As for me, I’m just going to share two videos. One is the trailer for the German film, Christiane F.This trailer — which I consider one of the best trailers ever made — is scored to David Bowie’s Heroes. (Both Bowie and the song also play a large and important in the film itself.) Secondly, I want to share a scene that I love, this one from Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds and featuring Bowie’s Theme From Cat People reimagined as an anthem of the French Resistance.
Whenever we have visitors here at Shattered Lens HQ, the first thing that they always seem to notice is the wide variety of music being played. Considering the number of contributors that we have working here on any given day, it makes sense. After all, we all have our own individual tastes in music and we’re not afraid to play it loud.
(Occasionally, if I’m lucky, I can convince Valerie Troutman to come to my office and sing the Degrassi theme song with me. Whatever it takes, I know I can make it through….)
Anyway, my point is that every writer at the Shattered Lens is an individual with her or his own taste in music, movies, and … well, everything. So, when you look at my list of my 10 favorite songs of 2015, you should keep in mind that these are my ten favorite songs and they do not necessarily reflect the musical opinions or tastes of anyone here at the Shattered Lens but me! And, in fact, if you want to see just how eclectic a group we here at the Shattered Lens, be sure to check out Necromoonyeti’s list of his favorite metal albums of 2015!
Anyway, here are my favorite songs of 2015. Notice that I didn’t say “best.” Instead, these are some of the songs that I spent the previous 12 months obsessively listening to. When I make my autobiographical movie about my life in 2015, these are the songs that will appear on the soundtrack!
Honorable Mention: Elle King — Ex’s and Oh’s
Ex’s and Oh’s has pretty much been my song all through 2015. However, the song itself was originally released in 2014 and this is a list of the best songs released in 2015. That said, hardly a day in 2015 went by without my listening to and singing along with this song and there’s no way I can’t include it.
Special Bonus Track Included Because Otherwise There Would Be 11 Songs Listed And Lisa Has A Phobia About Odd Numbers: Ellie Goulding — Love Me Like You Do
And now the list:
10) Adele — When We Were Young
9) Icona Pop — Emergency
8) Kelly Clarkson — Take You High
7) The Chemical Brothers — Sometimes I Feel So Deserted
6) Public Service Broadcasting — Go!
5) Taylor Swift (featuring Kendrick Lamar) — Bad Blood
4) Purity Ring — Bodyache
3) Big Data (featuring Jamie Liddell) — Clean
2) Public Service Broadcasting — Gagarin
1) The Chemical Brothers (featuring St. Vincent) — Under Neon Lights
Fourteen years posting a year-end list somewhere, and the rule never changes: odd-numbered years produce more good music. Thankfully, we just concluded 2015. 🙂
15. Deafheaven – New Bermuda
14. Peste Noire – La Chaise-Dyable
13. Mgła – Exercises in Futility
12. Veilburner – Noumenon
11. Botanist – Hammer of Botany
10. Enslaved – In Times (track: Building With Fire)
It’s amazing that after 24 years and 13 studio albums, Enslaved still routinely make it into my year-end top 10. They have continually evolved without letting go of their black metal roots, and the consequence lately has been a long stretch of memorable, prog-rock infused releases that keep up with the times and never grow stale no matter how often I resurrect them. If In Times won’t stick with me quite so permanently as Vertebrae in 2008, it still achieves everything I’ve come to expect of them lately and has managed to entertain me more than the vast majority of other albums I have heard this year. I think I have a bit of a subconscious inclination to prioritize newer bands, but #10 was as low as I could justify dropping this one.
9. Krallice – Ygg Huur (track: Wastes of Ocean)
Like any Krallice album, Ygg Huur takes dozens of listens to ingest. What struck me at first as a rather disappointing, spastic blathering of sound comes together much more coherently if you give it its due time. That being said, it is still a sharp break from their previous four albums, and it lacks that element of progression and overarching vision that has traditionally made this band, for me at least, infinitely repeatable. (I have listened to Krallice more than any other band in my life by a large margin, and they only came into existence in 2008.) Ygg Huur is a brief an meandering mood piece that does not, perhaps, maximize the band’s song-writing talents, but I’ve enjoyed it plenty never the less. More avant-garde than post-black metal, am I allowed to love it and still hope it was just a one-time experiment?
