round 1
(6) Willie Nelson, “The Scientist”
nullified
(11) Billy Idol, “Heroin”
190-182
and will play on in the second round
Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls closed @ 9am Arizona time on 3/9/22.
Back to the Start: Ron Hogan on willie nelson’s “The Scientist”
I’m here to celebrate a Chipotle commercial, but before I get to that we should discuss Johnny Cash and American Recordings.
I remember when that album came out in 1994. It seemed like a lot of people listened to it and said to themselves, “Oh, hey, Johnny Cash is actually pretty cool.” To me, it felt more like vindication—I’d had a “greatest hits” cassette of the Man in Black since the mid-1980s that I’d permanently borrowed from my grandfather, something he’d probably acquired from one of his record clubs. I played the heck out of that tape. For a while I even took to wearing a black short-sleeve shirt with black slacks—more than a bit presumptuous on my part, but not, in retrospect, the worst look of my late teens and early twenties, either. So, yeah, I saw everyone raving about American Recordings and I said to myself, “Congratulations on catching up to the rest of us.”
As I say, I was more than a bit presumptuous at that age.
Anyway, as Cash’s star continued to ascend, I would occasionally think about who should “be next” to get that sort of minimalist “a man and his guitar” relaunch, and Willie Nelson came up frequently on that mental list. Now, their situations were somewhat different at the time. I’m speaking here not of their status within country music fandom, but in the general popular consciousness.
Johnny Cash hadn’t fallen into obscurity in 1994, of course, but the world at large seemed to think, and record sales seemed to confirm the notion, that you could safely ignore him and not worry that you were missing out on anything.
Willie, on the other hand, may not have had a single on the Billboard pop charts since the early 1980s, but in 1994 he was constantly in the public eye as the face of Farm Aid, the series of benefit concerts he’d helped launch together nine years earlier to raise money for family farmers in the United States. (Cash had played the event three times, including one performance with Nelson, Waylon Jennings, and Kris Kristofferson as The Highwaymen, but if Farm Aid was associated with anyone, it was Nelson.) He seemed, to me especially, ideally positioned for the sort of mainstream reappraisal that Cash had begun to enjoy.
I even had the song picked out: Bob Mould’s “See a Little Light,” from his 1989 solo album Workbook.
Now, if I had bothered to track down and listen to the albums Nelson was putting out at the time, I’d have discovered Across the Borderline, an album released more than a year before American Recordings that included covers of Paul Simon’s “American Tune” and “Graceland,” as well as a duet with Sinead O’Connor on “Don’t Give Up” that, if you’d never heard Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush, would convince you that it had been a country song the whole time.
Nelson’s sound on Across the Borderline isn’t as stripped down as Cash’s—guest musicians abound, from Mose Allison on piano to Don Was on bass guitar—but there’s a crispness to the production that rivals American Recordings, and it deserves to be better remembered than it has been.
Instead, for the rest of the 1990s and into the 21st century, Nelson seemed to settle into an iconic status within American pop culture, becoming more famous for his tax troubles and his enthusiasm for marijuana than for anything he’d recorded since “Always on My Mind.”
I mean, I didn’t realize that Nelson had recorded an entire album with Ryan Adams in 2006, where they covered the Grateful Dead and Leonard Cohen. Around 2010, I picked up another collaborative project he did, with the Texas band Asleep at the Wheel, but in all honesty that was because I was going through a Western swing phase at the time.
So the shock the first time I saw “Back to the Start,” a short animated film made for Chipotle by Johnny Kelly in 2012, was real:
You don’t even hear Nelson’s voice until more than 30 seconds into the film; that first half-minute is devoted to the opening bars of Coldplay’s “The Scientist” on acoustic guitar as a man walks away from his wife and infant son and builds a small farm for himself. The computer-generated shapes are simple—the farmer is a head on a sphere that has thin arms and legs sticking out of it, the pigs are pink cylinders with tiny legs and big round noses, the cows are even more abstract, recognizable as cows more by their black and white coloring than their shape.
