Monthly Archives: January 2021

Scarlett Sabet: So, a year since Catalyst, what are your thoughts?

Jimmy Page: Well, my thoughts on Catalyst being a living entity a year on: Im really pleased that we did it and relieved that we did a project that I had in my mind. I had it in my head, at various stages, the characters of the poems. To arrive where we arrived, with something that was really avant-garde, that had not been done before, was really thrilling. It was a catalyst, but also a milestone that others hadnt got to yet.

SS: I think thats it. You were so passionate and fired up about it and your vision was so clear and distinct, so although before we did it I couldnt fully comprehend it, I never questioned what you wanted to do. During the recording and production of the album I trusted what you were doing implicitly. We created a new language. Each poem on the album was an important landmark. With the exception of Rocking Underground, which I wrote in 2012, you were the first person to hear all the other poems.

JP: Yes, yes, thats a good point. I was the first person to hear all of those poems. But I also had the pleasure to hear you read on numerous occasions, in a variety of circumstances as well. So I got to feel these poems and to recognise the character of each one and certain cadences you would employ during your readings. I dont think you ever read one poem exactly the same, because you were breathing new life into it every night. All these things were registering with me. What I didnt want to do was what people assumed it would be: poems with music behind it. Well, thats what everyone would think. And I certainly didnt want to think in the normal sort of way. I wanted to think of it in another way altogether. Lets do what I know is right and that you know is right, so I presented you with something that, yes, will be musical, it will sound orchestral, but its all done with the human voice. And thats where we arrived at the territory of things that hadnt been done before.

SS: Yes, thats really well said.

JP: Rocking Underground, I heard you read that at your first poetry reading at Worlds End Bookshop in Chelsea and that really got to me. I thought, Wow, shes really living this, and not only that, but thats a really fine poem. It was a narrative and really interesting. From that point on, having seen your writing and your publications, I thought it was really great you self-published so you didnt have other people getting in the way of it.

SS: Well, that was thanks to you. I took your advice to self-publish.

JP: Rocking Underground was the first poem. I got you to record it on an old Sony cassette player and once youd done a performance you were happy with, then I got you to track it. Now, this is where the unexplained comes into the equations. Id used the cassette before, but on this occasion, it played back with this noisy, metallic sound, like an announcement on an underground tube, and, of course, it was written on a train.

SS: Yes, it was written on the Tube in London and I think there is a misnomer that Rocking in the title is a reference to rock music. It isnt. The word Existing could replace Rocking in the title and the meaning would be the same.

JP: Yes, Im pleased you said that. And what was played back on the cassette gave an atmosphere that gave an identity to the piece, almost like an invocation. I wanted you to double track it. I knew youd be able to do that. So there was a metallic-sounding voice, then a more natural sounding voice on top. So that was a great start and you could see that my ideas were a bit wacky. Interestingly enough, when Catalyst was released Phil Alexander played Rocking Underground on his Kerrang! Radio show and then he played a Led Zeppelin song afterwards and I thought that was really cool.

SS: It was Dazed And Confused.

JP: Well, thats even better, because thats the more avant-garde side of what Ive managed to create in the past, something akin.

SS: You really captured the atmosphere of that and, on a personal note, it was the first poem you saw me read at my first ever poetry reading, so in that way it was a landmark. Also, when I wrote it it was unusual compared to what I had previously written, so that poem was the beginning and you were at the beginning with me, in a way. Rocking Underground was also the title of my first book, which I self-published on your advice, to keep creative control. So I think we both knew this poem was going to be opening this album.

JP: The other poem I knew I wanted to try with you was "The Fifth Circle Of Hell. Every time I witnessed you read that poem, there was such a response, people holding their breath and then a spontaneous applause. I knew how strong it was. So for the recording of it, rather than putting too many textures on it, because of the vocal performance and what was being said and what was being covered in it, I wanted a more locked-in double tracking, not just the power of one voice saying this, but two voices riding all the way through, to make the message even stronger. And you felt at home with these experimental techniques.

SS: I remember so clearly writing it. It had been forming in my mind and then it all came out in one sitting.

JP: Yeah, you did do it in one afternoon. You were channelling, like it was inside you and it had to come out and it did come out. The first time you read it to me I was really impressed, Ive got to say.

SS: I was really excited to read it to you, because it was so different and really long and it was the narrative of what I wanted to say and I caught it in this rhythm. You were in a meeting in another part of the house and I remember once you had finished saying, I think Ive written something. It was a creative landmark for me.

"To arrive where we arrived, with something that was really avant-garde, that had not been done before, was really thrilling. It was a catalyst, but also a milestone that others hadnt got to yet."

JP: The thing is, its as relevant now as it was then.

SS: The tone of the poem on Catalyst is very aggressive. Its almost demonic.

JP: Yes, it is. It takes on a different character from how you read it. Cut Up was the third track we recorded and you came out with a way of reading it that I had never heard before.

SS: I realised that I needed to adapt the performance for the format: we were making a record. It wasnt a live poetry reading, where that poem becomes very impassioned.

JP: It was a totally different pacing and it was incredible, the whole hypnotic, mantric quality to it, and as you were doing it I knew I wanted to use an effect that I had used way back in the days of Led Zeppelin.

SS: On which track?

JP: Well, I did it on You Shook Me, which is at the end of the first album. You can hear it, but I used it differently on Catalyst. With Cut Up, I wanted it to be there, faintly in the background, and it to be an entity to creep in and become more and more audible as things go on, until at the end it builds and its almost like a conflict. Again, I knew this hadnt been done before with spoken word.

