Originally this was going to be a “Favorite records of the decade/10 Songs” entry but now it’s not. That format is probably dead but there are definitely a few of the entries that are going to get re-assessed/refit as full essays. )

Deltron 3030 ( 2000 – reissued 2008)

Damon Albarn’s unmistakable english voice drones in, exhausted. “It’s the year  3030, and here at the Corporate Institutional Bank of Time we find ourselves reflecting… finding out… that in fact… we came back… we were always coming back”. Albarn sounds so perfect as an agent of  some sort of time-directorate, on the verge of collapse, sounding bored as he recites the introductory paragraph of a great science fiction novel. It’s a move that calls back to David Bowie’s “Future Legend” at the start of Diamond Dogs – not the Bowie album you’d expect to hear referenced in 2000, but a perfect fit. Dogs is a nasty, almost unintelligible concept record thats almost a prequel to 1984 by way of William S Burroughs. It’s about a world that needs Big Brother to save it, and about punk five years to early, it’s really hard to nail down.

Deltron 3030 is often thought of as a sequel to Dr. Octagon. Dan the Automator’s other scifi opus Dr. Octagonecolegyst just starts off with porno samples – and then quickly glides into Kool Keith in charismatic madman mode named. “3030″ even has a similar title to Octagon’s opener “3000″, but the big difference here is scope. Almost every aspect of Octagon is lyrically-based to evoke a debauched future, for better or worse. This time, Automator has set forth a challenge to himself to evoke an entire universe. Burroughs would probably prefer Keith’s raps about psychedelic vaginal warts – but Jack Kirby and Moebius could probably draw the world laid down here, something you can’t say for Octagon.

Starting off with an immediately mythologizing turn from Albarn, then simultaneous evocation of Rocket-Age space travel and a Vangelis Blade Runner sample, both badly distorted, until cascades of strings and our narrator introduces himself. Deltron Zero – the character played by Del the Funkee Homosapien – calls himself a hero right off and explains the etymology of “Neuromancer”. You have to understand, I heard this album for the first time when I was sixteen. I had just discovered DJ Shadow, hell rap production in general, and I was ether just done with or in the middle of  reading Snow Crash. Science fiction was a really big thing for me when I was a teenager – the sardonic, worlds-gonna-burn kind mostly. I was an angry kid, and I got the DK Encyclopedia of Science Fiction for christmas when I was around 12. That book probably had more to do with the development of my tastes than almost everything. I still have it and can see how much I picked-and-choosed from it what I liked – Jules Verne and Akira, Stray Toasters and Galapagos, Ray Bradbury, Stranger in a Strange Land, PKD, Appleseed, Heavy Metal, Total Recall, Metropolis, Brazil. Now, when you grow up and see the bias there. You see that Aasimov is boring, and that it was a really good thing that you couldn’t find Ballard or Disch’s books before you were old enough to have seen porn. All that stuff. I read through it a lot, kind of used it as a checklist for stuff I should keep an eye out for. It wasnt always right and there’s a lot thats been left out, but I don’t think I would have sought out any british tv shows from the 60s without it. I don’t know if I was into sf for the escapist impulse that a lot of kids had – I was attracted to the more difficult stuff a little earlier than I should have been, and that probably was as much a part of my shitty childhood as religion, my financial status, and family issues. Scifi was something a little more substantial than Batman, a little more comitted to going out dark. Blade Runner, in the eyes of a 11 year old, ends with the bad guy winning, and then dying an honorable death. The inhuman murdering monster is the one you cry for, not the cop. On simplest terms, moral ambiguity is a hard thing to get your head around at that age.