As Nelson’s voice comes in, the cartoon continues panning to the right, and the simple family farm becomes a meat factory, the pigs juiced up until they become rounded spheres that are compressed into neatly stackable cubes that can be loaded onto trucks and driven off to wherever. The highways fall away, and the farmer, older now, walks across a snowy field at night, his head hung low. “Nobody said it was easy,” Nelson sings, as the farmer’s visualized thoughts turn to caged pigs, chemical supplements, and industrial waste: “No one ever said it would be this hard.”
As the music swells, and Nelson sings “I’m going back to the start,” the farmer goes all Jesus and the moneychangers, overturning the buildings that store the livestock and pigs as the landscape behind him transforms into a free range, until finally, as an old man, he loads a single crate onto a Chipotle truck, which drives off as the farmer reunites with his family.
I’m not going to lie: The first time I watched this on YouTube, I was blinking back the tears by the time the Chipotle truck showed up.
(Keep in mind this was a decade ago, back when “Chipotle” was still in most people’s good graces, as we were more inclined to think of “wholesome ingredients” than, say, “terrible labor practices.”)
The film is only half of the song, but the sound on the full-length version remains just as exquisite—better, in fact, because here Nelson sings “Oh, take me back to the start,” and then another delicate instrumental passage kicks in before he reprises the entire first verse with a fuller arrangement, which builds up to the lush climax. It’s all just as pristine as “Don’t Give Up” in 1993, or the version of Daniel Lanois’s “The Maker” that Lanois himself produced for Nelson’s 1998 album Teatro. And though the song was originally recorded especially for the commercial, it was eventually added to Heroes, an album that came out later in 2012 with covers of several classic country tunes, as well as songs by Pearl Jam and Tom Waits.
Other than the fact that Coldplay didn’t release A Rush of Blood to the Head in 2002, this was almost exactly the sound I had imagined for Nelson throughout the late ‘90s. If only I had been paying closer attention, I would have realized it was the sound he’d been making all along.
Ron Hogan helped create the literary Internet by launching Beatrice.com in 1995. These days, he publishes a newsletter about developing your writing practice, "Destroy Your Safe and Happy Lives," at ronhogan.substack.com, and his latest book, Our Endless and Proper Work, came out from Belt Publishing in the summer of 2021. He’s @ronhogan on Twitter and @theronhogan on Instagram.
A Cover is a Hack: ander monson on billy idol’s “heroin”
1. “Heroin” was the first single released on Billy Idol’s 1993 album Cyberpunk, the album which—for a time at least—broke his career, or the hitmaking part of it.
a. After 4 straight gold and platinum albums (Billy Idol, Rebel Yell, Whiplash Smile, Charmed Life) Cyberpunk failed to even crack the top 40.
b. After its failure he didn’t release another album for 12 years.
c. He kept touring and playing old songs and putting out compilations and Greatest Hitserations, but until 2005’s smaller-label Devil’s Playground, that was about it, though he kept playing killer live sets
i. I do want to direct you to his recent resurgence, however, with the good recent EP, The Roadside.
2. Unlike Idol’s oeuvre previous to this album, which, let’s face it, was mostly about sex and partying, lite rebellion, and fun, Cyberpunk is a concept/fanfic album about (in a very loose way) cyberpunk culture and fiction, especially William Gibson’s Sprawl (Neuromancer) trilogy.
3. I will tell you up front this song is unbeloved.
4. But before we get into its missteps, let’s give credit where credit is due.
a. Cyberpunk and “Heroin” innovate technologically in a whole bunch of ways: unlike Idol’s other work, he recorded these at home on a Mac with Pro Tools, no big corporate studio.
b. Most of the videos for it were low-budget, non-corporate affairs sort of procedurally generated a live-remix technology called Blendo created by Brett Leonard, director of Lawnmower Man ( an early and ambitious if flawed take on the perils of VR and artificial intelligence and all those digital boogeymen everyone was scared of at the time).
c. Cyberpunk was also the first (major label, at least) CD released with a floppy disk in it. Somehow he convinced the powers that be to do this.
5. But before all that, “Heroin” was released initially only to DJs as a 12” single in a plain white sleeve. It shipped without vocals and without Billy Idol’s name on it. Later it was followed up with a 12” Idol-labeled single with his vocals, then eventually followed by a more traditional marketing campaign.
