Path: utzoo!hoptoad!amdcad!amdahl!ames!aurora!agate!ig!uwmcsd1!uwvax!astroatc!gtaylor
From: gtaylor@astroatc.UUCP (One Cointreau, please. On ice.)
Newsgroups: alt.cyberpunk
Subject: Why and How we pick cyberpunk music.
Message-ID: <799@astroatc.UUCP>
Date: 3 Feb 88 20:52:27 GMT
References: <2727@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> <1630@phoenix.Princeton.EDU>
Reply-To: gtaylor@astroatc.UUCP (One Cointreau, please. On ice.)
Organization: the Institute for Postmodern Recombinance
Lines: 36

In article <1630@phoenix.Princeton.EDU> tom@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Thomas C Hajdu) writes:
>and on top of that Holst with Mozart and Beethoven!!! What a joke!

It shouldn't be much of a surprise to anyone that when net posters decide
on proper music, they're merely engaging in a little projection, imagining
themselves as big, bad cyberweenies. Harmless enough, but one could rather
as easily have simply posted "What's your favorite music, oh persons who
read cyberpunk?" or "What subset of what you listen to could you imagine
as soundtrack music for the movie?" Heck, only the little interchange
about the relationship between media control and the music of the cyber
punk future was even close to the real issue [that is, take a fictional
world on its own *internal* terms and extrapolate the detritus of a
popular culture from it], and even that was tainted by a hint of optimism
on the part of the perfectable reader who talked about the explosion of
interesting music rather than the increased *volume* of work without a
kind of cultural screen or grid that the current homogenous marketplace
provides...it was a kind of argument about music in *this* modern world
and how nice one feels about it rather than what's on the radio-if one
exists-in Chibatown. For my money, it'd be disposable and not really
there at all in any sense but that of a virtual construct. Not owned, not
credited, and ever present as a way to delineate the tiny warrens where
noodle vendor engages in audio war with the artillery rental next door.
No one gives a shit who makes it, and it's unlikely that anyone ever 
asks unless it functions as a kind of initiation or currency.

Why are we so quick to assume that the future is a hybrid of Stanley
Kubrick/Max Headroom/Tron/Diety knows who else instead of something derived
from the text? Because we really invented this newsgroup to project
our weeniedreaming out into the aethers? Or because we were looking
at a kind of writing and the ideas that stand behind and in front of
it?
-- 
the reach of the arm.                   Gregory Taylor Astronautics
the sweep of the eye.                   5800 Cottage Grove Rd. Madison
the stones thrown at the darkness       WI 53704 608-221-9001,x232a
outside the fire's circle of light.     ...uwvax!astroatc!gtaylor