In 1993 Billy Idol released his first post-motorcycle-crash album, Cyberpunk. It was critically lambasted and fared miserably in the charts; rightly so, it was an abominable mess of horrid, horrid yucky clueless genre/style (mis-)appropriation. Probably the most gut-wrenchingly awful bit of the album was the EBM cover of The Velvet Underground's Heroin, complete with wailing divas, innappropriate Patti Smith quotes, and drum breaks which even in 1993 were sounding real dated. It's just nasty. (Allmusic.com called it "one of the worst covers ever recorded").It was also about this time that Idol began posting to the UseNET group alt.cyberpunk using the handle lyle libido (an anagram of "Billy Idol"), enthusiastically declaring his newly-acquired interest in new-tech, hacking, virtual reality, cyber-sex, AI, and that sort of thing (I'm not gonna link that shit up; google it if you must). Of course the hackers and philosophers and cyber-nerds and "industrial" music freaks on the group would have none of it, reacted very petulantly, and in doing so started one of the classic and most entertaining flame-wars in the early history of the internet. I ended-up feeling sorry for the guy - after all he just wanted to connect with the cyber-peeps.
Anyway, none of this is explaining - following on from yesterday's post on mp3-players and serendipitous random-play sequencing, or podflow - how an mp3 of Idol's cover version of Heroin found its way on to my new mp3-player.
I've never posessed an mp3 of Billy Idol's Heroin. I haven't even heard it for 13-14 years, and back then, there was no such thing as an mp3* - the cutting-edge of portable-music was the mini-disc. Hell, there was hardly even CDs, if I recall correctly. (Ok so that's a lie, but you catch my drift!). So you can imagine the sound my jaw made when it hit the ground when my mp3player started playing it on my way to work THIS morning.
WTF? Where the fuck did it come from? Did my player download it from a satellite? From someone else who I passed in the street? Did it.. argh, fuggit. Again, WTF?
So anyway I felt the need to coin another new term - podphreaking.
(from 'pod' n., An abbreviation of iPod, a generic term for high-capacity portable music-players, and 'phreaking' n. hacking telecommunications networks to obtain free phone calls.)
Amusingly, with 15 or so years worth of water under the bridge, Heroin just sounds like shitty commercial techno a la Gatecrasher, or something Sample Gee vomited up; something like that. But don't take my word for it...
Billy Idol - Heroin (right-click and Save As to download)
Here's Gareth Branwyn's (creator of Beyond Cyberpunk!) viewpoint on the whole Billy Idol/Cyberpunk business.
*well, there was music compression of a sort, but it wasn't exactly the consumer-electronics revolution that it is now.
2 comments:
i started listening to the track and was 'awww come on, it's not that bad, a bit thin and tacky, but i kinda like that, come on steve don't be a cunt. however, i just heard the 'gospel' bv's the 'chunky' guitar parts, and 'catchy' keyboard riffs. your right it's fucking bad. really, really horrid....
i found some good front 242 on you tube the other day. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4j1DQnjB0g&search=front%20242) pretty good.
maybe billy is having the last laugh though....how the fuck did that get on your player - i trust you kept it, it desverves to stay...
As the iPod is not a telecommunications device "phreaking" is probably not the right phrase.
Perhaps "Podjinks" would be better. Derived from "hi-jinks" - (a prank, playing around), Podjinks would be the act of taking an unattended iPod and loading crap music onto it.
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