Day: December 15, 2003

Billy Idol’s ‘Cyberpunk’

by

The future has imploded into the present. With no nuclear war, the new battlefields are people’s minds and souls. Megacorporations are the new government. The computer generated info-domains are the new frontiers. Though there is better living through science and chemistry, we are all becoming cyborgs.

The computer is the new “cool tool,” and though we say “all information should be free,” it is not. Information is power and currency in the virtual world we inhabit, so mistrust authority.

Cyberpunks are the true rebels. Cyberculture is coming in under the radar of ordinary society. An unholy alliance of the tech world, and the world of organized dissent.

Welcome to the cybercorporation.

Cyberpunks.

1993. Bill Clinton is beginning his presidency. The World Trade Center suffers its first terrorist attack. David Koresh and his followers die in Waco, Texas during a raid by ATF agents. Saddam Hussein orders the assassination of George Herbert Walker Bush. Cruise missiles repeatedly hammer Baghdad during the Iraq disarmament crisis.

Intel ships the first Pentium chips. A bug in a posting program sends a single message to 200 Usenet groups simultaneously, and the term “spam” is coined. The ‘net is still in its infancy, existing primarily through the green and amber glows of text-based computer terminals, accessible only through arcane Unix commands typed into keyboards by a legion of geeks (before the term “geek” gained street cred). Usenet denizens dreading the rush of “newbies” each September as college campuses opened and allowed new students onto the ‘net suddenly face the “September that never ended” when AOL opens Usenet access to its subscribers.

And Billy Idol discovers the power of computers, harnessing the power of Macintosh-based small-studio recording to produce his “Cyberpunk” album.

Cyberpunk

Read more

0 is also a number

by

Does anyone know how to access and rip the hidden tracks on the X-Files Songs in the Key of X soundtrack CD on a Mac?

For those who don’t know, the CD (a collection of music featured in the X-Files television show) contains a liner note that says, “Nick Cave and the Dirty Three would like you to know that ‘0’ is also a number.” When you put the CD in a CD player and, rather than hitting ‘Play’, you hit the ‘Rewind’ button (not the ‘Skip Back’ button), you can rewind to the -9:15 mark and find two hidden tracks by Nick Cave and the Dirty Three. The first is “Time Iesum Transeuntem et non Reverendem” (Dread the Passage of Jesus for He Will Not Return), and the second is a cover of the X-Files theme.

Unfortunately, iTunes doesn’t seem to want to scan backwards past the 0:00 mark! I can’t scan backwards, nor can I put a negative value into the ‘Start Time’ option. I looked at the audio file that the Finder displays, but it only reads as 3:25, so it looks like the Finder isn’t reading the extra information either. I even checked it on my “normal” CD player (as it has an optical audio out that I could plug into my G5), but it’s new enough that it isn’t reading the extra bits either.

Has anyone found a way to pull the hidden information off on a Mac? I’d love to know (or, alternately, if anyone happens to have a 128kbps AAC rip of the two tracks, that’d be nice too…)!