SS: That had started as a super-long draft of a poem, written by hand, and it got to the point it was almost 20 pages. I couldnt really stand it and felt I wanted to do something radical, destroy and dismantle what I had written, then rebuild it. So I remember I cut it up with scissors and because there was rhythm in the pre-existing phrases, the rhythm remained and it incorporated its own dark rhythm as well.

JP: It was remarkable and you were really on fire at this point. But this is how it was in the studio between the two of us, sparking off ideas.

SS: The actual recording was amazing and we were lucky to do it at home, being so comfortable, literally at home, and being with you: the trust between us, it made me brave. I wanted to meet you in that moment.

JP: And we did that. We arrived at that. To hear you do it in a different vein and rate and tempo, it was inspiring for me to come up with ideas. It was powerful.

SS: The first tracks are intense and really confront the listener and then Euphoric Kiss comes in and in the version on the album you can hear me laugh at the beginning. It was May when we recorded it, so after a long British winter, everything was coming alive again and I was filled with the joy of creating this piece of work together and its a poem I wrote as I was falling in love with you. Its a love poem, but defiant, and a code between us and it felt joyous to record it.

JP: Yeah, that was beautiful. This was one of the tracks where the poem alone would speak volumes. It needed just the naked honesty of it.

SS: Yes. When I'd perform that poem live, sometimes I'd improvise parts of it. The audience wouldn't know, necessarily, but you would.

JP: I think improvisation is the key to live performance, the people that know your work can see that you're not content to just go through the motions, that you're really hitting it every night in such a way that you're creating and changing the inflections of the poem, the song, whatever it is. Certainly within your poetry I could see you were capable of doing this and moulding things as you were performing them.

SS: You've created these phenomenal, electrifying live performances throughout your life. Are there some that stand out more distinctly to you, especially in terms of live performances, whether it be in a huge stadium or smaller venues or a studio?

JP: On occasion I've reviewed some work I've done in my own environment, from the home studio I had in the 1970s, where I had the facility to multitrack and layer guitars and other instruments as well. Whatever fires that off is the initial inspiration to create a piece. I'm sure it's the same as writing a poem. You get the inspiration for it and you build it and it takes shape.

SS: Yeah.

JP: And it's not necessarily a really long process. It's something that's really coming out. So under the circumstances of a live situation, I've heard versions of Dazed And Confused, for example, four nights a row on tour and I was surprised just how much improvisation there was each night, which I didn't repeat on any other night. To hear them decades later and hear what the mindset was... It was just allowing things to come through. They're unreleased.

SS: Do you have specific memories of when you've walked off stage after a performance or improvisation and just known, "Wow. That one was really..."

JP: Well, I particularly went on stage to do that sort of thing, so even though there was a set list, just walking up the steps to go on stage I knew what the numbers were going to be and I knew that there were little signs for the improvising sections that meant to the other, "Right this is going to change gear," and it was going to be something new, so they were just going to have to pay attention to these signs that would occur. So these whole passages would come out and then I would change it again into another one and that's really living by the seat of your pants, but I really enjoyed doing it and fortunately I was able to. I've really built my whole reputation on improvisation and spontaneous music. I can appreciate it in somebody else, certainly you. I could see you were breathing new life into poems every night.

SS: Possession was very intimate. I also adapted the performance of that piece. I wanted it to be intimate and its sensual and spiritual. I guess thats why its just presented as its recorded.

JP: Yes. Then it goes into And My Lungs Fill Ecstatic Song.

SS: Oh, yes! Well, that was written when I was walking by the River Thames in Sonning. I was inspired by the landscape. I wrote some notes. It wasnt until we went away that December that I started experimenting with those lines and cut them up, rearranged the structure. In that poem I also wanted to evoke almost the muscle memory of writing the poem, the feeling in my legs and the adrenaline, trying to capture it in lines. In poetry readings, I accelerate in the last verse, but in the production of this track you really accomplished what I wanted to convey. But we didnt even have a conversation about it. You just knew and you did.

JP: Given the way you read this, it felt quite mantric and, as you say, theres a pacing to it. I definitely wanted to bring all of that out, and make it quite orchestral in the way that it starts and develops and really pulsates. It has such a dynamic to it. And this is really what I meant when I said the album wouldnt be with instruments, but it will sound orchestral and going into areas no one has done before.

SS: Ah, and then the next is For Jack, which is a love poem or eulogy for Jack Kerouac. I started writing it in the months leading up to The Town And The City Festival in Lowell, Massachusetts, which is Kerouacs birthplace and where he is buried. So the poems inaugural reading was in Kerouacs birthplace. Im so moved by his work. He was so sensitive and spiritual. He tapped into something in the zeitgeist, expressed it in this new freeform way and he got huge praise and ridicule for it and he bore the brunt of both. Hes always affected me and I wanted to try to capture him. The word You is the opening of each line, addressing Kerouac directly. When I read it at City Lights, Peter Marvelis said that I had really captured [Kerouac] and what had happened to him. I think we knew we had to include this poem as part of Catalyst, because this album is kind of in the spirit of the beat writers.

JP: There was this whole movement going on in the 1950s and 1960s in literature and in music.

SS: What was the first poem that stood out to you as a young person ? I remember at primary school age, under ten, I remember Robert Louis Stevenson poems and then, after that, when I was older, WB Yeats and Coleridge. Then I discovered Bob Dylan, then Allen Ginsberg then Kerouac.