6. Open the promo edition of the CD (which I have, naturally) and you’d see a 3.5” floppy disk in it—I mean an actual floppy disk (I can’t not point out, particularly in an essay against Ron, who knows something about the floppiness of disks, that I don’t mean the older and actually floppy “floppy” 5 1/4” disks) and this warning:
I’ll give you a shot of the floppy itself, because this really was a notable move:
7. Hmmm.
8. Are you prepared to be ROCKED into the 21st century?
9. In 1993 I was.
10. Well, in 1993, perhaps it was more accurate to say that the future had caught up with me.
11. In 1993 the Internet wasn’t quite a thing. We were still dialing into Bulletin Board Systems with modems, or maybe getting online through hardwired lines in colleges and labs onto dedicated networks like TYMNET or TELENET.
12. Most of my life in the years preceding 1993 had been about as online as you got. I was pretty deep in the hacking and phreaking subcultures then, and I’d recently moved into dumpster-diving the Michigan Bell facility in Southfield, and then after that I’d graduated into some breaking and entering into actual Michigan Bell facilities in search of specialized technology.
13. But in 1993 all of this—for me—had come crashing down.
14. The same was true for Billy Idol the year before. He had wiped out on a motorcycle and broken his leg into at least three pieces, which required him to spend several months in the hospital, recuperating, monitored by machines. During that time a journalist told him he looked a little like a cyberpunk.
15. A cyberwhat?
16. It’s unclear at what point, if any, Idol understood what that was.
17. Or more accurately, like the former English major who doesn’t always or often do all or even some of the reading that he is and that I also am, Idol perked up and asked the journalist to tell him more. The journalist did, and Idol picked what he thought most interesting from it and ignored the rest.
18. Maybe because Idol had nearly died, or because he was frustrated with the increasingly corporate world he was now completely ensconced in, or because he was bored sitting in the hotel room, he got super into the mythology and the vision of cyberpunk—not just fiction but the actual subculture that had been happening online for some years in places like Mondo 2000 and bOING bOING and the Well, one of the OG countercultural online gathering spaces.
19. You may by now have guessed that this the world in 1993 did not want to be rocked into the future, probably at all, and definitely not by Billy Idol.
20. Even he or his people knew this.
21. Otherwise they wouldn’t have initially released the “Heroin” single without his vocals or even his name on it.
22. Maybe it was a cowardly move, or maybe it was a smart one. I’m not sure which.
23. Flash-forward to 2022. A lot of the promise of cyberpunk—near-total connectivity, the corporatization and commercialization of digital spaces, the erosion of the nation as the unit of global agency and the rise of the corporation in its stead, just to name a few—is so well embedded in the culture that I don’t even notice it as I slip between Bluetooth and wifi networks and Venmo friends instead of exchanging cash, and if I’m not super sure what corporation owns what technology and whether or not my privacy is respected in its space (prolly not), then Im not alone. Some of my friends (I am somewhat embarrassed to say) are “getting into crypto,” they tell me, though I’m not sure they really know what it means.
24. And in 2022 I’ve been reading and obsessing over a book by Matias Viegener published 10 years ago called 2500 Random Things About Me Too.
25. It’s a procedural book, generated by doing some Facebook meme where you write “25 Random Things About Me” and post it and tag five friends, and they do the same, and the thing proliferates from there.
26. Viegener kind of got into doing this, and ended up writing 100 of them. Those 100 lists comprise the entire text of the book, which is theoretically a list of 2500 random items about Viegener.
27. The promo copy calls it The First Book Ever Written on Facebook, which is a dumb way to sell this book, but it is fun to think about.
28. 2500 Random Things… is a blast in part because Viegener’s an extremely smart, lucid, and entertaining dude with a lot of interesting things to say. He’s also Kathy Acker’s literary executor. And sadly his dog is dying over the course of the book, which becomes one of its primary narratives, even as he tries to resist the pull of narrative away from his attempts at randomness.
29. It’s really hard to resist the pull of narrative against randomness. It’s like a drug.
30. Didn’t someone say better living through chemistry?
31. Back to 1993: it’s hard to overstate how much “Heroin” and Cyberpunk came out of nowhere, and how much it tanked Idol’s career.
32. Previous to Cyberpunk and “Heroin” Idol’s previous singles (that you’ve heard of) included a lot of covers: “LA Woman” (The Doors), “Mony Mony” (Tommy James), “To Be a Lover” (a 1968 track by William Bell and Booker T. Jones), and “Dancing with Myself” (covering his previous band Generation X).