8. Ghost Bath – Moonlover (track: Golden Number)
This is a pretty gorgeous post-black metal album that I’m surprised more sites haven’t picked up on for their year-end summaries. It lacks a touch of refinement that might have earned it higher standing, but the song writing is fabulous. Moonlover delivers a well-rounded package of post-rock infused metal that seems to pay a good deal of respect to Alcest and Amesoeurs, but their undertone is bleak and depressing. It’s a sad album in a way that makes me think of Harakiri for the Sky’s Aokigahara last year, but peppered with little bursts of joy that will bring a smile to your face.
Oh yeah, metal’s not supposed to make me smile. Check.
7. Sumac – The Deal (track: Thorn In The Lion’s Paw)
I never really got into Old Man Gloom. Make what you will of that. The Deal certainly wasn’t Aaron Turner’s most well-received album, but I personally enjoyed it more than anything he’s contributed to since Oceanic. A lot of that has to do with Nick Yacyshyn’s brilliant mastery of the drum set, but I also feel like Turner’s chugging out riffs that really sink into my head more than I’m used to. It’s like a doom metal reinterpretation of Isis, albeit with less progression, and I love the subtle stylistic diversity he brings to the field on this one. It has moments that remind me of everything from black metal to Converge. (And it probably wins this year’s ‘most listened to in my car’ award. <_<)
6. A Forest of Stars – Beware the Sword You Cannot See (track: Virtus Sola Invicta)
Beware the Sword You Cannot See is one of the most eclectic albums I have heard in a long time that I still managed to really enjoy. If I could begin to put a finger on how to describe it, I would have reviewed it ages ago. Black metal at its heart, it weaves a wild mix of strings and spoken word and avant-garde breaks around that core. I like it, quite a bit, and I think the vocals and lyrics (at least, what I can make of them) might be its strongest selling point. I really don’t know what to say about this album. Hear it for yourselves, and be prepared to give an attentive listen–possibly many–if you want to soak it all in.
5. Blind Guardian – Beyond the Red Mirror (track: Grand Parade)
It’s pretty hard to measure the worth of an epic power metal band on a list that is heavily dominated by innovative new styles of music. I don’t think I would have felt entirely comfortable with my positioning of this album no matter where I put it, but I tried to make the cutoff a sort of drifting point between albums that really made me reflect and albums that I just really enjoyed, because there’s never going to be a particularly deep hidden truth to a Blind Guardian track, but they’ve proven a dozen times over to be the ultimate kings of all fantasy-themed music. In the broad scheme of BG’s vast discography, I would probably place Beyond the Red Mirror fourth, after Nightfall in Middle-Earth, At the Edge of Time, and A Night at the Opera. That translates roughly to: it’s awesome.
4. Bosse-de-Nage – All Fours (track: A Subtle Change)
Am I a little biased since I got my initial rip of this direct from frontman Bryan Manning? Probably not, but in my weird little world that’s still a bragging point. 😉 Like Cara Neir’s Portals to a Better, Dead World in 2013, All Fours takes everything I love about screamo and turns it into post-black metal. This might be a coincidence. I’m pretty sure the band claims no direct screamo influence (don’t quote me on that), but the consequence is the same. These guys have worked their way into the top-tier of bands pushing metal in new directions today, and, more so than their previous albums, All Fours really strikes me as a well-rounded composition that possesses the maturity to fully deliver its vision. And Manning has a way with lyrics that’s… well… you just have to read them.
3. Obsequiae – Aria of Vernal Tombs (track: Orphic Rites Of The Mystic)
When I first heard Obsequiae, it was one of those rare moments where I went a-ha, you are that band that’s going to pioneer the style I have always desired but been too inept to create myself. I can guarantee you without much doubt that, of all of the albums of 2015, Aria of Vernal Tombs will find its way into my playlist the most for the longest period of time. Ten years from now, I will probably still be listening to this album when its competitors are all but distant memories. Like Summoning, they fit a unique mood for me that no other band has really begun to approach. (Perhaps Opeth’s Orchid crosses into this terrain, briefly and insufficiently.) A collection of captivating medieval melodies that press themselves upon you by-and-large through euphorically well-mixed guitar and bass (the bass on this album is absolutely gorgeous) rather than traditional instrumentation… my god, I’ve been waiting so long for a band that sounds like this, and they’re easily my favorite new discovery of the year.