JP: Yes, I was introduced to poetry when I was at school and I realised reading poetry in the class room, en masse, that it went into another dimension and then I appreciated the metre of it, the construction. I was quite taken with the Victorian Romantic poets, Byron, Keats, Shelley. When I was in my mid-teens, I paid a lot of attention to Christopher Logue. He released an EP called Red Bird in 1959. I absolutely adored it. I adored what they were doing. It was actually jazz, with Logue reading his poems, but it wasn't freeform, it was really constructed and really exciting.

SS: I remember when you played me that.

JP: I was really impressed with the way that he read his poems, sometimes really fast and other times in a melancholic way. It meant a lot to me when I heard it. I took it in, because it was someone who had done something new and not only that it was absolutely amazing and not many people knew of it. And, of course, Christopher Logue performed at the International Poetry Incarnation in 1965 at the Royal Albert Hall.

SS: You were there that night.

JP: I was there. Allen Ginsburg performed that night with some of the other San Francisco beat poets. I had come across Howl and read it and when many people read that poem it changed their life and I was one of them.

SS: Same.

JP: Burroughs and Gysin experimented with cutup and I know they had done work at the BBC, literally cutting up analogue tapes and putting them together. Thats something I considered to be really moving things in a different direction from what they had been before. That was exactly how I thought about music. And at the same time, you had Krzysztof Penderecki, his ode to Threnody, to the victims of Hiroshima. That texture of the orchestra had such an effect on me, all through my work, in Led Zeppelin and what I was trying to do with the bow and sonic waves and my ideas for what we did on Catalyst. I also liked The New Music a later album of Penderecki. Also during that time in the late 1950s early 1960s, I discovered electronic music records by John Cage, Luciano Berio, Ilhan Mimaroglu. It all had such an effect, these textures. And what they were doing in musique concrte is what I feel we were doing with Catalyst, an extension of that. The whole adventure of Catalyst was done over a few days and Im really thrilled we did it in such a compact amount of time. We spent exactly the right time on each thing, nothing was laboured. It was all so enthusiastic and inspirational.

SS: Yes, it really was. We knew where we were coming from with this project and your passion for it was like a suit of armour. Im so proud of what we created. I always want to do something experimental and the one thing Ive always tried to do is keep challenging myself, push myself creatively, not keep doing the same thing over and over again. To stay alive and connected as an artist I think its important to keep being brave and do different things.

JP: Yes, thats absolutely the way to go about ones work.

SS: Youve never played it safe and gone down the commercial route.

JP: I think its more satisfying to throw down the gauntlet to yourself, take on the challenge and then come out with something where youve really pushed yourself. To actually do something unique and new. Les Paul said to me, You know what you can do? Same picture, different frame. So you never lose the main part of your character, thats recognised, but you adjust the framing of the picture.

SS: Wow. Youve definitely done that.

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Jimmy Page and Scarlett Sabet in conversation about their spoken word album, Catalyst - British GQ

In refusing to be neither something different nor more of the same, Back to the Future IIs re-filming technique within the original via new VistaGlide technology offered rather a remix of the Back to the Future that notoriously played with our expectations of a sequel forever. What accrues over time as we look back on its archive, and how can we avoid nostalgia in this history? Its an argument for visiting both films on the 35th anniversary of the original. Yet the sequels 1989 vision of The Future also contains a cultural critique that betrayed a very contemporary self-awareness of countercultural downfall since the date of the original films October 21, 1985 conclusion. Namely the rebellious cyberpunk movement that had mainstreamed by that year within the hopeful 80s spaces of science fiction communities, arcades, MTV, comics, graphic novels, and British public television had come to a grim demise. The fate of popular cyberpunk since Back to the Future can offer us something perhaps more precious: a modern-day lesson for our own failing technoconsumerist times. As the 2020 release of a cinematic cyberpunk video game starring Keanu Reeves illustrates continuing interest in and criticisms of the stagnation of the genre, revisiting the cyberpunk archive of Back to the Futures 1989 might help us come back to a future beyond the technologized noise of social and cultural nostalgia.

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For many who watched the film Back to the Future II for October 2015s heavily pressed Back to the Future Day, David Ehrlichs assertions in Rolling Stone probably rang true: The year 2015 of Zemeckiss film was uncannily prescient as an experience that tends to look a lot like the present by the time it arrives. His claim that the future in retrospect has always been that way refers to explosive cycles of new consumer technology, like the Model T and the iPhone, falling in step with internalized narratives of progress that always seem to become overcommodified, overblown, and boring for us in the future-realized. On to the next thing, then: the rose gold iPhone Rebecca Mead described (as perverse) in her New Yorker article that year, the real-life-fantasy pair of self-lacing Nikes, that temporary sense of social inclusion progress even for a price.

The half-life of journalism as a novelty itself is affirmed in just how swiftly the viral relevance of Right or Wrong predictions in a Blockbuster sci-fi film can slip into Who Cares territory. Ushering a vision of the future with tech-equipped, white-collar criminals, a deserved poverty loser narrative in the future McFly lineage, and 24/7 work telecommunications, one could argue (futilely) that Back to the Future II predicted a dystopian 2015 wed certainly already arrived at. However, to the 80s-trained eye, Back to the Futures hyperconsumerist future was more than just an uncanny prediction of what technocapitalism may always do to culture, or what cultures may always do with their technocapitalism. Back to the Future II was also a 3.5-year reflection when it was released. It picked up exactly where the 1985 original left off, with Martys gee-whiz skateboarding character having successfully wired postwar Pax Americana nostalgia and new-tech savvy to resolve the American Dreams meritocratic and global technology anxieties. In hacking time as an ultimate soft technology (to quote SF writer Ursula K. LeGuin), perhaps the original had repaired the accelerating, post-industrial rift in lasting relationships and generational connection emphasized in Alvin Tofflers then-popular Future Shock, and perhaps in this endless loop of rapid late-20th-century technological change and cybernetic threat the sequel could do it again.