33. To be fair, Idol had also recorded quite a few excellent tracks he wrote himself, notably “White Wedding” and “Cradle of Love,” which were huge hits.
34. All of these were fun party songs. Idol was an established sexy spiky haired lite-punk pop guy. He was not the deep thinker you expected to veer into an extended cyberpunk dive of a concept album with no warning. He was a Cool Guy, or maybe a Jock, definitely not a Nerd.
35. So where did Idol get off going from fun rock cover guy to weird niche pro-Internet concept album?
36. And more importantly, what did he figure out then that allowed him to completely change his game at the very top of it?
37. And how can I get some of whatever he’s having?
38. Well, nearly dying in the motorcycle accident probably helped, as did whatever lucidity and sobriety he achieved during his time in forced (physical) rehab. I’m speculating here.
39. However it happened, Idol started doing some reading. He encountered work by writers like Mark Fraunfelder (of bOING bOING, who helped consult and contributed design work on the album). He read Gareth Branwyn’s influential essay “Is There a Cyberpunk Movement,” now referred to as the Cyberpunk Manifesto, even ordering a copy of a Hypercard stack Branwyn had made called Beyond Cyberpunk! directly from Branwyn. (Branwyn talks about this and about the relationship with Idol this led to in his memoir-in-pieces Borg Like Me.)
40. Idol thought about “Heroin” and about addiction, and then he thought about screens and machines and virtual reality. So he covered “Heroin” and released it as a single.
41. Cyberpunk, like its lead single “Heroin,” was ILL RECEIVED.
42. It was extremely ill-received by the cyberpunk community (and its attendant message board boys) who reacted as you’d expect to their whole subculture that they used to define their own sense of otherness and identity being coopted by one of the most rock-star rock stars out there.
43. It was ill-received by critics. AllMusic gives it its lowest possible rating. NME gave it a 4/10. Rolling Stone awarded it two stars, in an act of generosity. If Pitchfork had existed then I cannot imagine how low of a score they would have given it. Entertainment Weekly did initially gave it a B+ (“dumb, and occasionally glorious”), before including Idol in a list of “Surprise Losers” as it failed to even hit the Top 40. Even William Gibson disapproved or was at best bemused in interviews about it, calling Idol’s version of cyberpunk on the album “silly…I just don’t get what he’s on about.” I mean the album was a huge commercial failure, and after Idol wouldn’t record anything new for more than a decade, by which point the culture had pretty well passed him by.
44. Perhaps now, halfway into this essay, would be a good time to tell you what I think rules about Billy Idol’s “Heroin.”
45. It’s great for the same reason that most people thought it sucked: it’s half-assed.
46. But it’s half-assed in a glorious way! Its half-assedness allows it not to feel obliged to bow down in reverence to the original.
47. As a result, it discovers something new by covering—repurposing—the original “Heroin.”
48. Like the Cyberpunk album, “Heroin,” Cyberpunk half-asses a number of things in what I understand now to be a completely glorious way, taking ideas from Timothy Leary and early proto-internet culture and the few pages of Neuromancer that he ended up (probably (possibly? (doubtfully, really))) reading and turning the whole thing into a digital dance-driven 90s baby-techno somewhat punk jam that would have been super fun to dance to in the club, especially if you didn’t know it was Billy Idol.
49. An incomplete list of the things half-assed by “Heroin” and Cyberpunk:
a. “cyberpunk” literature (this remains a divisive term)
c. It also jacks part of one of the most iconic and cool musicians and writers and people of all time, Patti Smith, covering “Gloria” (the whole “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine” is hers).
d. One of the most influential cyberpunk manifestos (Gareth Branwyn’s “Is There a Cyberpunk Movement”)
e. The whole territory of what was then already somewhat well-known as the cyberpunk community
i. at the time there was a lot of debate on what passed for online then, like on the rec.music.industrial Usenet discussion boards, for instance, as to what “cyberpunk” was, if it in fact was anything at all
f. Muhammad Ali and The Road Warrior
g. Also the LA riots and the palpable sense of anger surrounding it
i. He said later that watching the city burn only a few miles from his house in LA really brought into focus the dystopian cyberpunk future he was reading about
ii. Yeah, he’s also missing the racist underpinnings of the Rodney King beating and the verdict andthe violence after, or maybe he just doesn’t know how to articulate that in a sufficiently Billy Idol way?
h. Industrial music
i. Dance music
j. Heroin addiction
k. Virtual Reality addiction
l. And the future
50. All in service of a kinda acid-driven baby-techno dance club track that in all honestly is a total freaking banger, like I love it SO much that whenever it kicks in on my speakers my Fitbit tells me “FAT BURN” since my pulse starts going!
