And now, as <s>threatened</s> promised last week:
INVASION of the DISCODROIDS!
I’ve been taking some deep dives into the
archives lately, to find the answer to the question that keeps coming back up: what inspired me to write “Cyberpunk?” The good news is that at the time, I kept detailed journals. The surprising discovery was that, while I’d always thought I’d started writing “Cyberpunk” in February of 1980, I’d actually begun writing the bits, pieces, fragments, and key scenes of the thing that eventually became “Cyberpunk” in the fall of 1978.
Only I didn’t call it that then, or even set out to write a short story at all. What I’d started out to write was a stage musical.
To reiterate something I have said many times before and will probably be saying for the rest of my life: I did not intend to become a science fiction writer. I intended to be a musician and composer. Sure, I’d puttered around with writing short stories, and even wrote most of a novel, It’s Okay, I’m With The Band, that’s better left forgotten now. But I never took writing fiction that seriously. It was just something I did to burn off the excess creativity that couldn’t be turned into a score, a libretto, a tape track, or a synthesizer program.
The plot of Invasion of the Discodroids, then, such as it is, should seem familiar, as it’s Standard Paranoid Science Fiction Plot #6. An ordinary everyday every-man office worker, vaguely dissatisfied with the shallowness of his life and yearning for something more, discovers a terrible secret: that the Earth has been invaded and conquered by alien robots, who control the masses by controlling pop culture. To keep the people off-kilter and vaguely uneasy, and thus easily manipulated, they keep fashions and trends shifting constantly; to give the people something to adore and aspire to being they have a factory somewhere in Southern California, probably on Disney’s back lot in Anaheim, where an automated assembly line cranks out a never-ending line of perfect singing and dancing robot pop stars.
[And every time I hear someone singing through an auto-tuner, I think: “Yep, got that one right.”]
As our hero gets deeper into the conspiracy and deeper into danger, he finds a last desperate ray of hope: a sort of Galt’s Gulch in Reverse somewhere in New Mexico, where all the free thinkers—the radical musicians, writers, artists, poets and the like—have been rounded up and are being confined, either for the rest of their lives or until they can be brainwashed into becoming enthusiastic supporters of our new robot overlords. Breaking into the Musician Reservation, he raises a revolutionary army and leads them back out into society, to shatter the shackles of conformity with the raw anarchic power of punk rock, and thus save the world.
Yeah. Right.
There were things I really liked about Invasion of the Discodroids. Some of the music tracks were pretty good. I almost made it to what in a few more years would become techno and EDM. I should have pushed further in that direction. And I particularly liked one plot gimmick: that every “morning” when our hero woke up to the blaring of his bedside clock radio, the first thing out of the DJ’s mouth was the daily forecast.
“Today the National Fashion Center is calling for Gritty Working Class Realism in the morning, changing over to candy-coated Fifties Nostalgia by late afternoon!”
I don’t remember whether I got that bit into the “Cyberpunk” short story, but did manage to work something like that into the novel.
§
On the other hand, the full show would have been hopelessly impossible and insanely expensive to stage. It only got one partial performance, once, in 1979; more of a demo reel of the work in progress, really, consisting of four songs from the show. The girls complained that there weren’t enough dance numbers to let them really show off their moves, and they were right. I failed to write a full-blown showstopper diva number for the female lead, not that I had one for the demo show. I failed to write any schlocky sappy ballads of the sort that men who like to do musical theater like to sing, and in a spectacularly stupid oversight, I failed to write a big happy the-whole-cast-up-on-stage-singing-and-dancing finale number.
[Loathe it or hate it, Mamma Mia! really is the model for the perfect stage musical. Would you like some more schmaltz with your schmaltz?]
The finale I did write, in which the MULA (Musician’s Union Liberation Army) punk rock commandos storm the theater with machine guns and electric guitars and hold the audience at gun-point while they perform the final number, was in hindsight a very bad idea.
