What did they think of “Talk Talk” in 1966? In 2023 it uncoils from your speakers like a cobra: alive and evil and glaring with death. It’s just 1:56 in length – short, even for the time. The tempo is punishing. The instrumentation is just lunges and stabs of fuzz; flames leaping from a barely-existent structure, as though the song’s burning down while still half-unwritten.

The lyrics are fragments. Ugly, mean thoughts, articulated with the stumbling self-seriousness of a teenager who’s drunk for the first time. “My social life’s a dud! My name is really mud!” Far from poetry…but people have thoughts like that. I used to. Sometimes eloquent phrasing doesn’t capture stupid, sullen emotions, “Talk Talk” may have been the first song they’d heard that truly sounded like the inside of their own mind.

The band was a five-piece called The Music Machine. One year earlier, they’d been playing folk rock.

They were fronted by Sean Bonniwell, a restless self-reinventor who never found a home. “Talk Talk”‘s success (#15 on the Billboard charts in 1966) proved a fluke. They had no followup hit. They were driven first aground and then apart by royalty fights, label disputes, and internal discord.

Bonniwell tried to regroup, but the window he’d exploited was now gone and his moment had passed. The Music Machine’s legacy is 1:56 of brutal noise and an unfulfilled promise. From the outside looking in, it was as though they’d come from nowhere and then gone back into nowhere. They did not become a Great Band.

But in a weird way, that helps me appreciate Music Machine more. There’s a long list of “classic” Rolling Stone approved acts (The Eagles, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Queen) that I either can’t appreciate or appreciate in an academic thinking-things-through way. Part of it is their critical reception: they’re so adored and revered that it triggers suspicion in me. And it distances me from the music, I feel like I’m listening to it from across a GREAT BAND cordon line. The immediacy is gone.

Rock music was never supposed to be a canon, or an establishment. It was supposed to shake your bones. So I enjoy listening to bands like The Music Machine, that doesn’t have a Rolling Stone-appointed crown weighing it down.

If The Music Machine is remembered, it’s for either their heaviness, their earlyness, their subtle influence on other bands, or their rapid collapse. The entire band left soon after their first LP, aside from frontman Sean Bonniwell. He changed the band’s name, changed their style, and then left the music business altogether. It was as though the Music Machine had packed a thirty-year career into one minute and fifty-six seconds.

In other words, they were the Sex Pistols, ten years before. Which brings up the p-word.

Music journalism as we know it barely existed in the mid sixties: as a result, some history is barely-written and misremembered. A lot of people seem to think that punk rock was a seventies phenomenon. That was actually the second wave of punk. The first wave happened ten years earlier, with US “garage rock” bands like The Sonics and MC5, as well as UK acts such as The Downliners Sect and the Kinks. This was raw, aggressive, cheap-sounding music, driven by jangling guitars, powerful drums, and farfisa organs. Much of it was retroactively classified as “punk” in the early 70s – the first recorded reference to the genre is in the March 22, 1970 issue of The Chicago Tribune.

Unlike the second wave of punk (conspiracy theories about “God Save The Queen”‘s UK #2 aside), garage rock actually got some singles to number one. “”(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” by the Stones and “96 Tears” by ? and the Mysterians both reached #1, among others. It’s disputable to what extent these songs are punk. The lines between a garage rock band and, say, The Troggs or The Beatles could be pretty blurry. And their 1960s mod and greaser fashions have left less of an impression in the popular memory than the edgier styles pushed by Malcolm Mclaren and Vivienne Westwood.

The Music Machine were among the heavier of the 60s garage rock set, but soon psychedelic rock and heavy metal left them behind in sonic firepower, and Bonniwell proved unable to keep the band on the charts on the strength of his songs.

He was a clever and inventive songwriter, pulling inspiration out of the air, but maybe not actually a good one. “Talk Talk” is sonically impressive but soon wears thin. “Trouble” and “Wrong” are the best songs, particularly “Trouble”, with its dense and rubby rhythms and melodic complexity. “Masculine Intuition” has a really awkward chorus that doesn’t fit the verse. And it’s too short to develop its ideas much: all of these songs are sonic mayflys, dying before they can progress or go anywhere.