When I first heard this album, I was transitioning between schools and was probably in my second year of discovering good music – this is one of the first albums someone had burned a copy for me, come to think of it (along with Homegenic, Endtroducing, Dummy, Internal Wrangler, Loveless, Agaetis Bryjun, and Since I Left You). This was the year where I finally knew my big touchstones – Radiohead, Beastie Boys, Nine Inch Nails, Beck, at the time Nirvana – but I hadn’t heard the Pixies yet. And Jared and I had just become friends – talking about X-Men comics neither of us read anymore and music videos (also at this time we were both pretty hardcore about being comics artists and I carried How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way around) – and he had turned me onto Neuromancer, which turned my head around a little. The first time. The second time a couple years later hit me ten thousand times harder. I was the one who grabbed Snow Crash first – originally I liked it better, which is kind of fucked up. The references to other cyberpunk fiction went over my head, but the YT stuff struck home. And in the first of many similarities to Snow Crash, it has the main character come right out in the beginning and call himself “Hiro Protagonist”. Snow Crash is a weird book – it’s kind of geek checklist wish fulfillment on one hand and a book about ideas being used as weapons (mainly religion and language) at the same time. The pan-ethnic cast, the hacker samurai, the anime supervillain, the intelligent robokilldogs, the concert (which pretty much describes a Atari Teenage Riot/Wu Tang in Japan shows five years too early), the metaverse, the corporatised mob – that stuff is all a little too tuned to be cool, a little too artificial. But once you get into it the cool stuff that makes you giggle you’re reading a book about religion, politics, language, technology, and a there’s a pretty great platonic man/woman friendship in there that you really don’t get to read about EVER in something like this. That’s kind of what “3030″ is like: Del’s lyrics for the entire album were written and recorded over two weeks, and they are just dripping with a knowledge of science fiction of the past 100 years. The more you know about this crap – and at the time I probably knew it more intimately than I do now – the more you know, the more sense it makes. But that’s the surface reading – while Nueromancer, Ghost in the Shell, mech-soldiers, bioforms, stim-pacs, Neo-Tokyo, Metropolis – it’s all just reference points. It’s coded language so Del can talk about the world today. It’s legitimate science fiction in the tradition of everything Del’s talking about. Which is probably why it hit me so hard and still does. Science fiction should inherently be a form of social commentary, but because of it’s genre roots, it more often than not can do so without becoming preachy bullshit. Here’s what Del thinks about the commodification of rap music, only it has robots. Automator and Koala have found the perfect base – their manipulation of William Sheller’s Introit goes from interesting prog-psych oddity to a film score to the apocalypse.

The weird mechanical sound of “Things You Can Do”, all woodwinds, hi-hat, music box clicks and sped-up Just Blaze-style vocal sample, is  what makes it amazing. Especially as Del uses its boxed-in clockwork setting to talk about destroying technology “Never let a computer tell me shit!”. Of course, even that is while he shows a scary adeptness with all kinds of sci-fi tech references (“meet the Armorines!”). The track is really just a battle-rap using a very specific vocabulary – this is probably the first point on the album that you realize that as much as Deltron is talking up Automator, that the album is clearly a struggle between the two of them. It’s words versus music, with Kid Koala here to ride out on the breaks when it reaches stalemate. “Positive Contact” on the other hand is straight Transmetropolitian shit – all shuffling beats and throbbing pulses. Of course it segues into “St. Catherine St.”, the weird Metal Hurlant sidepanel of dudes arguing in the street. Because even though Del doesn’t spend the track going off about a futuristic city/world/etc – the beat describes it perfectly. I can see huge buildings, and neon-looking sunset from pollution, and the track for the most part is Del giving a play-by-play of his day as he crashes his ship, surfs the net, and uses a transporter to fuck around and fight the entire cosmos, all while bragging about his ceramic shielding and his rapping skills.

“Global Controls will have to be imposed, and a world governing body will be created to enforce them. Crises precipitate change.”

“Virus” is the most predictive song on the album, the most scientifictional. It’s Del talking about the goddamn Bush years, about Cheney, Blackwater, Enron, the Patriot Act, globalization, all of it. In 2000, before it all happened. He sees it coming and, V for Vendetta style (I always imagined that this song is delivered in the same manner as V’s speech to humanity. Del’s in a suit on every computer, explaining that they’re fucked) he decides to burn it all down. “Human rights coming in hundredth place”. Maybe it’s the last gasp of 90s anarchist/ conspiracy nutjob impulse that gave us The Invisibles and the X-Files, but a few years on there’s a lot more teeth in “Virus” than there was when it dropped. On top of that “Upgrade” is the opposite, saying the only way out of this is digital-assisted advancement of intelligence. It’s about bodymodding, cybernetic shit. My hacked brain can change the world, my hypothalmus is operating at 90%, but coca-cola doesn’t taste the same anymore.

End of Part One.