2. Panopticon – Autumn Eternal (track: The Wind’s Farewell)
It’s amazing to think that, in the absence of one album this year that won my heart in a landslide, Panopticon could have taken my #1 slot in 3 out of the last 4 years. To put it bluntly, Autumn Eternal is Austin Lunn’s best album to date, and Austin Lunn is arguably the most accomplished metal artist of the 2010s. An incredibly versatile musician who can sample uninhibited from the melting-pot of styles that is post-black metal, Lunn’s newest offering is a mindblowing amalgamation of post-rock and black metal that leaves the more popular bands of this persuasion choking on his dust.
1. Liturgy – The Ark Work (track: Kel Valhaal)
What can I say…. it didn’t make Pitchfork’s top 25? I will probably look back on The Ark Work as one of the most underrated albums ever recorded, and I think its merits have more in common with Radiohead than with anything that has ever derived from heavy metal. It constantly threatens to collapse into a blundering mire of amateur garbage, from the excessive bell tones to Hunter’s marshmallow-mouthed rap vocals. This might be the turn-off for so many listeners, but it is necessary, and the key to this album is in how Liturgy always manage to somehow hold it together. It’s the musical equivalent of your kindergartener handing you a crayon scribble that, on second glance, turns out to be a Picasso.
On Aesthethica, Liturgy explored a very explicit reinterpretation of black metal that found quite a bit of inspired company among bands who were beginning to recognize and explore the similarities between black metal and post-rock. That album helped to define a movement, but it only achieved the band’s vision in a very direct sort of way: through rhythm and melody and progression. The Ark Work nails Hunter’s vision home with an extremely more robust and precise pallet, bringing lyrics and glitch effects and atypical instrumentation and a totally unorthodox approach to metal vocals into the fray. If you listen to a track like “Vitriol” and can barely take it seriously, that’s part of the point, but barely is the key word. Every risk and gamble they take ultimately works, and I am unabashedly unashamed to blare Hunter’s trap beat ‘occult rap’ at max volume out my car stereo. 😀
You might listen to The Ark Work and hear some childish clusterfuck, but I hear absolutely brilliant attention to detail–a musician completely in control of the degree to which his work teeters on the brink of nonsense. Top 20 all-time contender? I could go there. Leave your fear of speaking too fondly of Hunter Hunt-Hendrix at the door and just embrace this album with the assumption that he knew exactly what he was doing. You won’t be disappointed.
The 2016 inductees to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame have been announced and classic rock wins the majority; with Deep Purple, Cheap Trick, Chicago and Steve Miller. Getting a boost from ‘Straight Out of Compton‘, N.W.A. rounds out this years inductees.
Eligibility requirements:
“To be eligible for induction as an artist (as a performer, composer, or musician) into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the artist must have released a record, in the generally accepted sense of that phrase, at least 25 years prior to the year of induction; and have demonstrated unquestionable musical excellence.” **
Deep Purple:
Waiting for more than 20 years, Deep Purple finally got the honor they deserved. Deep Purple has been listed as ‘Heavy Metal’, ‘Hard Rock’ and ‘Progressive’. Having sold over 100 million albums, they are one of the most influential bands of all time. The band has gone thru many line-up changes thru the years, and it will be interesting to see which members show up on stage.
Chicago:
Formed in 1967 Chicago pulled a brazen move with their first release, Chicago Transit Authority being a double album, which went Multi-Platinum. Self-described as a “Rock and Roll band with Horns” Chicago has changed their sound thru the years, but remains one of the best selling and longest running bands of all time.
Cheap Trick:
Having preformed more than 5,000 shows, Cheap Trick is one of the most enduring bands of all times. Formed in 1973 they broke thru in Japan first, before the US, often referred to as the ‘American Beatles’. In 2007, the Illinois senate designated April 1st as Cheap Trick day as opposed to April fools day in honor of the band.
Steve Miller:
Although releasing his most notable hits with the ‘Steve Miller Band‘, Miller is being inducted alone. After a storied career, Miller may be ‘The Joker’ after all!
