squib of a countercultural battlecry. After its release, Idol would not release another album for over a decade. And I can tell you: on repeated listens, the songs don’t get better.

 

The bleach-blond dreads don’t, either.

But there’s something oddly charming about all of this. From the awkward earnestness of the lyrics to the gleefully atrocious version of Heroin (again: “SMACK ATTACK!”), it evokes a sympathetic joy in me that goes way beyond ironic amusement. There are still rockin’ guitars, and Idol’s heartfelt growl can make even the worst lyrics (and yes, these are the worst lyrics) sound cool. Ish. Looking forward to seeing Shock To The System included in the next DLC for Shadowrun Returns.