Towards a theory of Cyberfunk

No more real genres

April O’Neill reveals the heart of a true journalist over the sound of the future.

People who complain about our “obsession with the past” obscure that past. No idea is original—the past is a part of all of us. An artist cannot intentionally create something new; they create things, and sometimes something new comes out of it. But the tools they’re all using are old. To tell a musician he’s ‘obsessed with the past’ because he samples is like telling an artist they’re obsessed with shapes. The past is the formal building block of art in the present.

So why does it bug us so much when something feels “lazily” sampled, or cynically re-contextualized? I enjoyed the Netflix series Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, which I watched on Max Read’s recommendation, but I found myself cringing in its use of Franz Ferdinand opening theme music. I’m as open as anyone to the indie sleaze gestalt, but this just felt wrong. All of my associations with a cyberpunk aesthetic are no more valid per se. But this was yet another example—like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles using dad-rap classic “Can I Kick It?” in the new movie trailer—of the creative prestige cul-de-sac in which American culture has found itself of late, incapable and oblivious to the sensitive tonal resonances of popular art. This clumsiness is too-frequently ascribed the characteristics of old head bias, but I would contend it has more to do with the calcified takes and incurious opinions of people who need the shifting, contextual nature of life to be stable and static.

Over the last three years or so, I’ve become heavily drawn to what I’d call an anti-sound, one which sits at the nexus of several different genres from a brief era in music history (roughly 1982-1987, with some music extending on either side), when technology dramatically altered the sound of popular music. By anti-sound, I mean that it is much easier to define by what it isn’t—disco, techno, R&B, Miami bass, house, post-punk, “boogie,” “Planet Rock”-style electro, freestyle, vaporwave, city pop, —than what it is. Particularly because its window of creative interest—roughly the era 1982-1987, with a few years on either side—have been pretty thoroughly reassessed and revisited. Though not entirely.

After this period, the 1990s—when I was a child and teenager—became an era of overcorrection, of retrenchment, as the sound of authenticity—of “organic” and “craft”-oriented production—became the dominant narrative of how music should sound. If it wasn’t organic, it was sleekly futuristic, opulent and optimistic. At the time, I thought I just liked things that were good. But in fact, my taste, as well as that of the vast majority of my generation and beyond, were shaped in reaction to what came before. Only through the glut of sameness some have called retromania, others zombie genres, and what I would characterize as an unfortunate extension of the logics of streaming playlists, did it become apparent how my biases—much like everyone’s else’s—were resting upon wafer-thin rationalizations of the status quo.

Although always spoken of in the language of permanence (“timeless!”), the fluid and contingent nature of authenticity means that sudden dramatic breaks towards the future can make incredible artistic accomplishments into overnight relics. What once sounded like the direction everything is going becomes the ancient past, or forgotten entirely—much as for me, a nine-year-old when The Chronic was released, the soundtrack to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles had a briefly exclusive sensuous power—I was oblivious to its then-dated pastiche, yet nonetheless left it to collect dust as the 1990s shifted mass-audience expectations forever.

As this anti-sound—tics and affects which reflected to me snatches of the past which felt truly lost or marginal, yet epitomized the time of which they were a part—cohered into something substantive, I the concept needed a shorthand name. This fake genre, a meta-genre, needed coherence. For lack of better options, I called it Cyberfunk.

What is Cyberfunk? Cyberfunk is not real. I made it up, Jonathan Frakes voice. But then, no genres are “real.” It is a collection of aesthetically complementary—sometimes intentionally, sometimes inadvertently—songs which capture lost, forgotten, or disrespected aesthetic impulses which had been for many years been characterized as dated, or retained some contemporary influence in limited ways as sub-characteristics of wider cult genres. It is not, however, a celebration of the marginal-for-marginal’s sake; its canon was not always obscure. Some of its songs were hits. But the direction of popular culture relegated Cyberfunk to the dustbin.

To my mind, Cyberfunk still sounds futuristic—but in the dystopian sense. (Not—in contrast with much techno, trance, or millennial pop—a utopian one). Cyberfunk is not smooth, or sleek, or cosmopolitan; it is dependent on empty space, and heavily percussive—dependent on the new drum machine technology popularized in the early 1980s. It is repetitive. It is the “dated” sounds of gated snare drums which take ages to decay, Seinfeld-ian slap bass, canned electric guitar, and big synthesizer approximations of horn sounds. It exists at the intersection of post-disco, pre-sampler hip-hop, the EBM-style funk of continental and Wax Trax-era Industrial, the “commercial” vein of Miami Vice-adjacent mainstream rock, and—unlike disco, house, and techno—retains a stiff, mechanized appreciation for the “backbeat.” It taps forgotten flavors of mid-’80s pop music which has yet to be reassessed—it is not sophisticated, polite, synth pop. Emotionalism tends to be balanced by the aesthetics of “street dubs”—hard drums, dub-like echoes, disruptive use of sound effects. It includes film producers cutting costs on soundtracks thanks to the arrival of keyboards. It includes jazz, funk, R&B, rock, and other artists adapting to controversial new technologies. It is the sound of those artists experimenting with machines.