The album was recorded quickly to capitalize on a hit single. Most of the tracks were laid down at RCA Studios at three in the morning (on a hand-built ten-track machine built by engineer Paul Buff) after the band had been touring for thirty days, back to back, which explains Bonniwell’s hoarse, ragged voice. A surprising amount of punk aesthetic comes from what is ultimately accident and circumstance. Only in the aftermath does anything seem planned.

The band’s limited stock of originals is padded with covers, which are sometimes great (“Hey Joe” rivals Jimi Hendrix’s version. Bonniwell would later lament that his label wouldn’t release it as a single), sometimes pointless (“Taxman”), sometimes really stupid (“See See Rider”). The cover of “96 Tears” is pretty ironic, as ? and the Mysterians also failed to follow up their one hit.

The Music Machine is a fascinating curio, but they were riven by image and identity conflicts that they never figured out. Were they art, or yeah-yeah-yeah teenage music? They were initially presented as mods, but Bonniwell soon got into transcendental meditation and eastern mysticism. There was little sense of musical history to the Machine. You couldn’t obviously pick out their influences, the way you could for the Beatles or the Stones. This made them seem fresh, but also a little disconnected in time, as though they were visiting aliens. There wasn’t an easy “story” you could apply to the band, which made it easy for music history to not give them a story at all.

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Remember that part in Indiana Jones: The Title IX Violation where an Arab character twirls a scimitar around and Harrison Ford just casually shoots him dead? Wizards did that same gag four years earlier, and I want you to know that.

Three million years after a nuclear apocalypse, the Earth has mutated into a kind of high fantasy setting where people use magic (although there are mutants and caches of old weaponry waiting to be discovered). The queen of the fairies falls under a spell and gives birth to twins: the peace-loving Avatar and the malign Blackwolf, who discovers a trove of Nazi propaganda and decides to bring about a second Holocaust.

Wizards is sprawling, louche, animated movie, with no modern counterpart. It’s fundamentally and quintessential a movie by Raph Bakshi: whether this is a compliment, criticism, or neutral observation is your call.

It has little overriding style or aesthetic. It’s just the stuff Bakshi likes piled into one movie: namely British fantasy, a gritty countercultural vibe, big tits, and belabored social commentary. None of the ingredients really mix that well, which is kind of the point. Bakshi seems to be jarring your senses on purpose, playing off the flying sparks as jagged pieces of movie grind together.

This was his first (and most successful) flirtation with a Tolkien-style setting, and it works because it’s filtered through a lot of 70s decadence and doesn’t take itself seriously.

JRR Tolkien had become a mainstream craze in America during the hippie years (to his horror), with kids reading Lord of the Rings as an allegory for their times. The Shire was Woodstock, magic was weed/psychedelia, Gandalf was one of the wise elder “beats” (Ginsburg, Burroughs, Kerouac), Sauron was the Man, Saruman was a sellout to the Man, and so forth.

Bakshi was always more of a hippie observer than a hippie (1972’s Fritz the Cat is full of criticism for the excesses of the 60s counterculture), but he shared their fascination with Tolkien’s world, and the way its mythic setting cuts across cultural lines. Whether you’re an elderly Oxford don or a “turned on” flower power freak, everyone appreciates a well-kept garden, and everyone hates the bulldozer destroying it.

But when you combine hippie and Tolkien sensibilities, the result isn’t that coherent. The main thing you’ll notice about Wizards is how little it gels, and how awkwardly the parts fit together.

The art style is all over the place. Certain characters are drawn in a cheap TV cartoon style. Others (such as Blackwolf) are drawn in a more classicist Disney fashion. There are incredibly detailed backgrounds (and even rotoscoping), which really look odd next to the minimalism of the main cast.

