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The 30th Anniversary of the 90’s Most Underrated Rock Album
The future has imploded into the present
- from the album’s Intro, track #1
When I first heard Billy Idol’s ‘Cyberpunk’, I was on a bus, heading home from high school. It was 1993, and I was a fifteen year-old obsessed with Kiss, Metallica, Ozzy Osbourne, and Dungeons & Dragons. My musical preferences were rooted in passing trends from the 1980s, while Nirvana and Pearl Jam ruled the rock airwaves. I was more interested in fantasy than the future, if you can believe that.
My first impression of Cyberpunk was negative. I didn’t like the album’s electronic elements, which, at that time, seemed far removed from the rock and metal I loved. The looped beats, the industrial feel, the keyboard riffs, the samples — these were part of an aural world I had yet to discover, much less accept. A fellow classmate let me listen to it. I still recall the CD booklet and its Blendo-inspired cover. I found it more style over substance (an ironic take, considering my limited musical taste at the time).
Fast-forward four years, and I was very much into electronic music. I was (and remain) a huge David Bowie fan, and his 1997 electronica album, ‘Earthling’, opened me up to the genre. In quick succession I dove into The Prodigy, Nine Inch Nails, Underworld, Chemical…