In refusing to be neither something different nor more of the same, Back to the Future IIs re-filming technique within the original via new VistaGlide technology offered rather a remix of the Back to the Future that notoriously played with our expectations of a sequel forever. What accrues over time as we look back on its archive, and how can we avoid nostalgia in this history? Its an argument for visiting both films on the 35th anniversary of the original. Yet the sequels 1989 vision of The Future also contains a cultural critique that betrayed a very contemporary self-awareness of countercultural downfall since the date of the original films October 21, 1985 conclusion. Namely the rebellious cyberpunk movement that had mainstreamed by that year within the hopeful 80s spaces of science fiction communities, arcades, MTV, comics, graphic novels, and British public television had come to a grim demise. The fate of popular cyberpunk since Back to the Future can offer us something perhaps more precious: a modern-day lesson for our own failing technoconsumerist times. As the 2020 release of a cinematic cyberpunk video game starring Keanu Reeves illustrates continuing interest in and criticisms of the stagnation of the genre, revisiting the cyberpunk archive of Back to the Futures 1989 might help us come back to a future beyond the technologized noise of social and cultural nostalgia.

ABCs Max Headroom series

With aspirations for technologys potential for redemption against the symptoms of late global capitalism, Sabine Heuser notes that cyberpunk works would typically pit the individual against [a] conspiracy of corporations and capital inflicting conformism, surveillance, powerlessness, urban ruination, and a loss of authentic culture in their world. Cyberpunk reached for a radical transcendence of this technology-assisted oppression through liberatory notions like cyberspace, bodymod, hacking, subversion, novelty, fragmentation, and hybridity. These creative notions superseded the concern for current technological limits. A cyberpunk scholar, Heuser writes:

Emerging from the stories is a typical do-it-yourself attitude when confronted with high technology. There are no owners manuals, no respect for the intended function of the technology. Technology is turned against its original design or its intended use, becoming a vehicle for creative (and sometimes crude) intervention.

Starting within a literary movement that Samuel Delaney called an SF dialogue that had run its course by 1987, this characteristic cyberpunk ethos of aspirational hacking through and beyond available technology also emerged throughout popular visual cultural productions of the 80s a sort of cultural leaking of social theory. Much like Docs difficulty finding fuel for his hacked DeLorean, cyberpunk imaginaries of technological change sometimes struggled in the real world for the means of their aspirational cyber-aesthetic. The cyberpunk comic Shatter by Peter B. Gillis and Mike Saenz, for example, became the very first comic drawn with a computer mouse in 1985. Interviews for the bound 20th-anniversary compilation of Shatter describe an innovative, tedious, and costly process of making computer-generated art for the comic on a first-generation Apple Macintosh, pixel by pixel, then hand coloring the black-and-white printouts from a dot matrix. Shatters plot went further down the necropolitical corporate media rabbit hole than even its 1985 cyberpunk fellow, Max Headroom; The Shatter comic featured an evil media corporation that rather than cyber-copying journalists is in the regular, profitable business of harvesting genetic-based talent through mercenary murder. Cybernetic threat against the individual was a palpable anxiety that pervaded popular cyberpunk, and concerned its own forms of the systems . . . capable of receiving, storing and processing information that 80s cyberneticists sought to study for control purposes. We might find such anxiety in Martys race to resist the erasure of his very existence through quick-witted action scenes, while the circular causal and feedback mechanisms Marty must continuously maneuver seem to make movie magic of the foundational concerns of postwar cybernetics.

You broke it! . . . Wow! Look at him go! Marty (re)invents skateboarding in Back to the Future.

Not everyone had the custom tech apparatus of Zemeckis in Hollywood to realize their creative vision (in this case, for his refilming technique), and the Apple Macintosh was it in 1985 personal computer technology. Shatter artist Mike Saenz made obvious efforts to loosen up the limited state of contemporary computer graphics in 1985, layering dynamic mouse-drawn compositions with visible mixed-media colorations of watercolor, pencil, pastel, and gouache. Customer feedback in the inside cover of issue No. 2 met a range of reactions. A self-professed computer hacker and comics collector offered appreciation for how excellent the computer art was for its time (and worth the expensive issue price). A lengthy complaint applauded Saenzs bold attempt to make art with the Mighty Mac, but criticized the primitive quality of the emergent graphics, and the unoriginal similarities to Blade Runner, as being a comics turn off for even a fellow Macintosh owner. For one reason or another, Saenz soon left the Shatter project to work on an Iron Man graphic novel. His valiant hacking practice for Shatter was abandoned by the replacement artist in favor of traditional comic art that was first hand drawn and then digitized an easier and more manipulable visual process at the time, but was it still a cyberpunk?

Hacking, hybridizing, fragmenting, struggling for a cyberpunk aesthetic beyond the technologically possible, these proto-digital qualities of cyberpunk showed up again in the once wildly successful and transatlantic Max Headroom media franchise that appeared in scenes of Back to The Future II. As documented by Bryan Bishop in his The Definitive Oral History of 1980s Digital Icon Max Headroom, this pioneering transmedia franchise started as a UK cable Channel 4 movie on the politics of corporate media cyberspace what writer George Stone called the landscape of television. The satirical character Max Headroom, a computer-generated alter-ego entity reconstructed from the fragmented consciousness of a comatose journalist, would go on that same week to lambast media culture by hosting music videos on a regular show on Channel 4. By the second season in 1986, the roasting would include celebrity interviews and a joint airing between Cinemax and Channel 4, and thus began a wild rollercoaster of success for the franchise ending in a nostalgic, self-effacing flop in Back to the Future II.