I assume Bakshi wanted the film to look the way it does: like cels from wildly different films composited together. Illustrator Ian Miller and artist Mike Ploog contributed work, but they were deliberately kept separate during productiion. It’s heavily “influenced” by Vaughn Bode, as Bakshi would belatedly recognize. The movie occasionally feels crafted by a committee living on separate continents, communicating via carrier pidgeons.

Sure, the disjointedness make it a charming and personable movie. You come to love the incongruence, the way you enjoy the big, awkward stitching on handmade clothes.

But the tone never settles, and that’s a bigger problem. Wizards is a kids’ movie with bouncing boobs and swastikas. And the pacing is just bizarre. The first part of the movie is turgid: information and story lore gets dumped on the viewer with a tractor, and there’s ultimately little need for any of it.

It does get a lot better as it progresses. The battle scenes are thrilling, and Bakshi’s world is huge and vivid. He communicates sheer immensity better than most directors. You feel space and scale exploding out of the frame. The music is fantastic.

A tighter writing job would have helped focus the movie more, perhaps at risk of losing its unique aspects that make the film memorable. But there are many other directions Bakshi could have explored. What if he’d made a straight childrens’ film? Or doubled down on the political commentary?

As it is Wizards has themes, but no real time for them. The Nazi wizard angle is a fascinating one. The links between the real-life SS and such occultist movements as Ariosophism are fun to blather about (as many people have, ie Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke in his book Black Sun), but that aside…isn’t propaganda a kind of magic? The ability to control minds with images and words? Does it make more sense to regard Leni Riefenstahl as a filmmaker, or as a witch?

But this is pretty inconsequential in the film: Blackwolf inspires his soldiers with grainy old film clips of violence and war and Hitler speeches, and that’s it. Is that the essence of Nazism, according to Bakshi? Sound and fury? An angry, shouting man? Or is there an ideological component to fascism as well? It’s interesting to me that the world Wizards proposes (which is full of degenerate mutants, and an innately evil enemy who cannot be redeemed or saved) is probably more of a fascist one.

Matt Lakeman once wrote:

I have a friend who was a state-level legislator in the US for many years. Though ideologically libertarian, he ran as a Republican. He once told me that 80% of voters in America are actually libertarians. The problem was that 80% of voters are also actually Republicans. And Democrats. And progressives. And communists and fascists and monarchists and anarchists, and every other political ideology imaginable. They all want lower taxes but more social services, and to avoid wars but a strong foreign policy, and personal liberty but a safety camera on every street corner, etc. Thus, the key to my friend’s electability was to inspire their libertarian values while not triggering every other contradictory value they incoherently held.

This is basically Wizards. It’s trying to be everything for everyone, and scarily often, it succeeds. What do you get out of a movie this eclectic? Confusion? A desire for clarity? Or the sense of wandering in a delirious bazaar, overloaded with colors and noises and scents? For me it’s overwhelmingly the third feeling. It’s a flawed but impressive work, and at the top tranche of Bakshi’s work.

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Vurt is set a future/alternate Manchester. Society now revolves around consciousness-altering feathers that grant access to “vurts” – alternate realities gelled out of humanity’s collective desires.

Noon doesn’t get bogged down in details on what the vurts actually are. Dreams? Cyberspace? An alternate dimension? For story purposes, it’s just another form of “jacking in”; that tireless cyberpunk workhorse.

Blue feathers might lead to Soapvurts – you get to experience life on your favorite TV show. Pink feathers might lead to Pornovurts – detailed sexual fantasies. Yellow feathers are death vurts – trips to places where there might not be a way back.

The book involves a young crustie called Skribbles, along with his vurt-addicted gang, the “Stash Riders”. They cruise Manchester, seeking out new feathers, and new thrills. Some vurt feathers are legal and can be bought in stores, others must be stolen or fought for.

Naturally, the Stash Riders soon get over their heads. Scribbles’ sister Desdemona (who he has sex with inside a vurt, because why not) swallows a yellow feather, and disappears into a vurt within a vurt. Can Skribbles get her back? And what to make of the disgusting slimy creature that came back from the vurt in Desdemona’s place?

