Future Rocker: BILLY IDOL'S SHOCK TO THE SYSTEM (1993) inspired by TETSUO: THE IRON MAN (1989)

TOTALLY RECALLING BRITISH ROCKER BILLY IDOL'S CYBERPUNK PHASE

Directed by cult sci-fi / horror director Brett Leonard ( The Lawnmower Man / Virtuosity ), the Billy Idol promo is both a synchronous mix of real-world events and an anticipation of a tech-based dystopia that predicts the anarchic Los Angeles of the 2020s.

/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

The opening scene of SHOCK TO THE SYSTEM promo video (from the 1993 album Cyberpunk) is an obvious reference to the brutal beating of Los Angeles citizen Rodney King by the LA police. The incident had been caught on camera, and resulted in world-wide condemnation of the LAPD's tactics and abysmal community relations (King was African American and the incident brought the LAPD's institutional racism under intense scrutiny). In a highly-publicised court case, the officers involved were acquitted, sparking six days of violent unrest, causing over two-thousand injuries and 63 deaths. Scenes of shotgun-toting Koreans guarding their storefronts, and truck drivers being dragged from their cabs, were broadcast all around the world as the neighbourhoods burned.

Above: Japanese album cover for CYBERPUNK. An example of early Photoshop glitch art.

While it may seem obvious now that breakthroughs in compact tech such as hand-held movie cameras would revolutionize daily life and transform regular people into vérité filmmakers and citizen reporters, at the time this was still somewhat of a novelty - and perhaps, to authoritarian regimes around the world - not a beneficial one (Kathryn Bigelow's 1995 future-noir Strange Days is a good depiction of when tech goes horribly wrong).

With voyeurism, extortion, narcissism and violence now part of our daily media consumption in the Twenty-First Century, early cynics might have been proved right.

As well as the real-world events, the promo echoes the contemporaneous Cyberpunk literary movement, and was seen against a backdrop of big studio films such as Paul Verhoeven's Robocop (1987) and Total Recall (1990), as well as the more 'body horror' output of cult director David Cronenberg's Videodrome (1983).

Despite all these cross-pollinating influences, what seems to have been forgotten (or deliberately ignored) is that Shock To The System owes its entire central idea - that of the protagonist transforming into a chaotic cybernetic lifeform - to the notorious live action Japanese movie Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989).

/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

TETSUO: THE IRON MAN - TRAILER

/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

Tetsuo - in the eyes of Western audiences - benefitted from being adjacent to the blockbuster Japanese anime, Akira (1988), which preceded it. Though unrelated, both coincidentally feature a character named Tetsuo who undergoes a hideous series of mutations.

Directed by innovative and transgressive filmmaker Shinya Tsukamoto, Tetsuo: The Iron Man, and its sequels Tetsuo II: Body Hammer (1992), and Tetsuo: The Bullet Man (2010), both repelled and enthralled VHS collectors and arthouse movie-goers alike, with its highly kinetic mix of vertiginous photography, stop-motion animation, visceral violence and pounding industrial music.

British punk rocker Billy Idol, then living in LA, was voraciously absorbing Cyberpunk culture, and would definitely have been aware of Tsukamoto's film and been influenced by it.

/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

TETSUO II: BODY HAMMER - TRAILER

/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

Ultimately Billy Idol's entry into the Brave New Nineties didn't exactly pan out as planned. The Cyberpunk album, which had been assembled on producer Trevor Rabin's Macintosh-based home studio using an early iteration of Pro-Tools, failed to chart in America, but faired more decently in Europe. Although attempting to look and sound futuristic, edgy and confrontational, Billy became yet another Eighties rocker whose career was put on hold by the advent of corporate Grunge Rock. Plus, a serious motorbike accident didn't exactly help, either.

Above: Sleeve art for Billy Idol's Shock To The System 7'' UK single.

In terms of themes and content, perhaps if they were aware of these disparate influences, a sensitive resident of the Twenty-First Century may be offended by the referencing of the Rodney King incident, or of Shinya Tsukamoto's violent and controversial imagery.

Luckily in the Nineties, the vast majority of the audience were still able to accept speculative and 'what-if' concepts in good faith, and not look to score social points by dishonestly taking wild and antisocial portrayals of fictional characters and superimposing those onto the character of the creators.

Above: SHOCKUMENTARY VHS cover art.

Ultimately, despite the album's poor reception, Cyberpunk is notable in its use of electronic media in marketing, as Billy Idol was an early adopter of email as a way to facilitate a more direct contact with fans, and the hard copy of the CD also included bonus multimedia content written onto the disk. Both of these anticipated trends that would become common in music sales well into the Noughties.

It would take several years and the invention of new technology like Youtube to bring Billy to the attention of a whole new generation of fans. They probably won't see the divide between Billy's 'classic' sound, and the more 'experimental' sound of Cyberpunk, they'll enjoy both on their own terms. Perhaps they'll also research the influences and events that made the album happen, and discover that Shinya Tsukamoto's disturbing filmmaking was once something you might see at the local multiplex on 'art cinema night.'

Creators have benefited from a technology becoming ever more sophisticated and affordable, ultimately bringing us closer to the realities depicted in William Gibson's dystopian novels Neuromancer and Count Zero, prophetic books that established 'Cyberpunk' as an endlessly imitated subgenre for years to come.

/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

TETSUO II: BODY HAMMER - TRAILER

/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

TETSUO III: THE BULLET MAN - TRAILER