It sounds like New York, not just in some vague downtown arts scene sense, but also in terms of topography—beats with physical presence, that echo through the space between the colossal brown high rises which most vividly communicate the city’s titanic scale. Cyberfunk rejects the “craft”-conscious precision of increasingly big-budget ‘80s R&B—even that which uses expensive technology—in favor of the ungovernable polyrhythms sparked by dub’s echoing sonic toolkit. It has little interest in the cool of punk, post-punk, or pop punk, although many of its artists were influenced by the glammier side of that genre. Artists who incidentally betray humanity through the imprecision and imperfections of their robot tools. It sounds both “cheap” and massive, all at once. It’s the sound of the future-primitive, of a world in which technological advances hurtle forward, yet services and infrastructure fall apart, humanity living among the overgrown weeds of concrete and steel of a country in decline. It’s a lot like our world.

It’s the sound of an ambiguous future, of skepticism toward the country’s direction, of our treatment of the environment, of Reaganomics and authoritarian moral majorities. There’s a distinct flavor of “subversive edgelord” to some of it, but in a moral majority era when that had yet to realign with right wing politics. It reflects a new creative tonal palette, a whole new slate of ideological, philosophical and aesthetic concerns. It’s mixed with lots of space, open air, to give its blocks of sound more heft, physicality. It rejects disco’s lush, comforting predictability in favor of the clattering and unexpected—of a sudden profusion of widely variable rhythmic templates, disrupting the four-on-the-floor mass-market of the disco era with balkanized drums trends, sampled sound effects intended to jolt the listener from the narcotized safety of reassurance.

Cyberfunk rejects a lot more than disco. Funk is in but soulfulness is out. ‘80s R&B (re-popularized in ‘90s rap, and reassessed outside of it in the ‘00s) overlaps at times, but its emphasis on craft and perfection, particularly in the 1980s, often keeps it at odds. Sometimes CF sounds like electro—but not the pulsing post- “Planet Rock” style which maintained a lineage in Miami, Atlanta, and Brazil. Moreso the snare-forward sound one envisions when you see a drummer in a bicycle cap and hot pink shorts, a pack of cigarettes in his sleeve, playing furiously on flat drum pads. The aesthetic of the Tommy Boy Perfect Beat compilations—hugely influential for decades—are (with a few exceptions) out. The sounds which cohered around electroclash in the late 1990s are out too—the drums don’t hit hard enough, the aesthetic too buzzy, nowhere near muscular enough. CF is electroclash inverted, the busy synthesizers replaced by silence each gesture tries valiantly to fill, the thin drums replaced with huge ones. Vaporwave, with its soft-focus fixation on nostalgia perceived through a VCR, is out too. Too concerned with the numbed, wistful fetal position, the gated drums and ‘dated’ aesthetics lack have all the edges smoothed out, its futurism treated as a novelty of the past. Unrestrained joy is largely out too, with the limited exceptions of the cathartic exuberance of smashing drum pads, and the practical promise of cooperative unity in the face of a world in moral and ethical free-fall.

Unlike the hypnogogic, hauntological chillwaves of the late ‘00s, what tantalizes about this style is not how it refracts the past. Give or take a cartoon soundtrack or ‘80s action flick, I did not experience this music directly; it was fed to me in the staid, detached terms of the “classic hip-hop canon,” or lost in pieces I had to backtrack to uncover for myself. This music is gripping because it feels directly relevant to life in 2023. Only in certain negligible ways is Cyberfunk the sound of the past. Its sound cuts through—it’s engineered to hit frequencies that music today, especially the defanged, digitized mush of 128kbps mp3s and degraded SoundCloud uploads of YouTube videos have smoothed through. Even though I found it reading about the past, it feels like something that simply “fits,”—with AI eliminating the need of “craft” or “technique,” here is music which emphasizes the ways in which human imperfection shapes a “perfect” technology, how the humanness in an era of synthetic textures and buttons you press rather than drums you strike, is what comes through.

This project was conceived primarily as a series of DJ mixes, driven by my curiosity and tastes. It is not a history, not objective, not authoritative of anything but my own interests. It did spark a lot of interest in that history for me. If you’re interested, it will lead you in the direction of history, too. Cyberfunk has its own canon, its own heroes, its own stories and mythic figures. It overlaps with some other canons, but those were getting pretty boring anyway. Volume 1 of Time to Make the World End is sold out. Volume 2 you can listen to here, here, or here.