Few things were more hip in 1993 than cyberpunk, but Vurt doesn’t fit next to Gibson and Sterling. It’s older, and odder, and not really about technology so much as drugs. It’s a very British book, written in the years when Manchester was Madchester, and MDMA changed the face of the city. It’s steeped in things like rave and acid (musical and otherwise) and captures some of the throbbing, dark madness of the era.

There are no dry reveries to technology, no “like tears in rain…” navel-gazing. I don’t recall one scene where a character uses a computer. Instead, it’s about psychosis and the way personal madness, multiplied out across a multiple people, warps culture in its image. It’s about body heat on the edge of fever, smiles on the edge of rictus, dancing on the edge of demon-possession.

If you want a good book to compare it to, forget Neuromancer. It’s more like those hundred-year-old works of French décadence like A Rebours and Les Chants de Maldoror. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland would also be appropriate.

And unlike most cyberpunk, it’s an exuberant book. Hopeful. Most cyberpunk novels are set in grim hellscapes. Vurt describes a place you’d really want to live in. Yes, the feathers are wrecking many peoples’ lives. So did large rocks in 10,000BC.

We get some genuinely brilliant ideas, such as Tristan and Suze: two soulmates who are literally tied together by their hair – a six-foot-long tangle of dreadlocks that can only be separated by shaving. Countless weird critters make an appearance: there’s a Morpheus-like figure called the Game Cat who helps “kittlings” navigate (again, shades of another famous literary cat, from a hundred years prior).

Vurt is zany and colorful…to a detriment? The book suffers from Tim Burton Syndrome: the setting is so cartoonishly over-the-top that there’s little sense of wonder/dislocation when a character swallows a feather. Alice is already in Wonderland, so to speak. And that’s bad for the characters, who frequently lose track of whether they’re in a vurt or the real world. This does mean the book’s central conceit is robbed of impact.

British 80s science fiction (V for Vendetta, Max Headroom, certain Judge Dredd stories) tended to be “Thatcher, accelerated”. Vurt is more like “drug culture accelerated”, but with many classicist touches that set it apart from something like Trainspotting. Getting “high” with feathers is the world’s least subtle drug metaphor. But it’s also a reference to Icarus’s wings – particularly since the feathers melt once you’ve used them.

Cyberpunk underwent a mainstream explosion at the start of the 90s. But a lot of those books haven’t aged well, because another explosion happened a few years later (the internet), and few cyberpunk authors actually “got” what online worlds would be like (I except Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash).

Cybernetically-modded lowlives and chrome-hipped android girls now just seem weird in light of the turn society actually took. Pollution and crime went down. Megacorporations now own most things, as predicted, but they are more benign than expected – Chiquita hasn’t staged a third world coup d’état in over seventy years, as far as we know.

Even the technical side of cyberpunk now just feels off. Cybernetic implants do not exist as culture-defining products. We are not trying to improve our cruddy bodies but escape them entirely: vurtlike worlds exist everywhere like bindweed: if want, you can be Naruto, an anime catgirl, or Eric Harris’s girlfriend. Johnny Mnemonic involves a “data runner” with 160 Gb of rentable storage in his head – the movie makes this sound like an incredible amount. In 2022, BackBlaze rents that much cloud storage for $0.80 a month. As in, zero dollars and eighty cents.

The future we’re living in is characterized by conformity. Or rather, by individuality expressed in tightly restrictive ways. You can choose the color that surrounds your profile pic on Twitter. But you can’t really speak your mind: you will either face algorithmic or social repercussions. The social aspect is more visible: if Ice Spice started smearing elephant crap on her face to reduce her pores, a million impressionable teenagers would copy her. But the algorithmic aspect is the reason you know about Ice Spice to begin with.

Maverick hackers seem few and far between. The places on the internet that claim to be devoted to free speech immediately become hellish and radioactive. Cyberpunk, in hindsight, owed more to the past than to the future. William Gibson’s “console cowboys” gives the game away. His stories were actually built out of fairly old tropes. They now have value less as predictions of the future than outright fantasies, something Vurt recognizes and leans into, all the way.

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