E-mail to Berlin: early mentions of the digital cyber space age in music

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you: Double Date's 'E-mail to Berlin!', a once hilarious failure that's now a proper cult song, not in the least because of the atrocious vocals:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCBmuxH0XJw

Simpler times. But: What are the best and earliest mentions of digital connectivity in music? Yes, there's Dopplereffekt, there's Arpanet, there's Grandaddy's 'The Sophtware Slump' in 2000. There's Ok Computer in 1997.

There must be more. Hit me with music mentioning the World Wide Web, E-Mail or Cyber Space, preferably before it became common language or outdated.

"E-Mail My Heart," Britney Spears (1999)

I hope you aren't only looking for good music.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWRMvC8mXAA

Poe's "Hello": "I'm cut off from out main line / Like a disconnected modem" (1995)

Mousse-T's "Horny": "I sent a message through the Internet but it rejected" (1998)

Was about to say Mousse T - a line that sounded as wrong then as it does now

I posted on facebook a few months ago about how every time I hear it in the wild I get caught up in wondering what messaging platform the singer was using.

Obviously:

Kate Bush - Deeper Understanding (1989)

And a direct descendant of that is Happy Rhodes' "100 Years" (1998) which is about a computer network that survives after humanity is wiped out.

Royal Trux - "The United States vs One 1974 Cadillac El Dorado Sedan" ("the will of the authority / is the will of the Internet")

Aaron Carter's "My Internet Girl" (2000) is super creepy.

Would expect to put Billy Idol's Cyberpunk LP from 1993 here, but think it's almost certainly too terrible to check out, has anyone actually listened to it?

Poe's "Hello": "I'm cut off from out main line / Like a disconnected modem" (1995)

― Tim F, Wednesday, September 26, 2018 12:30 AM (ten minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Brilliant example. God I miss Poe.

I posted on facebook a few months ago about how every time I hear it in the wild I get caught up in wondering what messaging platform the singer was using.

― Tim F, Wednesday, September 26, 2018 12:34 AM (twelve minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This HAS to be ICQ!

TLC's "Fanmail" (1999):

Said I got an email today
Kinda thought that you forgot about me
So I wanna hit you back to say
Just like you, I get lonely

this similar thread is largely joeks but may be helpful:

List all of the un-ironic references to the internet in pop music

Holger Czukay - Rhythms Of A Secret Life (Moving Pictures, 1993) has some rambling about cyberspace and "the matrix."

2 Unlimited Info Superhighway from 1994 was one of the first mentions of internet/email in mainstream music I think?

D'Cuckoo was an early favorite of the Mondo 2000 set. I remember them playing early across-the-internet shows in 1990 or so at Electronic Cafe in Santa Monica.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6yzWW18RfU

Kraftwerk's 1981 Computerwelt LP, of course:

"Computerwelt"
Interpol und Deutsche Bank, FBI und Scotland Yard
Interpol und Deutsche Bank, FBI und Scotland Yard
Finanzamt und das BKA, Haben unsere Daten da
Finanzamt und das BKA, Haben unsere Daten da
Automat und Telespiel
Leiten heute die Zukunft ein
Computer für den Kleinbetrieb
Computer für das eigene Heim
Reisen, Zeit, Medizin, Unterhaltung
Reisen, Zeit, Medizin, Unterhaltung

"Computer Love"
I call this number
For a data date

Youtubing the latter I came across this song I hadn't heard before:

Zapp - "Computer Love" (1985)
You know, I've been searching for someone
Who can share that special love with me
And your eyes have that glow
Could it be your face I see on my computer screen

Need a special girl
To share in my computer world
I no longer need a strategy
Thanks to modern technology

I believe that Kraftwerk wrote 'Home Computer' before home computers were widely available (1981)

Kraftwerk invented internet dating with Computer Love

Computer Love might seem an obvious call but it's not really about digital connectivity. You'd probably contact a "data dating" service by telephone or in an office and a computer would 'match' your profile with others. Then you'd get a printout...

Applies to Kraftwerk and Zapp I guess.