In simultaneously making Max Headroom: 20 Minutes into the Future and The Max Headroom Show, creators George Stone, Annabel Jankel, and Rocky Morton realized that the graphics capacity needed to visually create their vision of the titular cybernetic character of the story was not only technologically impossible but years down the line. As a result, the hacking carried out to achieve the novel, computer-generated cyber-look of Max Headroom beyond 1985 computer art capabilities was a hybrid production including hours of makeup and prosthetics on actor Matt Frewer, fiberglass costuming, stolen rotating CGI background graphics from a milk commercial, and the non-digital, glitchy stutters and hiccups of the video editing room.

True to the avant-garde identity of cyberpunk described by Heuser, the premiere of The Max Headroom Show on UK cable Channel 4 featured a lack of credits and an immediate slippage between reality and fiction recalling Orson Welless unannounced radio premiere of War of the Worlds. According to Bishops interview with Max Headroom producer Peter Wagg:

There were no opening titles. There were no credits for anybody . . . it was just that satellite chssssssss, snow and buzz. And all of a sudden, Max was there. Like, bang! And hes talking in German, and hes telling this joke about lederhosen all in German, hes roaring with laughter during the whole thing, and then the first music video we played was a German music video. And then Max in English: And this weeks award for the worst TV commercial goes to . . . and a commercial break. We had no idea what the first commercial would be. . . . Then at the end, it just went chssssssss and to [static] again. It was like youd woken up in Eastern Europe and turned the television on, and youre watching some weird station that you dont understand, and then it suddenly is cut off and gone.

In this case, Max Headrooms fictional slippage into perceived Iron Curtain shadow worlds in Western media space and subversive cultural commentary marked a revealing glitch for the viewer, one that evaded the typically opaque programming of popular and political mainstream media. No doubt it helped that Max Headroom was premiering on Channel 4, a station of the later public media movement that aimed to provide an outlet for experimental, noncommercial content.

Penn & Teller perform magic on a Cinemax-only variety show concurrent to the 1987 ABC Max Headroom series.

Bishop notes that even after Max Headroom went on to be adopted as an MTV host and cyberpunk spokeshead for Coca-Cola commercials, and was appropriated to become U.S. network televisions very first cyberpunk series, the creative team employed guerrilla tactics with late scripts and copious ad-libbing at ABC to make sure edgy, countercultural satire about the media industry was still getting through. In fact, ever since Max Headroom had won a BAFTA for graphics in 1986, the joke had been on the larger industry as well, as it had all been a hack, a proud fake that used essentially no computer graphics to gain the critical acclaim. The fact that Max Headroom was hackwork didnt matter so much as achieving the aesthetic cyberpunk aspiration or maybe it did; amidst great commercial success, actor Matt Frewer describes the Max Headroom creative teams infiltration campaign of mainstream media as aspiring to get away with things. It likely didnt help pro-industry morale that the lead creators had been pushed out amidst lawyer battles as the wildly popular franchise moved to ABC, and that the show was soon given a graveyard slot.

The balance Max Headroom struck between a cyberpunk ethos and the massive budgets, corporate controls, and ratings obsessions of network media would not last long. Bishops oral history of the show tells of a swift downfall when the show was cancelled in mid-production of the second season. Perhaps the boundary pushing became vulnerable and public interest fell having sensed the obsolescence in Max Headrooms corporate integration, its multimillion-dollar expense account used to recreate props that wed found in skips and . . . in old junk shops and things (as original co-creator Annabel Jankel recalled). Perhaps the audiences attracted to big-budget productions didnt get it in the intersection where cult counterculture and corporate media had crossed the streams. Ultimately, the proud cyberpunk fake had become a commercial phony to network media, succumbing to a wider cultural phenomenon of cyberpunk and punk that Heuser calls fatal appropria[tion].

80s Caf scene in Back to the Future II

Sell-out is too strong a term. Pioneering analog-to-digital cyberpunk media of the 80s like Shatter and Max Headroom may have eventually appeared to fail in the ways they separated the cybersoul from commercial corpus and the franchise from founding vision, but this is because, as cyberpunk scholar Takayuki Tatsumi points out, the age of technoconsumerism and its global instabilities especially those perceived in the economic rise of 1980s Japan had already arrived. However globalizing media processes helped to popularize avant-garde art and social critique, it also chewed up a body of creatives that public structures like Channel 4 had aimed to support by prioritizing independent producers. The scenario highlights cyberpunks cyberlibertarian streak as a failed fantasy of freedom, one still unable to reconcile the weak position of cognitive and digital labor. Yet it also reminds us that, as with Orson Welless struggles to fund his work, the microhistories of cultural producers may have been altogether different if crowdsourcing platforms had been available to tip the balance of fatal appropriation. The question may be a timeless one: Can the technology that enslaves also liberate?

Back to the Future IIs version of 1985 is worth rewatching just to revisit a constellation of cutting-edge Max Headroom-style icons encapsulated in a deflating sense of the decades obsolescence. In the film, these animations play on tvs that no longer serve music videos or celebrity interviews, but instead service food orders in a sad 80s Nostalgia Cafe. This tired, commoditized cyberpunk is drained not only of its radical roots, but also of its appropriated commercial glamour. In a hilariously cutting scene, AI versions of Reagan and the Ayatollah battle furiously in cyberspace over screen control for Martys Pepsi (notice, not Coca-Cola) product placement order. Its politics and rapid technocultural overturn as usual, and why should the hypermediated icons of MTV fare any differently? Appearing two years after the cancellation of the Max Headroom series, this franchise cameo of sorts in Back to the Future II signals an already palpable and hungry, but bitingly sarcastic, contemporary nostalgia for itself a nostalgia for the techno-utopian zeitgeist of 80s counterculture that commercialism had gobbled up and cast aside by 1989.

