Yeah, it's been a while. Midnight Poutine has sucked up most of my blogging-allotted time despite my naive promise that I would continue this blog in full force. I also had a couple months of intense dissertation work followed by a completely unproductive (but well worth it) two-week visit from Mike. Now I'm working in Maine, moving at a summertime pace, and enjoying a life with fewer distractions. Getting on with it...
Hackers. A terrible movie by any objective standard if things like "acting" and "plot" and "cinematography" are taken into consideration, but one that I love more and more over time. This is because it captures perfectly the sense of wonder we all felt when we encountered the internet for the first time but knew nothing about it. If computers were connected, and lots of things ran on computers, then wasn't there the possibility of making crazy cool shit happen all over the world by pushing buttons in our living rooms? Was there already an overclass of hackers controlling everything that contained a microchip, living in the shadows, laughing at the rest of us? What did these people do at night?
The answers to these three questions, according to Hackers, were yes, yes, and rollerblading. Hackers portrayed a world where hip young people with names like "CrshOvrd," "ZeroCool" and "AcidBurn" did extremely important things on their computers that were beyond any normal person's comprehension and best portrayed using 3-D graphics and floating math equations. Most characters (i.e., the main ones) used hacking for fun and harmless hijinks, while others used it for evil things like robbing banks and flipping over oil ships in the Atlantic. Watch, for example, the segments at 1:00 and 6:30 (or watch the whole thing because it's all awesome):
Another important part of the hacker lifestyle, as this clip makes clear, is that all hacking-related activities must take place over super cool techno music. As much as I laughed at the film's absurdities (I was an overly snobby twelve year old), I absolutely loved every bit of its soundtrack to a point where it plunged me into a three-year-long techno phase.
I should specify first that my twelve-year-old self would have resented my use of the word "techno," since the music I liked was broadly classified as "electronica" and fell into sub-genres like drun n' bass, deep house, trance, etc. I used to get so indignant when people called it techno, as if my imported European underground rave music was the same thing as "Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now)" by C+C Music Factory. Yeah, I was a giant douchebag.
The Hackers soundtrack started me on this trajectory. It offered a surprisingly good sampling of electronic music that was huge in Europe and relatively unheard of in the United States outside of rave culture. It was only a couple years later (especially with the American release of Prodigy's Fat of the Land) that you could hear electronica on mainstream radio, and even then it fell into a niche market. My local "alternative rock" radio station, WHFS, broadcasted a show called Trancemissions (sic) every week that played DJ sets from raves; it ran from 12-2am every Saturday, specially designed for kids like me who wished they could be there (or go out at all). All of this is to say, electronica was big enough to make it onto a major motion picture soundtrack, big enough to make it onto the radio, but underground enough to make me feel really, really cool for listening to it.
The album's track list reads like a who's who of mid-90s electronic music:
- "Original Bedroom Rockers" by Kruder & Dorfmeister
- "Cowgirl" by Underworld
- "Voodoo People" by Prodigy
- "Open Up" by Leftfield
- "Phoebus Apollo" by Carl Cox
- "The Joker" by Josh Abrahams
- "Halcyon + On + On" by Orbital
- "Communicate" by Plastico
- "One Love" by Prodigy
- "Connected" by Stereo MCs
- "Eyes, Lips, Body" by Ramshackle
- "Good Grief" by Urban Dance Squad
- "Richest Junkie Still Alive" by Machines of Loving Grace
- "Heaven Knows" by Squeeze
Some of these artists became bigger than others. The most recognizable here is Prodigy, although "Voodoo People" and "One Love" are songs from their albums before Fat of the Land, which were unavailable in the U.S. before 1997 except via import and this soundtrack (and yes, I owned the imports, because I was a pretentious fuck). "Halcyon" by Orbital was one of the most ubiquitous electronica songs of the 90s and I suspect the most recognizable on this album. It's also still pretty good.
My favorite song on the soundtrack was "Cowgirl" by Underworld because it struck me as the darkest and most representative of the cyber punk lifestyle I wanted to live. (Side note: they were better known for "Born Slippy," which appeared on the Trainspotting soundtrack and was perhaps the second most ubiquitous electronica song after "Halcyon.")
Within about a year my love for electronica expanded way beyond the Hackers soundtrack and I very snobbishly looked down upon "novice" listeners who only knew a couple of big artists from a couple of compilations. I loaded up on imports by Orbital and Underworld, mined the internet for new music, and downloaded live sets by underground DJs. Occasionally I got in over my head, like when I dropped something like $20 on a five-song EP by Future Sound of London called Lifeforms, only to discover that it was was an experimental ambient project where the music was sampled from forest sounds - the first song, for example, features a drum beat scrapped together from recordings of flapping owl wings. I still have this album in my iTunes and occasionally put it on at parties as a joke.
My love for electronica began fading when I finally attended a real rave at around age 16 (I know, I really should not have been at a rave when I was 16). I was expecting an overwhelming, all-consuming, awe-inspiring experience where I would hear music with an intensity that I had never felt before, and just naturally dance my ass off without thinking about it. Imagine my deep disappointment when I realized everyone there was on... DRUGS! Yes, as an early-teen electronica lover, I largely overlooked the fact that most people's appreciation of my favorite music was largely supplemented by drug consumption. I remember a particular conversation with my friend Jessica who accompanied me that night: "This place sucks when you're not on drugs," she shouted to me over the noise. I shouted back, "I really like the music, that's why I'm here. I'm okay." Later that night she told me about a favorite drug cocktail of hers called the "Magic Five." As I recall, the Magic Five consisted of ecstasy, coke, ketamine, pot and PCP taken in some particular order. Some of her friends, she told me, had burned out for life after too many Magic Five-infused raves. Until then I thought my love of the music was enough to make me a true member of the rave/cyber punk/electronica revolution, but that night I realized I was an amateur and an outsider. It was all about the experience, not the music, and the experience involved retarded amounts of drugs. I also had a huge crush on Jessica and had thought my extensive collection of UK imports was enough to impress her (note: as much as she was a druggie, this still made me a pretentious douche). After that I felt a disjunction with electronic music, as if I would never know how artists intended listeners to hear it unless I altered my perception.
This isn't such a big deal anymore. I mean, drugs are fine, although maybe not at Magic Five levels. But I still think of electronica as being more about experience than about music - i.e, about dancing all night rather than listening closely - and this has prevented me from becoming a connoisseur again. I have, however, become increasingly enamored with the film Hackers and will happily watch it over and over again. I suggest a movie night in the future.
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