Editor's note: this post is not a review of the album. The album is very, very good. It has some of producers' William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes best work. I might still write a separate post about the vocal editing on "Madcap" or the genius that is the instrumental suite of "Simple Degradation", which attempts to give a mechanical entity a voice. This post is lyrical analysis but I just wanted to put this out there: Dead Channel Sky rocks. -EK
Oh and also, the post is called *prognotes because it used to focus on progressive metal albums and concepts. But who's to say that Clipping. is not progressive metal? Certainly not me. -EK again.
At this point, it feels like clipping.'s Daveed Diggs has a list of genre literature archetypes he is crossing out. This is by no means a criticism; listening, and reading, as clipping. move from space opera through urban and body horror and all the way to cyberpunk is a true pleasure. This is only in part because I am a big fan of said genres and have spent years (god, it's decades now, isn't it) writing and thinking about these genres. It's more that the band's passion for these ideas results not just in representation, ideas from these styles simply reproduced in musical form, but in true elaboration. Simply put, every clipping. album from Splendor & Misery and onwards is an entry in its respective genre, in its own right. They're not just a bunch of references but works in their own right, deeply situated within the tropes of the genre and moving past them in interesting ways.
As eluded to above, their latest release Dead Channel Sky, is clipping.'s entry into the annals of cyberpunk. I swore to myself this wouldn't be a massive essay so I am not going to try to create a definition of cyberpunk here or provide anything more than a rough sketch of its history. However, we have to delay on it just a bit, so that we have the context within which we can understand and discuss Dead Channel Sky. I'm going to do that by actually discussing what cyberpunk once was and no longer is. You see, there are actually two cyberpunks (three actually, but never mind that for now). The first is also chronologically the first; this is cyberpunk as it existed before the end of the millennium, as a relatively niche sub-genre of science fiction.
To be sure, it enjoyed commercial success even back then: ever since Neuromancer released in 1984 and Akira released in 1982, and even before that with proto-cyberpunk novels like The Stars My Destination and The Centauri Device (the sharp sighted among you will catch why I cited both of these books), cyberpunk has been popular. But these earlier works, all the way from 1982 and to 1999, were grittier, more radical, and more punk than anything than came before that. More specifically, the radical approach of early cyberpunk to bodies and what the collision between more and more invasive technology and these bodies would do to people was very prominent. Partial list: in the criminally underread Synners (1991) by Pat Cadigan, human brains are used as recording devices and the line between "human" and "entertainment" blurs. Bruce Sterling's Holy Fire (1996) imagines a future in which youth is eternal and, of course, a commodity. Jeff Noon's Vurt (1993), probably the strangest book I'll reference here, has people taking drugs over feather (yes) and merging themselves with dogs, shadows, and robots (more on this underread masterpiece here).
You can probably tell where this is going from here. One event signaled the explosion of cyberpunk, and the ushering in of the dominance of a new kind of cyberpunk, and that was the release of The Matrix (1999). Don't get me wrong - The Matrix didn't create its breed of cyberpunk from nowhere. Hacker girls in tight leather suits, people who see reality as code, our world as simulation, all of these ideas existed in cyberpunk ever since it was formed. But they were one stream among money, living alongside the examples above and others. For example, there used to be an entire sub-stream of cyberpunk that mixed cyberpunk and fantasy together (shortly, Tad Williams' Otherland (1996) and True Names (1981) by Vernor Vinge are good examples of this). After The Matrix came out, the variety and complexity of cyberpunk decreased sharply, at least in the public eye. The image of cyberpunk as we know it today came to be, an almost monolith made up of sleek cars, dark cities, and sprawling, virtual worlds. To be clear, you can still find great and radical cyberpunk out there (again, shortly, check out Saad Z. Hossain's Cybermage (2021), Andrew F. Sullivan's The Marigold (2023), and Tim Maughan's Infinite Detail (2019). But it's harder and most of the top shelf will be filled with leather leotards.
