The wife and I (and baby Diego) were down at the Elysium tonight eating dinner, and through the entire meal we were serenaded by the collective one-hit wonders of the 1980s...you know all those dudes like Soft Cell and Flock o Seagulls and Frankie Goes to Hollywood. Or whatever their names were...I just know the songs, not the bands.
"One hit wonders." Disposable music. So perfect for the 1980s when so much was disposable (or seemed to be). There and gone, like coke up the nose.
[whoops! What happened to my paycheck?!]
Is it any wonder that the cyberpunk genre came out of the 80s? Johnny Zed was first published in 1988, Neuromancer in 1984. Both postulated future worlds where everything was disposable: governments, body parts, thousand dollar bills, people and relationships.
Nowadays, these concepts seem so...well, dated. I mean, yes...technology becomes obsolete frightfully fast. And you can still pick up "disposable" pre-paid cell phones. But there's a whole push to make things of quality, things that will last. I mean isn't that why so many of us old gen Xers are finally settling down and starting families?
Or maybe I'm mistaken. I haven't got a whole lot o sleep lately, so I may just be slappy tonight. After all, I am a true "child of the 80s;" born in '73 I was seven in 1980 and 17 by 1990. God, that was a long time ago...what music was I listening to back then? Operation Mindcrime? Use Your Own Illusion?
Jeez...that was long before "grunge." Well, at least before the phenomenon (we had Soundgarden's Louder than Love on vinyl). The '90s was a shift from the "disposable" to the "self-destructive." Oh, right...Nine Inch Nails and Reznor.
The point is (if my meandering has a point), does it even make sense to put too much "disposable" into an RPG? Is cyberpunk completely passe at this point? I don't listen to my NIN disks anymore either.
I suppose dystopian futures and all-powerful mega-corporations are still pertinent and contemporary. But I can see why R. Talsorian's Cyberpunk 2020 holds no more interest for me. I'm kind of over the disposable 80s.
0 Yorumlar