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William Gibson is considered by many to be one of the most innovative science fiction writers of the last thirty years; some would go even further to claim he is the most important living writer in the SF genre.

Candidly wearing the influences of Philip K. Dick, hard-boiled noir-fiction, and the Velvet Underground band, Gibson broke onto the scene in 1984 with his novel Neuromancer, which won the triple-crown of Science Fiction: The Nebula Award, The Hugo Award, and the Philip K. Dick Award. Along the way, Gibson is credited as a founding father of cyber terminology, and the creator of the cyberpunk genre.

Over the past thirty years, both cyberpunk and Neuromancer have become pervasive influences on rock music and films, impacting the style and content of these cultural forms and the way they’re released. Musicians and filmmakers as diverse as Sonic Youth, Warren Zevon, U2, Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails, James Cameron, David Fincher, the Wachowski brothers, and Christopher Nolan have all created work that demonstrates their deep engagement with cyberpunk and Neuromancer.

Neuromancer – The Source

Written in response to the growth of the corporatist and militarist policies of the Reagan Administration, Neuromancer portrays a fallen USA, in which multinational corporations use the cyberspace matrix – or, if you prefer, the Internet – to control the lives of citizens through highly addictive forms of entertainment, drugs, and surgical procedures.

Case and Molly, the cyberpunks of the novel, are computer geeks who illegally hack into the cyberspace matrix, creating havoc and mayhem in the very center of corporate technological power.  Because Gibson writes about them in the clipped sentences of Chandler and punk-prophet Lou Reed, Cayce and Molly leap off the page as cyborgian Philip Marlowes who act illegally for the common good. They deconstruct the corporate definitions of good and evil, existing in the gray area of noir.

William Gibson’s Cyberpunk – The Influence

Gibson’s writing connects with these musicians and filmmakers because of the subversive nature of cyberpunk and its capacity to criticize conservative politics and the ever-growing system of corporate technological control.

As it’s presented in Neuromancer and elsewhere in Gibson’s work, cyberpunk isn’t “science fiction” in the traditional sense of the term. It doesn’t present a black-and-white world populated by heroes and villains who use technologically advanced weapons and spaceships to fight out grand battles in which good triumphs over evil.  Instead, Gibson operates in the gray areas, where technology is a blessing and a curse, where the good guys and the bad guys are hard to tell apart. His work reflects the complex and blurry moral and ethical realities of our lives and not a futuristic fantasy world.

Sonic Youth – The Sprawl

“The Sprawl” is Gibson’s term for the dank, violent, and frightening urban sprawl that extends from Boston to Atlanta in Neuromancer.  It’s also the title of a remarkable song from Sonic Youth’s 1988 album, Daydream Nation.

According to Sonic Youth’s biographer David Browne, the song is the band’s conscious attempt to bring an awareness of Gibson’s ideas to their listeners.

A sprawl of its own, the song clocks in at 7:42 and goes through multiple movements of jarring punk-rock riffs and delicate waves of noise. The rhythmically repetitive lyrics – “Come on down to the store / You can buy some more, and more, and more, and more” – indicate Reagan’s mind-numbing corporatist ethos.  In its anti-pop music stance, The Sprawl rebels against corporate authority, in the same way that Case and Molly do in Neuromancer.

Sonic Youth – The Sprawl

Warren Zevon – Transverse City

Warren Zevon recorded his 1989 album, Transverse City, under the influence of Neuromancer.  The album is a cyberpunk-inspired concept album that satirizes a corporatist USA dominated by technology.  Zevon’s lyrics make it clear that the only real freedom left in the country is the right to spend money. Take, for example, a few key lines from Down in the Mall:

“We’ll put it on a charge account we’re never gonna pay…
You can buy everything you want and then you want more
Down in the mall.”

Transverse City was a commercial flop, yet a pet record of many critics.  The album featured guest performances from Neil Young, Jerry Garcia, David Gilmour, Jack Casady, Jorma Kaukonen, Mike Campell, Chick Corea, Benmont Tench and Waddy Wachtel.