N.W.A.:
Pioneers and legends in the Rap and Hip-Hop genre, N.W.A.’s induction into the HOF is only the third Hip-Hop / Rap group to be let in. Ice Cube, Dr. Dre, DJ Yella, MC Ren and the late Eazy-E were portrayed in this years Oscar nominated ‘Straight Outta Compton‘
Lyrics NSFW:
Snubs:
Among many left out this year were ‘The Cars‘, ‘Nine Inch Nails‘, ‘YES‘, ‘Janet Jackson‘ and ‘The Smiths‘.
The 31st Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony will take place at the Barclays’ Center in Brooklyn, N.Y., on April 8, 2016 and be filmed by HBO for a later broadcast.
Today, the Academy announced the 74 songs that have been ruled eligible for a Best Original Song nomination! And you know what that means — it’s time for my to post the list! (Our longtime readers should know, by now, how much I love lists!)
The big news is that the 2nd song from the end credits of Love & Mercy — the one that everyone was expecting to be a front runner — has been ruled ineligible. Here’s what is eligible! Be sure to listen to all of these songs before the Oscar nominations are announced in January…
“Happy” from “Altered Minds”
“Home” from “Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip”
“Kaze Wo Atsumete” by Happy End (はっぴいえんど) appears twice in Lost in Translation: once outside a karaoke room at the end of a long night, and once at the end of the credits. Since that movie was so central to how I remember the late 90s and early 2000s, I thought I might end with it too.
Here are links to the previous entries in my series. They all clearly share :???: in common. (Well, I had fun, anyway):
The dream has to end somewhere. Science fiction seems to agree on that. Futuristic technology produces what biology could not: logic-based systems so functional and adept at survival that humanity becomes obsolete. Whether we assimilate into a borg colony or a zerg hive mind, imagination is pretty screwed. Our best bet might be something like The Matrix. Perhaps some utility will compel our robot overlords to spare the sheep who spawned them. Yay!
I cannot say what it must feel like to be enslaved by a post-human species, but I fancy it would sound a lot like the 777 trilogy by Blut Aus Nord. Between 2011 and 2012, these French black metal legends offered up a journey through a world that was beyond dystopian. Discordant melodies and unorthodox rhythms taken to the extreme are usually a recipe for disaster–the tools of technically proficient but creatively deprived math rock and avant-garde musicians I would only listen to under duress. Blut Aus Nord masterfully avoided that pitfall by envisioning a coherent aesthetic framework and driving the music forward as a consistent conceptual progression across 18 tracks. Radical experimentation joins forces with dark industrial grooves to place the listener in a futuristic, post-human world where mechanical gods rule apathetic over mortals bred in gestation crates.
The trilogy does not actually offer any textual insight into what its world is supposed to be. The minimal lyrics are highly esoteric, and Blut Aus Nord ultimately leave it to the instrumentation to tell their tale. You might not experience it as a futuristic world at all, but rather as some bleak corner of hell from which a lost soul digs through the madness and witnesses his overlord. But as far as it speaks to me, the 777 trilogy is the vision of a feckless human slave awakening from his dream into terrifying, incomprehensible world. He slowly comes to understand his master and, perhaps, ultimately assimilates into the hive mind. The final track, “Epitome XVIII”, is a grim, cold trance in which a soulless machine reigns on triumphant.
I can’t say that any entertainment franchise has given me more cause to think than Ghost in the Shell. It presents a mid-21st century post-apocalyptic earth in which society has more or less stabilized. Events revolve around Public Security Section 9, a counter-terrorism agency focused on investigating cyberterrorism, which is rather interesting because the original manga by Masamune Shirow launched in 1989, before cyberterrorism actually existed (or the modern internet, for that matter). Throughout their investigations, the team deals with the social and philosophical issues that arise in an age where society is fully integrated across a world-wide network and technology has been integrated directly into the body, rendering people intimately vulnerable to hacks and computer viruses.
I am as guilty as most of having never read the original manga. I became acquainted with Shirow’s world through Ghost in the Shell (1995) and Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (2004), both directed by Mamoru Oshii, and the 2002 anime series Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, by Kenji Kamiyama. While the two directors take rather different aesthetic approaches–the movies present Section 9 as a harsh, disenchanted unit in a somewhat dystopian world, whereas the television series is lively and a bit cartoonish–both remain dedicated to questioning the impact of highly integrated technology.