51. It’s a track to dance to and feel young to and probably to fuck to and to do some drugs to. It is not a song to think really deep thoughts to. Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash this is not. (Actually Snow Crash is a total banger too.)
52. Maybe I should also step back out of Idol and into myself for a moment. In 1993 I was graduating from high school, though not the fancy boarding school I had been going to outside of Detroit because I had recently been kicked out of that boarding school after being arrested by a Secret Service Task Force for hacking, phreaking, and illegal credit card activity, among a number of other offenses.
a. I’m actually glad that was all they could get on me then: we’d been up to some more serious shit that could have been even worse for us.
b. I was not as subtle with my illegal activities at the time as you might hope. I ran a BBS (precursors to the internet) called Datacrime International. It operated out of a cabinet of drawers that I’d hollowed out and made into a hollow facade that resided in an empty dorm room at school and was wired into a phone line I’d redirected from the junction box a hundred feet away.
c. I’d been way into the hacking and phreaking world for some years now. I’d read Gibson. I was part of the (much lamer real) world that still, for all its flaws, if you squinted, you could see how it could easily lead into the romanticized, noir, jacked-in version of the world Gibson and others writing at the time envisioned.
53. I mean I was pretty well-versed in technology at the time. I envisioned dozens of phone lines leading into my dorm room where they plugged into modems and then into a bank of computers with me, some kind of kewl chunky wizard, at the keyboard, doing 31337 shit in a maximal way.
54. I drank so much Coke and Mountain Dew at the time that it was so rapidly eroding the enamel on my teeth that whenever I went to the dentist, they asked me if I was bulimic in spite of my obvious overweightness. I didn’t know how to tell them that NOBODY QUESTIONS THE GRIM REAPER.
55. (The Grim Reaper was my handle online and I was convinced it was extremely cool.)
56. Anyhow, I got arrested, and it was pretty bad, and as a result—probably more from the bad publicity I brought the school than anything else, I’d been ejected from a future where I went to school with the future captains of industry (like the kids of the Iacoccas and the family who controlled Dow Chemical and god knows what the parents of the foreign kids who were my friends but I knew nothing about their lives did) and back into a diminished, disconnected life in remote Upper Michigan where I was forbidden to use a computer “for any reason but for good,” which basically meant doing community service for my parents’ friends, helping them install new software on and debug their crappy PCs.
57. So I was susceptible to what Idol was selling is what I’m saying. I mean, I was kind of doing what Idol was reading and singing about, albeit in its less fictionalized and much less romantic and cool forms.
58. I also wanted to feel like the stupid things I was doing mattered. Like that they made me a protagonist or something.
59. So when I listened to Idol sing about the future and the machine-man hybrid it was easy for me to get caught up in the excitement of it and skip the dumb stuff.
60. Speaking of machine-man hybrids, let’s take a little sidetrack to watch the video for the second single on the album, and the most commercially successful one: “Shock to the System”:
61.
62. If you don’t want to watch it, that’s ok too. You’re busy! So here’s the plot: a guy with a video camera comes across the police beating up someone, tapes it with his camera and as a result gets beaten down by the cops and left for dead, and for unexplained reasons instead of dying becomes one with the smashed video camera in a Terminatory way, like the wires and the lenses go into his hands and come out of his face in an awesome way, and Idolnator goes on to lead a revolution of the youth against the cops. The cops try to shut down the kids rioting, and the kids Molotov some cop cars, and then machine-man RoboIdol, increasingly covered by wires (with metal rods instead of his spiky hair: a great moment) Robocops the fuck out of them after they try to shoot him, and the cops go running to save themselves, and then the kids pick up RoboIdol and a dance party ensues. The video ends with Billy Idol pointing to the screen and telling us that “the world still burns.”