OK. Now we can talk about Dead Channel Sky. Simply put, Dead Channel Sky shows us what we already knew - Daveed Diggs knows his shit. The album is chock full of references to old school cyberpunk (one example are the "stingers" from the TTRPG Cyberpunk 2020, which released in 1988, and which appear on "Run It" form the album) but, more importantly, it displays and tackles the ideas of extreme body modification and virtual personality of the earlier days of cyberpunk. True to Diggs' politics and the politics of the cyberpunk genre at large, the album highlights the complexity of these ideas, including both the freedom and power of them and the dependency and vulnerability they introduce. For example, on "Dominator", Diggs says:
"A waste of energy debating the mechanical
For genitals when gender is so easily programmable, you know that (I'm the one and only)
Beating it without leaving a bruise (I'm the one and only)
Out your window, whatever you choose (I'm the one and only)
Cameras are tracking your every move (I'm the one and only)"
The duality here is palpable. On one hand, cyberpunk has long been a genre that has attracted non-binary and trans people. That's the punk part - technology, and its radical and free use, has the potential to free us of the limitations which society uses our bodies to enforce. We already know that there is no such thing as "objective biological sex" but if we could actually edit our bodies with ease? In a setting where body modifications is taken to a technological extreme (already used widely by gender conforming people in our own reality), gender becomes "easily programmable". This is a good thing. But what's the price? "Out your window" there is also the same thing - infinite choice. You can go anywhere, see anything, be anyone. But the price is complete and utter surveillance. Like Cadigan's Synners, the same radicalizing technology that allows us to modify our bodies is also owned wholesale by the powers that be. As such, they are double edged swords, using the freedom they allow us to monitor, digitize, and sell every single one of our experiences. By the way, if cyberpunk feels familiar to you it's because you're living in it.
This duality also works very well with another common theme from Diggs' previous works: drugs. Before the advent of current cyberpunk, drugs figured prominently in the genre's writing (as befits any genre that cites Philip K. Dick as one of its progenitors. Come to think of it, I'm going to use this parenthesis to say that Blade Runner vs. its source material, Do Androids Dream of Electric Ship? might be the first instance of more popular cyberpunk modifying earlier versions of the genre). Their reality-bending properties interact very naturally with virtuality (please read Jeff Noon's Vurt, I am no longer asking) and other tropes of cyberpunk, like psychosis and economical distress. The relationship with drugs is as ambivalent as the relationship with body modification technology; on one hand, they represent an escape from an unbearable reality, literally an "opioid for the masses". On the other, they represent yet another form of control, addiction giving the powers that push the drugs (whether that be the CIA or business interests) bodily control over users.
Dead Channel Sky is filled with this. Beyond overt references to the CIA's role in the spread of cocaine ("Ain't no peace in the streets, people fiend for release from the new kind of cheap cocaine / Contraband, Nicaragua and Iran and a handshake for the CIA"), the album depicts both users and pushers in the harsh, critical light that cyberpunk has usually taken with these figures. Depicting them as part of the collapse of society, their prevalent predation just another depressing aspect of the falling apart cities of the future, Dead Channel Sky integrates drugs and their use into the complex vision of the future body it proposes. This can be seen on the aforementioned "Run It" but my favorite example is, unsurprisingly, on "Keep Pushing", a track dedicated to the agility and perseverance of the pusher. There, we can see the duality I set up above: to begin with, the drug pusher is a pretty despicable figure, an opportunist in a world falling apart:
"Livin' at thе top of the syndrome, placebo
Gеt you repo'd into thin gold
Ain't worth shit when the skin gone, and it been cold
And makin' money off of the impulse, they nothin' but sinful
But that need faith and, where they do that at?
The world is a wasteland, the state is a rat trap"
However, later in the track, the perspective shift and the "wasteland" that is the world is shown as the context in which our nameless pusher operates. Who are we to judge them? Just like in the powerful "Ends" from CLPPNG, drug use is contextualized as a dead end solution but only one which is available to people whose lives and futures are crushed under the negligence and violence of power, whether that is the institutional violence of the state, the curse of being redlined into a ghetto, or the omnidirectional pressure of racism. In cyberpunk, the entire world is the ghetto - everywhere suffers from the same urban decay, rot, and institutional degradation that defines slums in our timeline. Therefore:
"Look, pimp, don't ever panic when a hoe is a nympho
You push so many keys that it's resembling Gitmo
Remember that place? Nobody else does
They like the past erased, so they can get buzzed"
"They like the past erased, so they can get buzzed". "They" is of course everyone but also specifically the powers that be, those that ran Gitmo all those years ago in the narrative's timeline (which is approximately two-hundred years in the future by the way). This line, which is great "just" in the context of "Keep Pushing" actually opens up the third theme of Dead Channel Sky: the erasure of the past. This is a theme which is most powerful seen in cyberpunk in the aforementioned Cybepunk TTRPG which, in case you weren't aware, is one of the greatest roleplaying games ever made. If you were wondering where all the hype came from even before we saw the first screenshots of Cyberpunk 2077, it was from TTRPG old-heads who still hold Cyberpunk as one of the greats of the explosion of roleplaying games at the end of the 80's. One of the reasons it's so good is its setting, Night City and beyond.
And one of the reasons its setting is so good (because this is not a post about the TTRPG and I refuse to listen to the voices and spend a thousand words on it here) is how it treats history and memory. Or, rather, how it shows that states, cities, the police, the rich, and the other powerful of the setting do everything they can to erase and obfuscate the past. This is, of course, because if people had context into how they ended up impoverished, imprisoned, and surveilled as they are in a cyberpunk setting, they would instantly revolt. More importantly, is they found out that this is all by choice, that the disaster often depicted as "natural" by those who caused it, brought it about because they were greedy and stupid. Sounds familiar? Yeah, you're living in it.
