WHAT COMES TO MIND … MI-SEX, YOUR WORLD, OUR FUTURE
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- 4 min read
Here we have the next instalment in What Comes To Mind, an alternative series in the Wind Back Wednesday space, based on the work of the brilliant photographer Stuart Spence.
Each time, he will dig out a photo from his archives going back almost 50 years and challenge me to respond with what comes to mind when I look at that image. It might be serious or ridiculous, personal or historical but it will be inspired by a photo I’ve not seen before, and maybe even unseen by anyone beyond Stuart himself.
This week, Steve Gilpin looks ahead and finds us fully musked.
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NO ONE – or at least no one with cash, clout or a media platform, with aspirations to fly to Venus, run a Logan’s Run-style state or singlehandedly repopulate the white tribe – want to admit when art not only gets it right but gets it right in advance. They can’t even write code dude, what do those poncy types prancing about in a filmclip or doled up in a paint-spatted smock or opining over a line of dialogue know about anything eh?
Especially Australian ones. Especially especially Australian ones who were actually New Zealanders who we appropriated on the basis they were here long enough to get a round in so they’re ours now. Arse end of the universe my friend. Arse. End. And I don’t care what kind of sex it is, his, yours or Mi.
But wait, says Steve Gilpin frontman of said Mi-Sex. Or he would if he were still able to: he left us in 1992, having not recovered from an awful car crash. He was only 42, not that much older than Michael Hutchence was when he left a few years later.
(Which reminds me, you’ll be shocked to hear that in the various versions of Mi-Sex that have performed since, he was never replaced by Jon Stevens. I know, what the hell? Pretty sure that is in any contract signed by “classic era” Australian pub rock bands, that a missing lead singer will at the very least temporarily have Stevens take a run at the job. But there was another Noiseworker who stood in for a good while, Steve Balbi, so it’s alright. But I digress.)
You see, Gilpin knew. He told us, but we didn’t listen. Or if we did we didn’t read further, think harder and resist more.
Think of Mi-Sex songs Space Race, Computer Games, and People, a kind of Bradbury or Heinlein or Asimov-like trilogy of science fiction prescience.
When you listen to the news now telling us about drones wreaking havoc on behemoth military machines, small, lightweight and cheap products needing multi-million dollar rocketry to counter it, remember Gilpin sang in Space Race of “Crystal domes and bleeping things/Silent but for the wind/Flying low and clipping trees/Trying to dodge the military”. Hmm, I know.
Hearing another Trumpian climate denier argue with a researcher, a covid “sceptic” berate you for not taking the red pill, an RFK anti-vaxxer sagely advising “do your own research”, can’t you hear, from the same song, that thinking summed up with ”Governments see politics/And scientists see science tricks/They're overdosed on statistics/And nothing's in between for them”? Uncanny, no?
What are we on? “I'm programmed to a schedule/What will the answer be?/Is it suicide run 'til the work gets done/'Cause the matrix grid don't say?” Ah, yeah, I reckon Computer Games got that right, even down to the red pill itself, The Matrix. Spooky, right?
And if this doesn’t tell you our Kiwi-as-near-enough-Australian friends weren’t on to something about social media, pile-ons and general online rage, nothing else will: “Get a message to my mother/What number would she be?/There's a million angry citizens/Looking down their tubes at me”.
Hear that pew pew pew? Listen again: “Com-pu-pu-pu-pu-pu-pu-pu-pu-pu-pu-pu-pu-pu/Computer games.”
(Another digression to say that, sadly, not even Gilpin and friends were perfect in their foresight. As someone who lost a lot of old work, wiped out and never recovered, in The Great Carlingford Crash of 2005, I wish I had not been so blithely of the view that “There's safety in numbers, they say/'Cause the figures never lie/No perfect person's ever noticed one computer die”.)
From computers it is but a short step to biology then to the Doge, a new world freed of some of the constraints petty rules imposed on even giants like certain South African man-children fascists with more cash than care. Boundaries like morals, concern for others, fitting into nature so we can survive.
Take a ketamin hit, put on that stupid voice and ask yourself, as People predicted, “And what would happen to the family/When the day comes when the child no longer/Owes his existence to two biological parents?”
And now imagine adding “Genetic engineering/Life can now begin in a test tube/The idea both fascinates and appeals to me.” For surely our new overlord is exactly the sort of person who would disdainfully cast an eye on we mere peons. “Look at all the people in their houses/People on the stairs/People in their visions/You see them everywhere”.
What are we to him? Why worry about us when he can show us another AI-created "reality"?
“People cry/People live, people die/People laugh (ha, ha, ha)/Yes, they laugh (ha, ha, ha)/We're all laughing.”
Mi-Sex saw the future. Steve Gilpin told us about the future. The future is now. And where the hell is Noiseworks? Exactly. Are you a clone?
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Find more work by Stuart Spence on Instagram @stuart_spence
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