63. TIMELY.
64. DORKY but TIMELY.
65. As an aside on the aside, the video is also done by Brett Leonard (The Lawnmower Man) and clearly is making use of some Terminator tech, and the effects are by effects wizard Stan Winston, whom I will always love for having created the Predator costume for the movie and franchise I spent a decade writing a book about.
66. Honestly, though, I’m still susceptible to “Shock to the System” and to Cyberpunk and to “Heroin”! I think this song rules.
a. I also love the album, but it’s got some bigger issues than “Heroin” does.
b. Like it uses these spoken word interludes to try to create a larger narrative around the handful of pretty good (or pretty good for Billy Idol: they do what you want Billy Idol songs to do!) songs.
67. Viegener’s 2500 Random Things About Me Too tries and fails to resist narrative. Writing a book as a series of 100 25-item lists is a big middle finger to narrative, but guess what, the human mind finds and makes story out of everything, so while it resists, it still gives in, and the resistance (and the giving in) are very pleasurable.
68. Like Idol’s “Heroin,” 2500 Random Things About Me Too is also kind of a cover, in the sense that it takes a lot of its best ideas and the listing format from Joe Brainard’s I Remember, a book Viegener refers to and thinks about throughout 2500.
69. Writing this very list item I also just had the realization that 2500 is only 100 (4 lists of 25) off from 2600, which is an extremely important number to the early phone phreaks because if you could replicate the 2600 Hz tone you could control the phone lines. So early phreaks created “blue boxes” which would replicate the tone on command.
70. I dunno: that kind of coincidence must mean something. Once you start thinking about stuff, it all seems to connect. That’s how narrative works I guess.
71. But in 1993 I’m about to be embarrassed that I had never heard the original version of “Heroin.” I went to visit my friend Jonathan at Oberlin a year later and I played him my discovery of Cyberpunk (and especially “Heroin,” my favorite track), and he looked at me, like he looked right through me, and said cool: oh, you’ve heard the original version, right?
72. No, Jonathan, I had not.
73. He played it for me.
74. I was pretty embarrassed not to know the original, but this was also my introduction to the snobbery of the hipsterati.
75. It’s ok. It was ok then and it’s ok now.
76. I know this is not the consensus opinion, where the Velvet Underground are among the Most Important Bands and blah blah blah.
77. Tbh I kind of tuned out halfway into my friend’s cool music nerd explanation of who the VU was and why they were important, honestly. I’m also tuning out of yours.
78. The VU version of the song is cool but you can’t fuckin dance to it.
79. It has no synths. Maybe if I was actually into heroin I’d like it more, but I’m not, unlike a friend of mine at the time who eventually I lost touch with when he complained that someone had spiked his crack with cat.
80. I mean fuck the Velvet Underground.
a. I know that’s not cool to say, but I’m not scoring any cool points by liking Billy Idol anyhow.
81. Also probably fuck Patti Smith, which his version also jacks.
a. Though she was super nice to me the one time I met her, and she definitely didn’t have to be, so I hereby retract my fuck yous to Patti Smith. You are awesome, Patti Smith. Your version of “Gloria” is excellent and I hope it wins this competition when my song is eliminated unless it comes up against “Sweet Jane” which, like Idol’s, also is much better than the Lou Reed original.
82. It didn’t—and doesn’t—matter to me that Idol is only kinda half getting all those things I listed above. That he bastardizes Branwyn’s manifesto (at least Idol did pay him for the privilege). That he only kinda gets it.
83. I love him for his half-assing.
84. I praise his half-assing.
85. Hilariously, Idol demanded that any journalist who wanted to ask him questions about his new Cyberpunk album had to show up having previously read Neuromancer. There would be a quiz, they were told.
86. When some of them duly did so, those journalists figured out pretty quickly that Idol in fact had not read Neuromancer.
87. Why read the book when you can just listen to the song. It tells you all you need to know.
88. It’s propulsive. It seems to take only a minor interest in what the original song is about (it’s an ode to heroin). Or: it takes that but applies it to virtual reality, to that feeling of being hacked in, jacked in, plugged in to something much bigger than you ever thought you could be. I mean, that’s heroin, but that’s also more than heroin. Maybe it’s about being jacked into a bigger culture, a whole group of people evolving badass thoughts about the future and literature and music, and feeling ALIVE by association. That’s pretty cool.