Stand Alone Complex lies much closer to the root of my music series, because some of the key issues it tackles have since arisen online in the real world. Everyone is well familiar with the use of V for Vendetta-styled Guy Fawkes masks in protests originating from the internet, but there is a decent chance you have also caught a glimpse of an odd blue smiley face among the rabble. The Laughing Man image originates from Stand Alone Complex, where it functions as a mask employed anonymously by individuals taking public action independently of each other. At first, an advocate for social justice uses it to disguise himself while committing a ‘terrorist’ act, but the image quickly overreaches his motives. Others commit unrelated political sabotage under the guise. Corporations employ it to discredit their competitors. Pranksters use it as a sort of meme, forming the shape with chairs on a rooftop and cutting it into a field as a crop circle, for instance. The image has no concrete meaning, and everyone who uses it essentially ‘stands alone’, but the public perceive the Laughing Man as a single individual.
The actual anime gives a fairly shallow interpretation of this. The creator of the image, Aoi, explains that he never intended the mask to become a social phenomenon, and that its arbitrary usage dislodged the image from its original meaning. He sums this up by asking “Who knew that copies could still be produced despite the absence of an originator?” The ‘profoundness’ of this ties back to a long history of bad philosophy which assumes that signs have universal objective meaning in some sort of fundamental way which mystically transcends subjectivity of the mind. Basically, certain Greek ideas saw a resurgence of popularity in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, probably as a consequence of high society’s fascination with antiquities at the time. The plethora of ready-at-hand counterexamples to these archaic notions provided easy meat for countless grad students to earn their PhDs, so long as they did not throw the baby out with the bath water and ruin the game for everybody else.
But I digress. While the intended idea behind “Stand Alone Complex” is a bit naive, the Laughing Man does represent a unique sort of game that can only be played in the information age. To the public, the Laughing Man was a single individual, or at most a closely coordinated group, but the participants knew better. They knew that there was no real ‘Laughing Man’, but their independent actions were performed under the expectation that they would be written into ‘his’ public profile. The game was exclusive; you had to be aware of the mask in order to dawn it. The game also had rules; an action totally out of line with the Laughing Man’s pattern of behavior would be perceived as a fraud. (You could not, for instance, reveal the truth behind the Laughing Man.) By playing, you added a little piece of yourself to the puzzle, and it might slowly assimilate you in turn.
Ghost in the Shell has remained a uniquely relevant franchise in science fiction because it got so many ideas right. In 1989, at a time when internet was still a novelty of college libraries, the manga offered a world of total connectivity, where every human and device belonged to a global network. In 2002, Stand Alone Complex introduced the Laughing Man, and shortly afterwards the real world knew an equivalent. Whether this bodes well for the franchise’s dabblings into cyborg technology, only time can tell, but history has certainly made an inherently fascinating fictional world all the more compelling. In the Ghost in the Shell universe, science has fully bridged the gap between computers and neural systems, allowing electronic implants to directly convert wireless digital information into stimuli compatible with the senses. The average citizen possesses visual augmentations which allow them to directly browse the internet via voice command. More complex technology delves deeper, creating a sort of sixth sense whereby users can engage a network through thought command. Some individuals, especially accident victims with the means to afford it, might have their entire bodies replaced by neurally triggered machine components.
The 1995 Ghost in the Shell film gets especially creative in tackling this–enough that it became the chief inspiration for The Matrix four years later. It revolves around brain-mapping technology and its implications regarding sentience and identity. From the start of the film, the ability to copy and read brain data appears to be common. Presumably, these digital copies would remain stagnant until encoded back into a neural network, but as the government develops better software for interpreting and editing the massive content at its disposal, funny things start to happen. The software gains a sort of temporary sentience while performing its complex tasks, and eventually it uploads itself to a cyborg body in an act of self-preservation. This new entity possesses the capacity to read other augmented brains and incorporate them into its internal network. At least, that is how I’ve interpreted it. The movie does leave a lot to the imagination. Perhaps it is recycled from earlier science fiction, and far-fetched besides–I wouldn’t really know–but Ghost in the Shell presents it all as if it were right around the corner, not lost in a distant galaxy of Star Trek.
