More on Billy Idol’s Infamous “Cyberpunk” Record #cyberpunk
Earlier this year, I posted a piece here about Billy Idol’s 1993 concept record, Cyberpunk, and my part in that project. Open Culturerecently posted an article about Cyberpunk, too.
The OC piece is a decent overview of the story, even if it gets a few details wrong. As far as I know, Billy never hung out on the alt.cyberpunk USENET newsgroup. It was The Well BBS where Billy pitched his tent on the new cyber frontier. It was there where he found the topic I’d created, called “Is There a Cyberpunk Movement?” He turned the intro to that topic into what became known as the “Cyberpunk Manifesto.” You can here this piece (some of my words were changed by Billy) below.
One of the cool things in the Open Culture piece was an imbed of this video that I’d never seen. It’s a click-through of the 3.5″ multimedia floppy disk that came with the special edition of the album. It contains essay content by myself and Mark Frauenfelder, the album’s lyrics, and an animated version of my “manifesto” (4:35). The HyperCard-based multimedia disk was created by Jamie Levy of Electric Hollywood. It was fun to see this after all of these years. This may look like the digital stone age now, but this was near bleeding edge tech at the time.
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