steampunk vs electroclash vs cyberpunk
“From 2001 to 2004, for example, there was a small but influential movement in the electronic underground music scene that successfully fused a punk attitude with science-fiction aesthetics. This movement, known as Electroclash had a very different dystopian worldview than that of Gibson: these artists saw the future world as being ruled by celebrity worship, drug culture, and deviant sexuality, and criticized the pop culture they simultaneously saw as worthy of celebration and denigration through highly irreverent and ironic music and performance pieces. These artists “strip popular music [and culture] down to what they perceive as its true essence (sex, money, and looking good), and then reproduce it using framing devices that indicate ironic distance,” (Luvaas 176). This movement too, though, went through it’s cycle of resistance and diffusion, and the clashing aesthetics of a sleazy celebrity underground and our future post-apocalypse has been taken up by pop artists like Rihanna, Beyonce, Madonna, and most recently and most explicitly, Lady Gaga. Other musical movements that combine electronic instrumentation and punk attitude or aesthetics (digital hardcore, Nintendo-core, 8bit punk, chip tune, to name a few) have failed to produce a unified style or thematic unity in the same way that Cyberpunk or Electroclash had.
Other offshoots of fantasy/fiction literature that have taken up the “punk” moniker include Steampunk, Clockpunk, Stitchpunk, and Splatterpunk. While it is possible to read some of these stories as having the anti-authoritarian themes, each label is becoming much more closely associated with an object style rather than a fully developed aesthetic or movement. One critic scathingly comments:
Steampunking, with its commerce driven, faddish re-skinning of their own history, is closer to Disney than punk or sci-fi. A laptop styled like a Eastlake sideboard is merely a threat of bad taste, not a threatening reaction to massive social and economic disenfranchisement. In its essence Steampunk seems suburban in its attitude: nostalgic for an imagined, non-existent past, politically quietist, and culturally insular hidden behind cul-de-sacs of carefully styled anachronisms that let in no chaos or ferment. (Nakamura)
Lately, Steampunk is becoming increasingly mainstream, and the themes of Steampunk stories are reflecting this. The Final Fantasy series of videogames, which has long been a staple of Steampunk aesthetics, is less focused on groups of rag-tag eco-terrorist teenagers fighting against an authoritarian empire or corporation and more about adventuring for the sake of it. The series’ leanings toward MMORPG is evidence of this. The cyberpunks had a manifesto, and cyberpunk literature had an underlying subversive agenda, and while these movements or styles may have taken the “punk,” from cyberpunk, they may have done so in name alone.
To use the term cyberpunk now feels a bit dated. If we can criticize Steampunk for its “suburban” dreams, we can almost say the same of cyberpunk: it now comes off as a sort of angst about a future that was, and never will be, actually realized.”
From a paper I did on magical realism and cyberpunk
-eric