Ghost in the Shell is so steeped in ideas that it’s a wonder I don’t forget it is a collection of animations, not a book series. Stand Alone Complex is presented as rather typical–and relatively forgettable–anime, but the 1995 movie definitely denies dismissal. It is a real work of art. The city is dirty and a bit washed-out without feeling downright destitute; the masses still lead normal lives. Emptiness expands upward; the characters are perpetually surrounded by massive, sort of dusty-looking structures that feel vacant despite signs of life. The music is simultaneously vast and minimalistic. Generally, the artistic direction projects a feeling that the protagonists are isolated–cut off from the massive world surrounding them–perhaps by the knowledge they possess.
The score Kenji Kawai (川井憲次) crafted for Ghost in the Shell ranks among the best soundtracks I’ve ever encountered. Without it, the film might easily unravel. The plot really does take a lot of creative liberties. What amount of entertainment value could convince people to open up their brains to potential hacking? Or, if they are doing it to maintain memory backups, why is a brain hack so devastating? Can’t you just resume from your last save? Why would a hacker go to the trouble of replacing an entire memory system in the first place, if they could just encode an impulse into an existing one? To these questions, I say “shhhh!”, because Kawai has so utterly convinced me that my cyborg brain will be shipping in from Japan any day now. The music shrouds the film in imminent mystery. It is a moment of quiet awe, before the very foundations of human experience become uprooted and replaced by a higher state of computer-enhanced perception.
‘Interesting’ nerd note on Kawai: while the majority of his discography appears in anime and film, he is credited with arranging the TurboGrafx-16 port of Sorcerian, one of Yuzo Koshiro and Takahito Abe’s better 1980s NEC PC-8801 projects. I am pretty excited to dig that one up. Aren’t you? …Bueller?
If you are looking for a careful plot showcasing the new challenges of a technologically advanced, post-apocalyptic earth, then Katsuhiro Otomo’s 1988 classic Akira is not a great option. The film does not try to raise any questions, the story is vague, and it revolves around characters who are empowered supernaturally, not enhanced through technology. Akira‘s legacy lies in its music, art, and shock value.
Set in a dystopian Neo-Tokyo in 2019, 31 years after the ubiquitous cataclysm uproots every tenet of modern society, Akira displays a violent, futuristic world where law and order amounts to little more than brute force. The military police force is ruthless. Suspects are executed in public spaces with no concern for who might get caught in the cross-fire. When protests turn to riots, machine guns and tanks bulldoze down all opposition to the state. In one memorable scene, a group of protesters is bombarded with tear gas, and a choking helpless civilian staggers into an unclouded space that happens to be occupied by a policeman. After a moment’s pause, he blasts him in the stomach with a smoke grenade at point blank range. The incessant violence permeates everything. Within the first ten minutes, the hero, Kaneda, has murdered a half dozen members of a rival gang for entering his turf. The antagonist, Tetsuo, while certainly not evil, does not think twice about slaughtering the millenarian following attracted to his psychic powers.
Akira keeps you attentive with an endless escalation of weirdness and destruction. At every turn, events outpace your expectations, culminating in a transformation sequence that is not even worth trying to explain. I suppose it does raise one question, and only one: “What the fuck did I just watch?” It only works, though, because the art is so distinct that it leaves little to the imagination. Akira is a visual tour through everything that the most dystopian, vulgar cyberpunk city is supposed to be.
The soundtrack, composed by Tsutomu Ōhashi of Geinoh Yamashirogumi (芸能山城組), is inescapable throughout the film. It’s a bit of a counterbalance to the grim, futuristic visuals, relying heavily on Japanese and Indonesian traditional instrumentation and avant-garde vocals. It focuses more on capturing Akira‘s supernatural side, both in style and in strangeness. The opening track, “Kaneda”, does this while racing full speed into the heart of a towering metropolis.
I will never summon ethereal fire spirits to rend my foes, and unless the unknown reaches of physics politely comply with Hollywood, I will never receive a post card from the dark side of the Milky Way. I will also never applaud a director’s effective use of taste and smell, or upload a backup of my memory to external storage in between breakfast and a morning shower, but there is a difference here…
Nearly every cyberpunk story I have encountered begins with an apocalypse shortly after its publication. I guarantee you someone is writing one right now in which, in 2020, either Putin or radical Islamists nuke the shit out of everybody. Now it is 2060, and all of a sudden everyone is rocking cybernetic implants, babies grow in artificial wombs, and Lunar Colony Beta just declared independence. It’s not an absurdity. It’s not as if people just go “it’s the future; of course it will be futuristic!” and ignore the context. The assumption is that a cataclysmic act of destruction will somehow propel technology towards radical progress.