89. Isn’t that what music is all about?
90. Depending which version you listen to of it you’ll catch him throwing in a “VR” before the “Heroin” lyric, just to make sure you get it. It has that kind of C&C Music Factory dancy synth line happening that felt extremely now in the 90s. It has all the processed guitars happening. The vocals are processed. Even the lyrics are processed, spliced together with Patti Smith. Idol’s hair is processed. Even the video is processed. Super processed! Everything in this song is processed to a maximal extent. I mean it’s fuckin blendo!
91. I mean this is what I want out of a cover song—and a song in general: complete commitment, even in service of what may turn out to be a regrettable idea. Really if it’s a bad idea, all the better. Take it far enough and sometimes you figure out how it can be good.
92. I really like 2500 Random Things About Me Too. It is a bad idea and it is very good. It’s very rereadable, and it’s very teachable, and I’m a big fan of books that give you things to do, like procedures you can do yourself if you want to. It has that DIY ethic that’s at the heart of what real hacking (not Hollywood hacking) is actually about: repurposing stuff to do something new with it, to solve technical problems and get access to things you’re not necessarily supposed to.
93. I mean hacking as covering. I mean hacking as repurposing. I mean hacking as resistance.
94. I mean, it’s not hard to a write a list of 25 “random” things “about” “you” every day.
95. Last semester I tried it with my students. Let’s stop writing “essays” and just write lists. 25 Random Things. Do it for a week and let’s see what everyone got.
96. Their lists ruled.
97. You get bored just writing random things about you. You start writing about other stuff, like Billy Idol for instance. Like your history with criminal activity in high school.
98. After the week of our lists ended I kept writing them. And then I kept writing them. And I thought after a while that what I was doing, well, it might have originally started as an imitation exercise, which is to say a cover.
99. 1957 list items deep into what was feeling a lot like a book, was I even “covering” Viegener anymore?
a. What did it even mean to cover something?
i. Is using someone else’s (borrowed) form a cover? Is it if it’s a procedural thing you’re doing? How much of doing what someone else did do you have to do for it to be a cover?
b. I certainly wasn’t doing 25 Random Things About Me for the most part now, day to day.
c. I’d started tabbing these items in—like subroutines, almost—and I started using them as a tool that I repurposed to do something that felt new to me anyhow. When did a cover stop being a cover?
i. And could I use it to write about a cover as a rewiring by writing about a cover that rewires?
100. I dunno. Can we admit that maybe some of our reaction to Idol’s concept fanfic turn was more about our own desire to keep him in his box, dancing sexily and spike-haired in his cage?
101. That my friend’s rejection of Billy Idol’s “Heroin” was probably more about him than about me, and probably it wasn’t about Idol, but that it hurt.
102. And that the world rejecting Idol probably hurt.
103. But that, nearly thirty years on, can we admit he was on to something?
104. I mean, aren’t we now going into the Facebook Metaverse now?
105. Aren’t we all online a whole lot now? Aren’t we all into crypto or hearing about people getting into crypto now?
106. The culture ate cyberpunk and now cyberpunk is its bones. We’re all wireless, networked everything (“the Internet of things”), the ascendancy of capitalism and megacorporations over the individual; the weird splicing of the physical and the digital (are you reading this on a phone? How often do you put that down? Is it not effectively part of you?), the anarchy of the dark web, the proliferation of information and surveillance everywhere, and the importance of individual use of technology to counter authoritarianism, at least if I’m feeling optimistic, which Billy Idol makes me want to be.
107. I mean, Idol wasn’t wrong. He was just kind of half-assing his rightness, ghosting on the cool surfaces of Gibson and Stephenson as filtered through the Blendo of Idol.
108. After all, Idol had seen LA burning after the Rodney King beating and the violence and the fires after. He lived only a few miles away. He nearly DIED. He saw things getting faster and more fucked up. He fell in love with some ideas. He got HYPE.
109. Idol also may have overestimated just how far he’d get up his own ass recording this album, due in no small part to the novelty of recording it in a home studio on a Mac, which was unheard of at that point, especially for someone like Idol.