Warren Zevon with David Gilmour – Run Straight Down from Transverse City

Warren Zevon – Networking from Transverse City

U2 & Bono Meet William Gibson & Cyberpunk

Following the lead of Sonic Youth and Zevon, U2 took a stab at cyberpunk. When singer Bono and guitarist The Edge read Neuromancer and its vision of “a darkly digital world, interactive and anarchic” dominated by “a computer-hacker-infested future,” they wrote the Achtung Baby (1991) and Zooropa (1993) albums, and developed the ZooTV tour.

Technological-based ways of making music – for example, drum loops and samples – that were previously unheard on U2 albums were suddenly there, as well as a newfound willingness to explore darker subject matter in the lyrics.

Bono cited the influence of cyberpunk on the song Zooropa, whose noise attempted to re-create the feeling of William Gibson’s Sprawl.

Zooropa – U2 – Live, 2011

Gibson himself made contributions to ZooTV and interviewed Bono and The Edge for Details magazine.  Bono then returned the favor by reading excerpts from Neuromancer in the Gibson documentary, No Maps for These Territories:

Radiohead – In Rainbows

By the 2000s, the central ideas of Gibson’s cyberpunk had become so ubiquitous that they began to even influence the ways bands released music.

Following the subversive lead of Gibson’s Case and Molly and their anti-corporate methods, Radiohead released their album In Rainbows without the assistance of a major, corporate label.

The band used cyberspace to subvert the corporations, making In Rainbows available as a self-released digital download, for which fans paid whatever they wanted. They made a revolutionary cyberpunk strike against the quickly disappearing major record companies that were becoming more and more reluctant to put out adventurous and challenging music.

Trent Reznor – Year Zero

Trent Reznor, the creative force behind Nine Inch Nails, also employed cyberpunk strategies to release new music.  Year Zero (2007), Reznor’s final project for the major label Interscope Records, criticized the extreme corporatist, militarist, and Christian evangelical politics of the then-current Bush administration by depicting a dystopic vision of an apocalyptic USA in the year 2022.

Reznor’s politics weren’t just in the music, however, but in the way in which his use of the Internet to displace corporate authority over the distribution and meaning of the album. Yes, Year Zero was an album of music, but it was also an ever-growing and ever-changing alternate reality game that incorporated e-mails, cell phone numbers, videos, artwork, and material found on USB drives that were hidden at concerts that listeners could upload to and circulate on Internet websites. With the Year Zero project, Reznor empowered his fans as cyberpunks, real-life anti-corporate anti-heroes who could have walked off the pages of Neuromancer.

With the albums Ghosts I-IV (2008), The Slip (2008), The Social Network (2010), and How to Destroy Angels (2010), moreover, Reznor continued to use cyberspace to confront corporate power by making a lot of his music available to fans for free or reduced prices. In effect, he had become the Case and Molly of the new millennium and a darkly shining example for today’s artists and fans.

William Gibson – Influence on Film

Gibson and the influence of cyberpunk have been so omnipresent that they feature prominently in the work of many of today’s most creative and visionary filmmakers.

Three of James Cameron’s greatest cinematic triumphs – The Terminator (1984), Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), and Avatar (2009) – incorporate elements of artificial intelligence, cyborgs, extreme violence, and mega-corporations that are the very stuff of cyberpunk.

Neo and Trinity, the heroes of the Wachowski brothers’ Matrix trilogy (1999-2003), could themselves be avatars of Gibson’s Case and Molly – bearing similar neural interfaces that allow them to hack into the cyberspace matrix and disrupt the technological system that imprisons the population.

The hero of Christopher Nolan’s Inception (2010), Dom Cobb, also comes straight from cyberpunk in his ability to use technology to enter people’s dreams and commit acts of corporate espionage.

And isn’t David Fincher’s Mark Zuckerberg, the anti-hero of the Reznor-scored The Social Network (2010) and real-life founder of facebook, just a selfish and greedy cyberpunk, whose hacking skills make him a boatload of money? As presented by Fincher, Zuckerberg is Case and Molly gone selfishly bad.

From the underground noise rock of Sonic Youth to the mainstream films of Nolan and Fincher, Gibson’s innovatory cyberpunk has become perhaps the key lens through which we view, understand, and criticize contemporary politics and technological forms of control. It’s not science fiction but the new realism.

Video: Recent interview with William Gibson

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