The sound of the sparkling, crystalline cyberpunk utopia that never arrived, but that we all dreamt of in the 90s
As a child of the 80s and 90s, I grew up during a time when we still believed that technology would save us. The Internet was brand new. Electronic music became popular enough that raves became a thing. And while we had plenty of disillusionment and pre-millennium tension: worries about nuclear warfare, Y2K, global warming, these things were all still abstract enough that we could actually envision a positive outcome for the human race. It was a heady time to be sure.
Many of us who were in the rave scene back then saw ourselves as optimists, and many of us within that number were certainly futurists. We survived Cold War paranoia, saw the birth of the Personal Computer and The Internet, we read William Gibson, we watched Star Trek: The Next Generation and Re:Boot on TV, saw The Lawnmower Man, Hackers, and The Matrix in movie theatres, and played Sega Saturn, PlayStation, and N64 in our parents’ basements. We were the first generation to experience Virtual Reality, to envision a world beyond the physical; a crystalline, phong-shaded, digital utopia where we could temporarily cast off the fetters of primitive meatspace and become something more.
This playlist attempts to capture that techno-optimist vision of a future that never came, like a latter-day Jetsons, but replace the Raygun Gothic flying cars with ISDN subscriber lines, rollerblades, MDMA, squonky, squeaky, acid-y TB-303 basslines, and TR-808 drum loops played back at 120+ Beats Per Minute. So pull on your Jnco jeans and ski goggles, let the black lights shine and the fluoro-paint blaze, as you dance and groove in remembrance of a dead future we were never allowed to have.