§
The true killer, though, is that we never would have been able to clear the rights to “Funkytown,” which I wanted to use it as the recurring motif for the evil robot overlords. Every time the fashion forecast changed, “Funkytown” came back with a different title, different lyrics, a different mix, and different instrumentation, but always just as slick and soulless as ever, and always with the UDB—the Universal Disco Beat—throbbing away underneath. There is no way Steven Greenberg would have let me do that.
All the same, I would
have dearly loved to have seen the entire cast up on stage in blue
jeans, cowboy boots, cowboy hats, and plaid yoke shirts with patch
pockets and pearlized snaps, line-dancing together, on the day the
fashion forecast said Country & Western was in style and the hit
song of the day was “Honkytown.” The costuming for that number alone
would have blown the budget.
Man, I hated “Funkytown.”
§
But aside from that one partial performance in 1979, and aside from my continuing to work on it well into the 1980s, Invasion of the Discodroids didn’t happen, “Cyberpunk” did, and my life turned in a completely different direction. It’s probably just as well. Quite a few of my friends from the 1970s didn’t make it through the 1980s. AIDS cut a hell of a swath through the music and theater communities.
I moved on, and became the person you think I am now. Music and theater dropped completely out of my life…
Until
about twenty years ago, when someone I’d never heard from before
tracked me down, wanting to talk about the performance rights to
“Cyberpunk.” I get these kinds of inquiries all the time, usually from
aspiring film students or would-be television producers. I refer them
to my agent, and once they find out that I actually have an
agent in L.A. and have some experience with the film and TV industry,
the conversation usually stops dead in its tracks, and I never hear from
them again.
This query, though, got my attention. The guy represented a theater company in a city that has a major live theater scene, and they were looking to get the rights to develop “Cyberpunk” as an original live stage musical. When he found out about my music background, the conversation got even more interesting. We went back and forth for a few weeks, with me getting more interested with every exchange, until finally he ‘fessed up that even though we hadn’t reached a deal, they’d already started working on music for the show, would I like to listen to their demo reel?
Would I? Oh boy, I couldn’t wait to
listen to their demo reel—until about ten seconds after I popped the
tape he’d sent me into the tape player in my car and started listening.
Fast forward. Listen. Fast forward again. Listen again. No, this track is rotten all the way through. Okay, maybe the second track is better. Listen…nope. Third track? Nope. Fourth track? My God, it just keeps getting worse.
You would think, if you wanted to do a musical named “Cyberpunk,” that you’d want to have some—oh, punk rock in it? Or maybe something electronic and techno-ish? Or maybe—well, anything but track after track of lame, sappy, schlocky, schmaltzy, off-off-off-off Broadway show tunes?
The deal fell apart. The musical never happened. I suppose I could have just shut up, taken their money, given them my blessing, and let that misbegotten mess happen. But if I had, I would have hated myself in the morning.
—Bruce Bethke
About Bruce Bethke: In the early spring of 1980 Bruce wrote a little short story about a
gang of teenage hackers. From the very first draft the story had a
one-word title—a new word, one that he’d made up in a deliberate
attempt to grok the interface between the emerging high technology scene
and teenage punk attitudes, and this word was—
Oh, surely you can guess.
Half a lifetime later Bruce is still getting questions about this story, so rather than answer them privately and one at a time, he’s decided to make answering questions about cyberpunk a regular feature on this site. If you have a question you’ve always wanted to ask him, post it in the comments here, IM him on Facebook, or email it to brucebethke.cybrpnk@gmail.com. He can’t guarantee he’ll answer, but will certainly give it a good try.
3 comments:
Any musical designed to trash disco would be worth a listen. Montreal in the 70s was VERY disco, and I still have residual twitches. Another part of the city was very jazz, and that got me through.
I have to confess: I own a 45 of the French take on "Disco Duck." It is hilarious.
This is gold. I would sorely love to see a version of this now with Baby Metal (as part of the Liberation Army) and a K-pop group or two as the discodroids. And maybe a catgirl.
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