A science fiction milieux where tech jargon becomes the language of everyday life: a mundane, hypnotic, self-absorbed dream. Gary Numan sang "Me! I Disconnect from You!" more than thirty years ago, evoking the interpersonal specifics of computer-mediated social networking long before Mark Zuckerberg was even born. [Thought Catalog via iO9]

Read more in Music at Boing Boing

⟿ Follow Rob Beschizza on Twitter.

MORE: music

More at Boing Boing

The technology that links taxonomy and Star Trek

Hackers prepare for first "national holiday" in their honor

lewisfrancis

The other day I heard that song playing as background music at my Whole Foods store in Northern Va. Before that it was XTC’s Life ‘Begins at the Hop’. This all sync’d nicely with an earlier surprise with a chain sub shop’s ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ in DC. I suppose all this means something, even if it’s just I’m officially old.

BTW, both times I’ve seen Numan his live performance of ‘Are Friends…’ rocked hard.
snej

*Everyone* was busy appropriating Kraftwerk right then â€” it was worldwide serendipitous “Kraftwerk Copying Time” in the evolution of pop music. In the UK it was OMD, the Human League, Throbbing Gristle, etc., and in the US it was hip-hop pioneers like Afrika Bambaataa. Gary Numan just happened to be one of the first to get a hit record with that style. And that’s the way popular music works. (There is a great BBC documentary on the history of synth-pop that goes into this in detail â€” it’s floating around the youtubes somewhere.)

And let us not forget that Kraftwerk themselves were majorly influenced by Neu! (themselves spun off of the old Kraftwerk 1.0), Can, the VU, Terry Riley, academic electronic musicians like Subotnick, etc. No one’s original!

Lyrically, I think Numan must have absorbed large amounts of Philip K Dick and J G Ballard and remixed them in a way that was derivative but never quite copying. Together with the music, I thought his early records were pretty amazing.
- Nathan Bibb
  
  I agree with the Philip K Dick comment. I think that’s one of the reasons I love most of his work. This particular song is a favorite of my 7 year old son. He calls it “The robot song” and requests it whenever it’s just the two of us in the car. His mother is more of a Tori Amos/Rufus Wainwright fan.
- Anonymous
  
  The synth documentary is “Synth Britannia”.
Jesse M.

So there’s this comic out called Henry & Glenn forever, imagining Glenn Danzig and Henry Rollins as a couple…now Johnny Ryan has just done a takeoff of a takeoff entitled “Mark & Gary Forever”, about Mark Mothersbaugh and Gary Numan. Enjoy!
tw15

Disconnect? This was a time when all you could connect to was Ceefax and, if you were lucky, Prestel. Computers meant BBC Micros and Sinclair ZX81s. It was disconnecting from a society in general, rather than an online world, from a man who grew up a few hundred metres from the runways at Heathrow Airport. Lots of JG Ballard, Philip K Dick influences.
faultyanalogy

“Are Friends Electric?” is actually a Tubeway Army song, being performed my Tubeway Army, the band. Gary Numan was the front man for Tubeway Army, before he began to release music under his own name. Honestly neither Tubeway Army nor Gary Numan were much like Kraftwerk, imho. Tubeway Army was originally more glam and pop-punk. On the cover for Tubeway army’s last album “Down in the Park” (where “Me I disconnect from you” appears), Numan is actually sporting Black Nail Polish!… And then for “The Pleasure Principal” they started going for the Logan’s Run look…I agree that is was seemingly SF-inspireg, probably Dick more than Ballard.

And I gotta say, regarding the comment about Throbbing Gristle in the UK being part of “Kraftwerk Copying Time”:
HAHAHAHAHOHOHOHOHOHOHHEHEHEHEHEHE!!!!!
That’s hilarious!
Anonymous

Gary Numan isn’t ripping off Kraftwerk.

He’s ripping off Drimble Wedge and the Vegetation.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Au9_vfx6t6c
Anonymous

Apart from anything else, it makes me feel old to see a band actually playing (painfully) live in a popular music show. Were they drunk?
enkiv2

Early Numan is excellent, if somewhat clumsy. Late Numan (post-Jagged) is, on the other hand, standard pop-industrial fare (there is an interesting feedback loop between NIN and Numan — Pretty Hate Machine, according to Reznor, was written during a period when he was listening to Telekon on a loop, and later Numan makes direct references to lyrics from The Fragile / The Downward Spiral). I’m less impressed by late Numan since it’s less original, even if it is less clumsy.