Was this signaling intentional, or part of a machine built on metafictionality teasing another new and upcoming next best thing? Interestingly enough, the 80s nostalgia cafe pokes fun at a film franchise steeped in its own decade of hypermediated nostalgia, from cyberpunk film noir, to the classic Westerns that Mark Fisher saw recycled in Star Wars, to the postwar romanticism of Back to the Future itself. Consider the way the title graphics for Back to the Future recall those of The Stunt Man, a 1980 film starring Peter OToole that captured a feverish paranoia of the pervasive conflation between media image and reality, exacted through the gods eye control of the Hollywood director. Takayuki Tatsumi similarly identified this metafictional power of media circulation in the 1979 film Apocalypse Now!, which echoed the real-life entanglement between news coverage of Vietnam and the influence of Hollywood war movie nostalgia. On to the next umpteenth Jaws sequel in Back to the Futures future of 1989, then (a reference made all in good jest, as Spielberg was Zemeckis mentor and friend).

In this sense, The Future in Back to the Future functions as a film candidate of the slipstream genre, something between mainstream and science fiction that William Gibson described as works that play with representational conventions . . . not creat[ing] new worlds but quot[ing] them often out of context . . . turning them against themselves a commercial-countercultural War of the Worlds, indeed. Metafiction, as Cory Doctorow explains, is just one of the estrange[ment] tools in the arsenal of slipstream. Between MTV and arcade, these filmic cyberpunk quotations of the Mainstream of Recent 80s Past also mark the future year 2015 in Back to the Future as, in fact, a historical looking back, a virtual space for pondering what the heck had already gone wrong with their generations popularized counterculture, rather than a speculative prediction waiting for us to weigh in on for accuracys sake. And it does so successfully in a very tenuous space that Zemeckis continually asserts a right to occupy, in the space between the avant and the popular, before the demise into the consumer culture archive.

Nostalgia, a product of longingly looking back with a sense of present social loss or decline, comes to us as a fiction, the totalizing, dreamy flattening of a real and complex past that fails to capture all the ironies, the holes and inconsistencies, and the dreams deferred of that time period. Yet I suspect that viewers of Back to the Future II caught the cyberpunk joke, the hack, the proud fake of a disillusioned nostalgia, well recognizing the commodity failure of their not-yet-fully-realized counterculture of 1985 before its technofruition or maybe just understanding from the mainstream that it was all a great, big commercial phony after all. Perhaps the saddest, most dystopian thing about Back to the Future II is that the only counterculture cyberpunks left to be found are a bunch of annoying rich kids, sporting fetishized high-tech gizmos, and hanging around at a shopping plaza. Thats something for us all to keep in mind as we stop what were doing to run out and buy that new iPhone to replace that boring old rose gold one, of course.

Francis Ford Coppolas cameo in his own film, Apocalypse Now!

SF writer Samuel Delaney argued in his Black to the Future interview with Mark Dery that cyberpunks aspirations to subvert the official uses of media and technology could only fall short over time as a pervasive misreading of an interim period of urban technoculture. As our 20th-century relationships to the material hardware and inner workings of technology grew increasingly remote, our technology [became] more and more like magic; The spells and incantations of hacking and urban bricolage across consumer stuff could never amount to transformative agency in the production and flow of technological culture. Neither could cyberpunk maintain the naivete of ironic anger toward this power imbalance implied in William Gibsons infamous phrase The street finds its own use for things. The reality, for Delaney, was that cyberpunks DIY ethos could neither get inside the portable black boxes of its time, nor the white boxes of the computer hacker class.

The late Mark Fisher has pointed out in popular music how a decrease in access to viable cultural production has actually influenced nostalgic traces of lost futures in 21st-century music music that only sounds new because it emulates the still-possible sense of the future in the old. Derived from Derridas hauntology of media, these are the aesthetic traces of failed futures futures that, in fact, no longer feel like they could ever arrive; The future is no longer what it was. Perhaps this is why recurrent cyberpunk media like Cyberpunk 2077 invites repetitive criticisms of the genres romanticized sociocultural as well as stylistic stasis. And so we find ourselves returning again and again to this historical moment in global medias simultaneous emergent possibility and dystopian impossibility as if this time, enhanced with the latest graphics and social contexts, we might finally find that peripheral exit from its trajectory. Yet Martys kind of hyperactive, on-the-fly ingenuity, hopeful as it is of an unassimilable emerging creative class within the cyberpunk moment, seems as much a romanticism of something we havent reached. As Samuel Delaney points out, without romanticism we might not have the initiative to explore whats on the other side of anything. Somewhere amidst the nostalgia, Im sure, is the leakage of an updating social theory.

Overall, Delaney has made the case that science fiction is most effective when its not at the center of anything. Its unclear whether he meant science fiction as a social forum, art form, or vehicle for the speculative; The trouble with the center is that it allows no room for moving. From Zemeckiss quotations of the Safety Last! clock scene in the original and Spielbergs Jaws in the sequel, to the hacking of his own films iconic scenes through innovative technology, perhaps the Back to the Future franchise most asserted one thing in the face of fatal appropriation flops and rapid commodity turnover: the influence of the cultural archive, and the power of creative acts to endure and that the best part of the joke, the hack, is when youre in on it, of course.