110. What appealed to him about this was its speed: he recorded the album in 10 months vs 12 years for his previous two albums. That meant he could just follow his arrow without having too many people (and his label, and the corporate apparatus of music) to call him on his bullshit.
111. Any tool can be an asset or a liability.
112. Idol in an MTV News interview with Kurt Loder: “[Previously] I always worked through a team of a producer and an engineer and in the end you always felt you weren’t getting as close to your ideas as you could be.”
113. Yes. And yes. Also: assessment matters.
114. I mean anyone could have told one of the most beloved songs of one of the most influential bands of all time probably was not a great idea.
115. But sometimes you have to be stupid—or to not know what you’re doing—or to not think about what you’re doing—or to not listen to other people tell you that what you’re doing is stupid—in order to make something meaningful.
a. It’s hard to know how much of an edge of something you can take and use before it turns into a surface.
i. And it’s really hard to tell when you’re doing it by yourself, when it’s just you and your ideas and what you come up with it and where you go.
116. This is one of those times.
117. “Heroin” did not chart in the UK, the US, Australia, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Switzerland, or Sweden. It was the only one of Idol’s 19 singles to date (excepting the two preliminary singles he released in 1981) never to chart in any country.
118.
119. I wanted to leave a blank item on this list—which is increasingly not Random Things About Me—to let that sink in.
120. Did I mention Idol also raps on Cyberpunk?
a. That’s not his only rapping, though. I dug up a 2001 Ikea commercial featuring him going full rapper. It isn’t…bad?
i. IS it bad? I can’t tell anymore due to my adjacency to Cyberpunk.
1. I think Cyberpunk kind of broke my ability to tell if something’s good or if it’s not, if I’ve ever had that ability at all.
a. Probably I have not. If I could tell the good ideas from the bad ideas I probably wouldn’t have ended up doing the things that got me arrested.
121. Anyway, fuck it. If you’re all the way to this point in the essay then I’ve done my job and you should probably vote for Billy Idol.
122. Let me try to give you a few more reasons to do so, though.
123. A vote for Billy Idol says fuck you to the cool kids and the music hipsterati.
124. It says that it’s ok to repurpose something that you thought was cool, and to repurpose it without reverence, and to feel free to mash it up with something else you thought was cool (Patti Smith), and to throw some dance beats on it even if you know it’s going to piss off a lot of people, and to recontextualize it in the terms of some future fictional bullshit and also to do it on your own in as close as you get to a DIY way when you’re Billy Idol, with no corporate studio time and no input from the A and R guys or whatever, and and just to nerd out, even in a half-assed way—ESPECIALLY in a half-assed way, because full-assing it you would never have even got started here or past your internal critics or your external critics of which there are many, really they’re out there laughing at you because you’re a caricature to them but you know what fuck them, and fuck the part of yourself that tells yourself in weaker moments that you are a caricature and are only a pretty boy and that there’s no there there, and you’ll show them, and you don’t need to know how to do everything yourself, or how cyberpunk works or how computers work or how email works or how really anything works in order to make something cool that says something true—and your vote is also saying that the key thing, really the only thing that matters at all, is to commit as fully as you can to the fucking bit and hope that somebody out there gets it—
125. eventually.
126. Even they don’t, it’s ok.
127. And it’s okay if your cover veers off course from the form of the original, like it’s no longer in 25s.
128. I mean a vote for Billy Idol here endorses the idea that a cover is a hack—or maybe the inverse.
129. A few years back I pitched my book on Billy Idol’s Cyberpunk to the 33 1/3 book series through their yearly call for submitted proposals.
130. My proposal made the first cut but not the second. It was declined at that point without explanation.
131. I’ve often wondered why.
132. Was it because Billy Idol is 100% not cool enough for that particular school? Or was it because his Cyberpunk is so unbeloved that it seems unworthy as a subject of attention, or they figured nobody was going to buy a book about that album? Or was it because my approach was shitty? Or did it seem insincere? Or just a really bad idea? Or did I just not commit enough to the bit?
133. Anyway, this is my new proposal.
Ander Monson’s newest book is Predator: a Memoir, a Movie, an Obsession. It comes out from Graywolf in Sept 2022.