Judy is a Cyberpunk

When comparing “God Save the Queen” to Neuromancer looking for makes the novel cyberpunk instead of plan science fiction we have to look at what makes “God Save the Queen” punk and what from that carries over thematically and aesthetically to Gibson’s novel.

One of the most obvious elements of “God Save the Queen” is the song’s attack on the English monarchy and society’s acceptance of it. The song presents a very negative picture of England’s government, in a way saying that England is using the monarchy to fool its people. This sort of carries over to Neuromancer, in the book there is defiantly a sense that the common people aren’t doing that well, and that there are those that have far more power than them, such as Case’s former employers, and they are hanging over the whole story. However the distrusting those  in power and protest are not exclusive to punk, folk and soul artist such as Bob Dylan and Sam Cooke were making protest music in the 1960s and no one is gonna argue that they are punk. So we must continue.

Another major aspect of punk is it’s attitude and aesthetic. In “God Save the Queen” this is expressed through the instrumentation, loud upfront guitars played straight and to the point, as well as the vocals snide and aggressive delivery, give the song a dirty, abrasive, and arrogant feel. This of course carries over to the novel and we see it all over the place. We see it in our main character, he’s mostly unconcerned with others and he thinks he’s better than everyone else, which he might just be with hacking. We also see this in the books world it dirty, rundown, and filled with society’s cast offs.

Lastly and probably most importantly, punk at its core was a movement against the virtuosity of  blues and prog rock at the time to make music that was less overwrought and more straightforward in sound and more accessible in style, music that sounds like it could be made by people in a garage. Cyberpunk does that with science fiction moving away from fiction about those space captains and genius level scientists, shifting the narrative to characters that could be us or people we know if that was the world we lived in. Punk and cyberpunk are the sum of each of these aspects.