The shark may always still look fake in the emergent technology of the future, but theres nothing quite like striving to create something new in this world.

This Time Its REALLY, REALLY personal.

* * *

Bibliography

Bishop, Bryan. n.d. The Definitive Oral History of 1980s Digital Icon Max Headroom. The Verge. Accessed January 7, 2021. https://www.theverge.com/2015/4/2/8285139/max-headroom-oral-history-80s-cyberpunk-interview.

Bonner, Frances. 1992. Separate Development: Cyberpunk in Film and TV. In Fiction 2000: Cyberpunk and the Future of Narrative, by Eds. George Slusser and Tom Shippey. University of Georgia.

Dery, Mark. 1994. Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose. In Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture, Ed. Mark Dery. Duke University Press.

Doctorow, Cory. 2006. Slipstream Science Fiction Anthology Defies Genre Conventions. BoingBoing, June 14.

Ehrlich, David. 2015. Back to the Future Part II: Welcome to the Present. Rolling Stone, October 21. https://www.rollingstone.com/movies/movie-news/back-to-the-future-part-ii-welcome-to-the-present-191700/.

Fisher, Mark. 2012. Star Wars Was a Sell-out from the Start. The Guardian, November 1.

Fisher, Mark. Vol. 66, No. 1, Fall 2012. What Is Hauntology? Film Quarterly, 16-24.

Gerovitch, Slava. 2002. From Newspeak to Cyberspeak. MIT Press.

Gillis, Peter andMike Saenz. 2006.Shatter. A i T/Planet Lar.

Hansen, Miriam. No. 56, 1992. Mass Culture as Hieroglyphic Writing: Adorno, Derrida, Kracauer. New German Critique43-73.

Heuser, Sabine. 2003. Virtual Geographies: Cyberpunk at the Intersection of the Postmodern and Science Fiction. Rodopi.

Hobson, Dorothy. 2008. Channel 4: The Early Years and the Jeremy Isaacs Legacy. I. B. Tauris.

Holland, Norman. n.d. Richard Rush, The Stunt Man (1980). A Sharper Focus.Accessed January 14, 2021.https://www.asharperfocus.com/Stunt.html.

LeGuin, Ursula K. n.d. A Rant About Technology. Ursula LeGuin Archive. Accessed January 7, 2020. http://www.ursulakleguinarchive.com/Note-Technology.html.

Mead, Rebecca. 2015. The Semiotics of Rose Gold. The New Yorker, September 14. Accessed January 7, 2020. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-semiotics-of-rose-gold.

Saenz, Mike and Peter B. Gillis. 1986.Shatter, No. 2. First Comics.

Tatsumi, Takayuki. 2006. Full Metal Apache: Transactions Between Cyberpunk Japan and Avant-Pop America. Duke University Press.

Toffler, Alvin. 1970. Future Shock. Random House.

Umpleby, Stuart. 1982; revised 2000. Definitions of Cybernetics. American Society for Cybernetics. Accessed January 8, 2021. https://asc-cybernetics.org/definitions/.

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A Brief History of Slip and Failure: Cyberpunk and the Headroom for Nostalgia in Back to the Future - Bright Lights Film Journal

Given the recent racism-related discourse permeating the Star Wars fandom, it may come as a shock to many that Lucasfilm and Disney once stood against all stripes of racism.

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As first reported by Itchy Bacca of Disney Star Wars Is Dumb, now-former Disney Animation Studios employee Justin Garrison placed a since-deleted ad for a non-white, non-male engineering manager to his personal Twitter in December of 2019.

Not that white males cant do a great job, Garrison said in a similarly-deleted follow-up tweet. We all do better work when we can feel safe and have more diverse opinions and backgrounds.

In late 2020, Garrison revealed how certain people on twitter didnt take kindly to that and said the company was racist for not hiring white dudes and that his impromptu classified ad had sparked a wave of complaints directed towards Disney, which eventually led the company to confront the engineer regarding his apparently professed beliefs.

[Disney] suspended me for 3 weeks, recalled Garrison. Had a 2+ month investigation, threatened me with legal action for various things, asked me about tweets from years ago, and my manager told me I should really question if Im racist or not because what I did was racist and illegal.

Garrison further explained that he was very active in trying to get diverse people in our pipelines and even successfully hired one.

He then noted, My reciter told me I brought in more leads than any other source. HR wanted screenshots and chat logs from everyone I ever talked to about our positions.

In the end, Garrison revealed, Disney HR didnt find anything wrong and gave me a non punishment, which he described as being prevented from doing things that were never actually a part of his regular job activities.

Shortly after the conclusion of the investigation, Garrison left Disney after receiving an offer somewhere else.

Garrison then described how the investigation had led him to question whether he was in the wrong,

He stated that he couldnt put words to what I was doing until I read anti-racist and realized it was exactly what I was trying to do.

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The book in question, How to Be an Anti-Racist by Ibram X. Kendi, discusses how certain policies, ideas, and actions should be dismantled in support of being anti-racist, while conversely claiming that supporters of these policies, ideas, and actions are themselves committing an act of racism.

In fact, Kendi argues that racism can be any form of inaction on policies and ideas as well, a mentality described as if someone is not actively supporting a cause, they are against it.

Further, Kendi believes that inaction and/or silence regarding a given injustice is just about as evil as supporting it.

Thus, it would appear that Kendis book led Garrison to believe that his attempt to diversify Disneys hiring process was a justified and righteous cause, not to mention one which would eventually lead to bigger and more well-paying opportunities elsewhere.

