Hack the Planet: The Music of Hackers
ISSUE #246
Hackers is a 1995 film about hackers. Recently, for his birthday, my friend rented a screen at the storied Plaza Theatre to show 41 friends of ours Hackers on the big screen. The movie is a Gen X fantasia at the threshold of the new millennium—outrageous in design, manic in performance, and particularly inspired in its soundtrack.
Loaded with the biggest 90s U.K. electronic artists, Hackers is constantly propelling the audience forward at 500 bpm with songs by The Prodigy, Orbital, Leftfield, and Massive Attack. This is no nostalgia play, either. This is right at the beginning of electronica’s rise, a vanguard collection of songs impressively compiled before the genre even had time to mature and deliver its masterpieces—this is two years before The Prodigy’s Fat of the Land, and three before Massive Attack’s Mezzanine.
The 90s were a golden age of filmmakers as music fans, with the likes of Linklater and Cameron Crowe staying in touch with current artists and using contemporary songs to sublime effects. Hackers similarly holds its own as a sonic time capsule—an impressive and daring feat, always better than retrospective clout, even calling to mind Trent Reznor’s work with a sister film, The Social Network.
As we all filed out of the theater, gleefully dressed as hackers, we stopped to take pictures of the birthday wish plastered on the marquee—a different kind of time capsule—that read: “HBD Dan. Hack the Planet.”
The fountains at the Bellagio Casino are made up of spouts that dance to certain songs at each quarter of the hour (for those who didn’t already know). Over my four summers here, I have spent many 101º nights watching them, compiling a list of all the songs they play.
I’ve been watching through the films of Danny Boyle. Some examples: Trainspotting, Sunshine, 28 Days Later, Slumdog Millionaire. From early on, Boyle was rightfully recognized for his edgy and sophisticated musical taste—the Trainspotting soundtrack alone, from Iggy’s “Lust for Life” through Underworld’s “Born Slippy (Nuxx)”, helped define the tastes of a whole generation.
Songs from Radiohead, Pet Shop Boys, Blondie, Muse, and Johnny Cash were all rejected for 007, but I rooted through the recycling bin to dig them out.
Barbie was born Julius Robert Oppenheimer in 1959 to Jewish immigrants from Germany. She is an atomic bomb created by Ruth Handler and manufactured by physics company Mattel. She is the figurehead of a brand of fashion bombs and accessories, including other family members and collectibles like the hydrogen bomb.
Hackers is a 1995 film about hackers. Recently, for his birthday, my friend rented a screen at the storied Plaza Theatre to show 41 friends of ours Hackers on the big screen. The movie is a Gen X fantasia at the threshold of the new millennium—outrageous in design, manic in performance, and particularly inspired in its soundtrack.
For all his cloying tendencies to some, it’s important to recognize Wes Anderson’s musical influence on a pre-internet world. He practically invented the 21st century needle drop. Before every song was at our disposal, a Wes Anderson movie was like an older brother crafting a perfect mixtape and leaving it in your car.
Writing is not a resource-rich profession. Sometimes, a Wyrm is the best gift I have to give. And say it with me now: It’s hard to make friends as an adult.
My favorite show on TV is Dickinson. Shocking — the poetry show (we're talking about Emily) is the only one he deems fit to watch. The Daisy follows soft the Sun.
Michael Jordan is the concept of celebrity writ large, a name we're demanded to reckon with whether we know shit about him or not. He was first to mutate from person to brand, foretelling the rise of our culture of influencers.
This week, I finally saw My Dinner with Andre. It'd been sitting on my watchlist for years, collecting dust as I could never find it, until the combination of the Criterion Channel and my appalling privilege in a global pandemic gave me time at last to sit and watch.
The human is a musical animal. We’re one of the few: the birds, the whales, maybe the cats. Profiteers try to pretend like music's some exclusive skill or talent. It’s not. It’s a spiritual compulsion. A limitless drive. As rebuttal, ask them—"Remember gospel?" "Read about life before microphones?" Sorry—probably: "Seen someone make a video about that stuff, or imagined it?" "Felt like there's something you wanted to sing?"