Dead Channel Sky is all over that. Hell, the album closes with a track called "Ask What Happened"! This track eludes to the question posed by many of the other tracks on the album: how did we get here? "Polaroids" which precedes it, probably my favorite track on the release, sketches out some of this in the form of photos from the past: technological acceleration leads to urban collapse which leads to ecological collapse. War for resources leads to nuclear war leads to more total collapse, from the wreckage of which a new, sharper, more neon world is built. But this description really does injustice to how beautiful the track is and how vividly Diggs paints this picture so let me segue harshly to the words themselves:
"People used to drive to places like this just to escape
If you look close, you can see the early fiber optic cables stretching out into the jungle
The beginning of the end
A still life in motion, one of those night traffic shots
The long exposure makes the tail lights stretch ad infinitum
Down and to the right
Red tiger striping the city street so it reads "Raver"
This is before the riots
Ghostly in the out-of-focus, high rises are rising as they're won't to do
Contorting just like trees looking for sun (Trees looking for sun)
Mostly to the left, you'll notice piling up like nothing new
The boxes for the shanties that these buildings would become (These buildings would become)
Toppled by the potholes, here they are before they sunk (Are before they sunk)
Like on hold for glottal stops approaching with the sun (Approaching with the sun)
They're choking on the words they never said
So soon the running from the end of life that no one really figured had begun"
These lines are my favorite from the album for their lyricism and beauty but also for the last line: "the end of life that no one really figured had begun". With this line, Diggs does something quite subtle, which "Ask What Happened" later compliments: it ties the story of the album to our present. I've said it repeatedly here before: we live in the cyberpunk dystopia. Diggs knows this as well and he wants to tie the story on the album to our modern lives. "The end of life" has already begun and, what's more, the saps in the faded polaroid who didn't see it coming are us. "Ask What Happened" connects to this by answering the question that the track's title poses with...a lesson of our own history:
"Thumbs up for the bombs dropped, with the resource runnin' low, killing many okay
Safe harbour instead of off-shore for the rich, if you got money you will be okay
Stock markets never stop anymore, people locked on the floor trading all day
Farmers stop when the crops are worth less than the land that they start selling away
Internet entering into homes via phones, "Online" is a thing they say
Speed-up thought is a boon for communication, borders break when they link for trade
Allies made to be safe and to maintain status, currency in play
Tech is king in the life of the ring to the table is changing, things you pay for
Virtual sex can be messy but tissues by the desktop keep it clean, okay
Underground they could start to acknowledge sound of glitch and the beats they make
MP3, SD2, PCM, AU, ALAC and WAV
Getting hard to imagine expanding a thought when it's not any breathing space"
And that, at the end of the day, is the true cyberpunk genius of Dead Channel Sky and why I prefer the "classic" style of cyberpunk to the one which dominates the genre today. The whole point of cyberpunk, indeed of science fiction, is to tell something about the present and not the future. From Ursula Le Guin's introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness ("the keyword is kemmer, that's what your ass needs"):
"The weather bureau will tell you what next Tuesday will be like, and the Rand Corporation will tell you what the twenty-first century will be like. I don’t recommend that you turn to the writers of fiction for such information. It’s none of their business. All they’re trying to do is tell you what they’re like, and what you ‘re like—what’s going on—what the weather is like now, today, this moment, the rain, the sunlight, look! Open your eyes; listen, listen. That is what the novelists say. But they don’t tell you what you will see and hear. All they can tell you is what they have seen and heard, in their time in this world, a third of it spent in sleep and dreaming, another third of it spent telling lies."
On Dead Channel Sky, Diggs is telling you what he has seen and heard: cities falling to drug abuse pushed by the powers that be, the Internet giving us ultimate freedom while shackling us to ultimate surveillance, the body being split open to bring forth new and amazing ways of being and immediately being supervised, controlled, and controlled, eco-death and ignorance, war and the beautiful, aching potential of surviving. There's so much more on it that we haven't covered: hijacked satellites, stylish corpos, and, of course, fucking cool mirrorshades. But all of these are in service to one message which screams loud with the static of the album: cyberpunk is not about the future you idiot. It's about you. Through music, the album revisits the main tenet of cyberpunk and allows us another avenue through which to approach it and to think on it. Thus, Dead Channel Sky is like the TTRPG Cyberpunk - a non-novel entry to a mainly literary genre that belongs up there with the best.
There, just a bit more than 3,000 words. That's short, right? See you next time Clipping. drop an album.