As for the Ballard references, I understand that Joy Circuit contains several. I consider Telekon to be his best work.
Major Variola (ret)

GN was great for his time. _Cars_ has no comparison. However, his genre was replaced by more aesthetic ones, IMHO.
tw15

That version is lip-synced. Live version here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uu6MDdxBork
Chris Tucker

This song was the inspiration for the theme music of ‘The IT Crowd’.
cubo23

Well, the best thing about Facebook friends is that sometimes they can actually be electric:

http://motorhueso.net/facebook
Anonymous

Bizarre! I’ve been listening to this for about a week now. I found an 80′s compilation in my collection “our Friends Electric” and I can’t get enough of it. Of course Gary Numan’s “are ‘friends’ electric” is on it.
DrPretto

I can hear a little influence of this in the later band Soda Stereo from Argentina (famous in Latin America in the 80s and 90s):
Listen to this song called “Sobredosis de TV” (Overdose of T.V.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YagqRPgWvXI
pauldavis

The problem I have with this is that I was there. Numan didn’t seem like anything more (or less) than a clumsy UK ripoff of Kraftwerk’s aesthetic, and the idea (at that time, at least) that he had anything interesting to say about contemporary or future life was really quite laughable.

I agree that in hindsight, that assessment may not have been so objective, and that like many music acts of the time that seemed to wallow in a nihilistic fetishization of “the machine”, maybe Numan really was on to something about what the future (our today) would look like.

But I’m not really convinced. The future could have gone down several different paths, and in most of them Numan would have appeared far from the fortune teller of what was to come. He didn’t know about the Internet (it barely existed), and I’m not even convinced that “the machine” that his songs feature so heavily has anything remotely to do with computation.

Meanwhile, here in my car, I often do feel safest of all. And its true … at present, I can only receive.
- speedreeder
  
  This song is actually by the band Tubeway Army, of which Gary Numan was the singer. Sorry to be such a trivia stickler.
  I read that GN was reading a lot of sci-fi at the time, especially JG Ballard, and Philip K. Dick. Maybe he’s not as cool as Joy Division or Kraftwerk, but I think his themes of alienation and dysfunction, speak to alienated high-school and college kids.
  
  To say that he was simply ripping off Kraftwerk leads me to believe that you haven’t heard any of his records, and have only heard the hits, i.e “Cars,” “Are Friends Electric” etc… Gary Numan (Tubeway Army) started out as a glam influenced punk band, and his records are a lot more “rock” sounding.
  I also want to add that GN was hugely influenced by Brian Eno, which everyone seems to miss.
  (If you want a really terrible Kraftwerk knock-off, think of Styx’s Mr. Roboto.)
  Yeah sure, he’s kind of dated and cheesy, but I’m a fan and I think his early records are pretty amazing.
Chloramphenicol

@Anon #6 – I actually prefer the Information Society cover.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBT1a9mLfL0
gber

Numan has pretty much reimaged himself, and I think his live performances are an amazing experience compared to the cardboard stuff we saw in the early years…

The who-did-it-first debates miss the point, it’s, who-did-it-well that counts. To the author’s point, I think Numan was a very effective artist for the cause. ’nuff said.
coolvoodoo

As a musician/songwriter whose seen hundreds of concerts from the sixties until now I can say that Numan’s concerts in the 80′s were some of the best, and he still totally rocks if you can manage to see a live show. As a lyricist, the imagery he evokes in many of his songs affect me more than any band that I can think of that is popular today. Unfortunately, the best Numan lyrics and songs are from the period after he was really popular…
seanwilliams

In my ASTROPOLIS series, I have a character who speaks solely in Gary Numan lyrics. A nightmare of licensing, but worth the effort to honor the crazed sci-fi prescience of this awesome dude. I’ve been a fan for thirty years. Great to see him getting some love!
Anonymous

This cover by the late Chris Whitley is actually far superior:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DN8Y5NhUbUY

…Because I say it is.
Salguod

As a lonely, computer-obsessed, science-fiction reading teen in the late 70s/early 80s, I felt that Gary Numan’s music was speaking directly to me. I was familiar with and liked Kraftwerk, but found Numan’s lyrics to be much more meaningful.

Did he predict Facebook? Obviously not. But I felt then (and still feel) that he was tapping into something inherently true about the nature of computer-mediated experience.

Are friends electric?

Read more in Music at Boing Boing

More at Boing Boing