Related: Star Wars And Lucasfilm Officially Support Calling All White People Racist

It is important to note that Garrison is a former employee of Disney, with his Linkedin profile noting that he had served as one of Disneys Senior System Engineers for nearly 5 years between May 2014 and Nov 2018.

While Garrison faced consequences, if they could be called that, for his recruitment post, such an incident would have garnered a very different response in the current post-2016 environment.

In recent years, audiences have come to hear numerous creators actively profess their intent to run various companies according to social justice ideologies, such as New Gods director Ava Duverney, who justified potential anti-white discrimination by stating that bias can go both ways.

Others would also latch on to the anti-racist movement and try to buck the system by overcompensating, as exemplified by Seth Rogens declaration that he was just actively trying to make less things starring white people.

So thats how Ive been trying to deal with it, Rogen explained, is just to actively take as they would say, anti-racist measures to assure that some work is doing done to acknowledge that Black people are very marginalized in American society.

The list goes on. Thor: Ragnarok and Avengers: Endgame star Tessa Thompson revealed that she didnt want to work with a bunch of white people on set. A number of professional productions have admitted to actively looking to pay less to white actors, while simultaneously requiring them to undergo forced anti-racism training.

But considering the lackadaisical method in which Disney moves on statements by Justina Ireland, the recent debacle with Krystina Arielle and her history of disparaging white people, and Star Wars official endorsement of such behavior, it seems Garrison might have a better environment to enact his Anti-racist hiring practices in the zeitgeist of 2021.

What do you make of Disneys approach to employment? Sound off in the comments below or lets talk about it on social media!

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Report: Disney Management Once Took Action Against Perceived Racist Hiring Practices - Bounding Into Comics

In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, it was announced that VH1 had cut its ties with the production company Big Fish Entertainment.

Following the success of Love & Hip Hop: New York in 2011, it wasnt long before VH1 was willing to see whether a spin-off series would perform just as well, which later brought about the Atlanta edition in June 2012 starring the likes of Mimi Faust, Joseline Hernandez, and Stevie J.

It turned out that the latter show proved to be more popular with fans, with ratings at one point surpassing 3.5 million viewers per week, consequently giving producers the idea to produce another string of spin-offs: Hollywood in 2014 and Miami in 2018.

But in June 2020, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, it was announced that VH1 had cut its ties with the production company Big Fish Entertainment, leading many people to believe that the LHH franchise -- once starring rap superstar Cardi B -- could potentially be over but does it still stand a chance of coming back?

Things remain up in the air about the franchises future following the news that VH1 and Big Fish Entertainment are no longer in business together.

VH1, which is owned by ViacomCBS, announced in a statement that its relationship with the production firm had come to an end, meaning that all of its shows produced by the company are pretty much over and done with.

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We have decided to end our relationship with Big Fish Entertainment and will be producing our shows in house at this time, the statement read. "We thank Big Fish for their past contributions and wish them the best.

According to sources for The Hollywood Reporter, a decision to cut ties with Big Fish came about following the controversy concerning its A&E show, Live PD, which raised a lot of eyebrows and nationwide protests over its handling of footage from a traffic chase in March 2019 which resulted in the death of Javier Ambler.

While the chase was never shown on TV, the story in itself drew enough attention for viewers to ask those whod been watching the show to boycott the series.

In the midst of the Black Live Matter movement, while ViacomCBS isnt responsible for other shows that Big Fish producers on other networks, the scandal was big enough for the company to know that cutting ties with the company was probably the wisest decision they couldve made.

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To make matters worse, however, Big Fish also produced VH1s Black Ink Crew, meaning that two of the networks biggest franchises were wiped after a decision was made not to move ahead with new seasons.

In October 2020, however, executive producer and the shows creator Mona Scott-Young spoke out about the situation concerning Big Fish and ViacomCBS, admitting that while there had been a lot of back and forth between both firms regarding the future of two of its franchises, there was still a chance that all of the Love & Hip Hop shows, including New York, would be returning.

Its believed that Viacom has struck a deal to take over production of the aforementioned reality shows, which Young appeared to confirm in her interview.

The network has made a decision to take those productions in-house, so they have been gearing up and backing up in a way that will allow for them to do that, she said.

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It wont change my role in the way that I work with them but there is a process now thats taking place, and also of course, the caution, the precautions that need to be taken with figuring out how to reimagine a docuseries and do it while adhering to safety protocols and finding a different way of making the show.

Young did stress that while she wasnt sure whether all spin-offs would be coming back taking production costs into account having seen how popular the shows have been for VH1 and its roster of shows to follow, the TV mogul and longtime manager of rapper Missy Elliott says she sees no reason why the entire franchise wouldnt return as a whole.

I kind of embrace the challenge and see it as a new frontier to be conquered, she continued. The beauty of it is each city has managed to establish its own fan base and has its own place in the zeitgeist and with the fans, and, of course my hope is that all four cities come back, there has been nothing to indicate otherwise."

They all have fared really well for the network in terms of ratings and theyve been the cornerstone of the programming there so I dont see that changing.

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Maurice Cassidy is an entertainment writer with a BA in Media and an MA in Film Production obtained at the New York Film Academy. He loves keeping up with all pop culture news and Hollywood gossip, and despite being born and raised in Germany, Maurice is always up to date with his favorite US celebrities and shows, including Love & Hip Hop and Jersey Shore Family Vacation. His favorite documentary is The Defiant Ones on Netflix.

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Has The Love And Hip Hop Franchise Been Canceled For Good? - TheThings