Even more off-topic, but for an earlier song about pre-internet computer dating: France Gall w/ "Computer Nr. 3", a cheery if slightly pitchy German Eurovision heat runner-up from 1968
https://genius.com/France-gall-der-computer-nr-3-lyrics (video on youtube but not linking as offtopic)

(lyrics by Georg Buschor and music by Christian Bruhn, who also scored Captain Future and Timm Thaler as well as a lot of schlager, adverts and other TV shows that were ubiquitous in badly dubbed form on British 80s children's TV)

on the one hand I feel funny thinking of anything from after I got online in '96 as "early", on the other I'm finding it hard to find any real examples from before 2000, or at all: I just listened to a couple of things I thought I remembered having a jacking-into-the-matrix cyberpunk vibe in the mid-90s and found no actual concrete references

www.pitchshifter.com is an album by the British industrial band Pitchshifter, released in 1998.

No idea if they were the first band to do that but they certainly beat Jethro Tull to the punch!

You'd probably contact a "data dating" service by telephone or in an office and a computer would 'match' your profile with others. Then you'd get a printout...

This is still digital, no? I have no idea how these services worked, maybe everyone was manually reading out all the answers over the phone and a patient clerical worker on the other line was turning them into punch cards, but I thought at least some of this was done by electronic pulses - like how touch-tone phones tell the switching office computer what number you're dialing, or Telex type systems.

The first home computer boom was in the late 70s, it was just the province of nerds, hobbyists, hackers, and people who were engineers in their day jobs. The Wozniak Apple I was 1976, the TRS-80 and the Commodore PET were 1977, etc. It was by no means a true mass market even by 1982, but I have to imagine it would have been on the radar of people like Kraftwerk.

*cough* there were PCs in my public school in 1979 FYI (it was a big deal when we went from 2K to 4K of RAM)

I think my dad was actually running a computer store as a Kaypro dealer by 1982

Where did you go to school?

central Virginia, decent tax base but still a mix class-wise, this was back when public schools actually had money

Computer dating obviously inovlved computers, but you weren't accessing a network in any 'connectivity' sense. You weren't even connected directly to other users.

You'd fill out or answer a questionnaire, and yes somebody would usually type that into a computer, although at some point there may have been telephone touch-pad based services. I imagine the French Minitel system would have had something like that (had the French ever needed help getting eet on of course.)

Then you'd get a printout of matches, or maybe get to hear recorded messages or watch video messages on tape.

yeah I don't think Compuserve came along until '82 or '83. I do remember playing an ASCII version of Donkey Kong on dialup in 82-83.

xp Interesting — I was in Northern Va.; was just telling my wife last night how we had PCs in 2nd grade and learned “Logo” programming (moving the little turtle around).

I mean Computer World is about computers and the title song probably about networks but what Computer Love references is Data Dating.

at some point there may have been telephone touch-pad based services

right - so, "digital connectivity," yah?

put another way i think what the thread reveals is not so much the prescience of any particular artists, but that outside of pop music, discussions of a computer-networked society go back decades before Netscape Navigator. in many ways by the 1970s the implementation was far enough along that it's surprising there aren't MORE songs about it, and it's interesting to get pop back into the same room with your Haraways as well as your Fullers and McLuhans. but like "computer world" the song is all about this massive complex of giant corporations and state institutions linked by telex machines.

right - so, "digital connectivity," yah?

You can call it that but why would you want to argue that entering some options into one computer on a phone is anything like 'cyberspace' or a network? It's no proto-internet and you're not connected to other people. It's just an automated questionnaire system.

If computer dating even existed in that form.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1j2uzvWMDo

well cuz as i tried to argue, I think the thread (and histories of digital humanity) are more interesting, not less, when allowing for a continuity with earlier systems. it also helps get us around "wow, you had snapchat in middle school, you're like a whole different generation than us" silliness. put another way, why the emphasis on networks? machines that think and talk back, accessed at physical remove, is already pretty "digital cyber space age." not sure "songs about long-distance interactions with only non-networked computers" desperately needs splitting off in its own thread.

thread did get me to remember the early 00s parody record label Clubbo.com and its "Convoy"-styled AOL paean, "Log On," a true classic.

why the emphasis on networks?

I'm all for digressions and expansions but personally speaking because this is specifically what the OP was asking for.

I think computer dating as generally conceived before the adoption of the web was a rather different thing. I'm sure there were niche dating services for nerds on Compuserv and what have you but for the most part it remained the preserve of specialist agencies who would claim to be combining psychology and science and using COMPUTER MAGIC to find your ideal partner. It wasn't about either networks of computers or peer to peer connection.