This makes sense, if you think about the forces that drive technology forward. In capitalism, there is always an incentive to stagnate. The longer you can milk a product, pumping out new models with superficial “upgrades”, the less you have to invest into research and development. Especially in oligopolies like America, once you establish a monopoly you can dig in your heels for years, even decades, before competition on other fronts undermines your turf. Technology is also hardballed by the western world’s incoherent, slapped-together code of ethics. Since the 1980s, our society has been pretty thoroughly convinced that free will is an endangered species preservable only in captivity. Half of the potential at our fingertips is illegal to research let alone implement, on the grounds that it somehow violates our sanctity.
The post-apocalyptic setting washes us clean of our old ethics and oligarchs. The society that emerges might be a terrible place to live, but it may well be a technocracy. When capitalism undermined the old aristocracy, revolution created bourgeois democracy. The First World War birthed all sorts of hyper-industrial dictatorships, even at the far fringes of the Industrial Revolution’s sphere. A catastrophic event in the information age should, if the trend holds, generate Google empires. How long can conventionally mechanized warlords withstand against soldiers modified to receive live satellite imagery of their terrain and fully regenerate major wounds in a matter of months? Is 45 years too soon for all this? Mother Russia went from de facto feudalism to Sputnik in fewer. And we have to make some allowances for fiction…
There is nothing fundamental preventing massive progress towards biological enhancement–at least nothing we are commonly aware of. The Cyborg Age won’t emerge in our lifetimes, realistically, but only because of entrenched social, political, and economic conditions. The fictional cataclysm is compelling for a lot of bigger reasons, but plausibility still hangs in the air. Our cozy modern lives won’t take us anywhere, but maybe a little pandemonium will usher in the paradigm shift to a society which praises integration of digital technology into our biological systems.
Kinski are a post-rock band from Seattle that formed in 1998. “Semaphore” appears on their 2003 Sub Pop release, Airs Above Your Station. I am pretty sure that the opening two minutes contains a formula to reconcile quantum mechanics with general relativity, but I am too old to do acid. At any rate, I hear it as some sort of major shift in perspective inaugurating an era of progression.
Stand Alone Complex lies much closer to the root of my music series, because some of the key issues it tackles have since arisen online in the real world. Everyone is well familiar with the use of V for Vendetta-styled Guy Fawkes masks in protests originating from the internet, but there is a decent chance you have also caught a glimpse of an odd blue smiley face among the rabble. The Laughing Man image originates from Stand Alone Complex, where it functions as a mask employed anonymously by individuals taking public action independently of each other. At first, an advocate for social justice uses it to disguise himself while committing a ‘terrorist’ act, but the image quickly overreaches his motives. Others commit unrelated political sabotage under the guise. Corporations employ it to discredit their competitors. Pranksters use it as a sort of meme, forming the shape with chairs on a rooftop and cutting it into a field as a crop circle, for instance. The image has no concrete meaning, and everyone who uses it essentially ‘stands alone’, but the public perceive the Laughing Man as a single individual.
Ghost in the Shell has remained a uniquely relevant franchise in science fiction because it got so many ideas right. In 1989, at a time when internet was still a novelty of college libraries, the manga offered a world of total connectivity, where every human and device belonged to a global network. In 2002, Stand Alone Complex introduced the Laughing Man, and shortly afterwards the real world knew an equivalent. Whether this bodes well for the franchise’s dabblings into cyborg technology, only time can tell, but history has certainly made an inherently fascinating fictional world all the more compelling. In the Ghost in the Shell universe, science has fully bridged the gap between computers and neural systems, allowing electronic implants to directly convert wireless digital information into stimuli compatible with the senses. The average citizen possesses visual augmentations which allow them to directly browse the internet via voice command. More complex technology delves deeper, creating a sort of sixth sense whereby users can engage a network through thought command. Some individuals, especially accident victims with the means to afford it, might have their entire bodies replaced by neurally triggered machine components.
Through the Shattered Lens 