It doesn't need its own thread.

I'm not sure I'd count this as "early", but judging from some of the other dates on this thread it counts: Denim - Internet Curtains (1997)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4BPMKrT0ro

Prince - Emale has to be one of the first? Its from 1996:

"W-w-w-dot-emale-dot-com
The king takes the pawn
W-w-w-dot-emale-dot-com
It's on, it's on, it's on"

Would have been a pretty lucrative domain to squat and sell on later if he had thought about it.

the OP asked for "digital connectivity" and then when i invoked "digital connectivity" you said "you could call it that, but" --- which imho is getting us into no-true-scotsman territory?

This Basil Kirchin - Silicon Chip track is a good example of a pop cultural conception of computers as The Future that has nothing to do with networks. You can obviously find tons of examples like it (not all as fun and groovy). So that distinction is valid and interesting, when does network awareness become a thing. That's what I read the OP as asking.

https://youtu.be/oDU6P01yvnU

the OP asked for "digital connectivity

But more specifically -

Hit me with music mentioning the World Wide Web, E-Mail or Cyber Space

fwiw my point was not that "computer world" and "computer love" are vaguely about computers as the Future but that they specifically are dealing with the digital cyber space age, just as numerous observers had been since at least mcluhan, stewart brand, ant farm etc. we can split hairs about the technology of computer dating in 1985, or what roger troutman might have been imagining it would soon be. maybe he got into a discussion of it on The Well that year for all we know. but what people imagined it as was, you're interacting with a computer (perhaps over the phone lines), it does some thinking for you, and it talks back linking you up with a match. that's extremely "cyber" imho in terms of the offloading of consciousness, physical remove from the thinking machine, the new forms of consciousness and social interaction that get worked out with this technology etc.... as much as any of the stuff haraway is discussing in the cyborg manifesto.

if there was a song from 1992 hat went "I met my girl on a BBS, lord / It's love at 9600 baud" would you be like "yeah sure but technically that is just one PC dialing up another PC, not a network" ?

Basement 5 (featuring Dennis Morris - the guy who created the Metal Box design and packaging for PIL, and the bass player for B.A.D and later, Dreadzone) also had a track called 'Silicon Chip' but a bit later in 1980.

xpost okay so only those three exact terms? this is silly. idk, not like i have a million more examples anyway. i've said my piece and it's LBI's thread.

we can split hairs about the technology of computer dating in 1985

We can!

And I was thinking 1981 (but the same goes for Troutman; he no longer needs a strategy because the computer will do the match making.)

Kraftwerk sing -

I call this number
For a data date

As I was saying, I don't think the connotation of "data dating" at the time was so much about interacting with or through computers. The computer's role was to do the number crunching profile matching. He's not using a modem, he's calling a number. One imagines he's calling either the dating agency to speak to an operative, or calling one of his matches. That's the image I have and how I suspect (or recall) it would have read in 1981.

Weirdly adversarial thread

xpost okay so only those three exact terms?

All the cues I see in the OP refer to email, cyberspace and the internet (i.e. networks) so I took that to be the loose brief because "post any old songs what mention compooters" seems too broad and unlikely.

And Computer Love I've always thought (while being about loneliness and alienation in the technological age or whatever) referenced that old fashioned type of "computer dating" rather than predicting Tinder as such.

Surely dating agencies' version of "computer dating" was just dumping ppl's paper questionnaires into a spreadsheet and then searching for the highest number of shared interests

(if even that and it wasn't the sole operator of the business reading the handful of submissions they got in the same room as a PC they used for their accounts)


www.pitchshifter.com is an album by the British industrial band Pitchshifter, released in 1998.

― Gavin, Leeds, Wednesday, September 26, 2018 9:07 PM (yesterday)

No idea if they were the first band to do that but they certainly beat Jethro Tull to the punch!

― Gavin, Leeds, Wednesday, September 26, 2018 9:08 PM (yesterday)

www.tism.wanker.com is the fifth album by Australian alternative rock group TISM (This Is Serious Mum), released in 1998. The album title references an internet URL which, at the time of release, was a subdomain (of wanker.com) provided by a friendly person overseas who had registered wanker.com, as TISM were not able to obtain their preferred domain, wanker.com.au, due to Australian domain regulations. However, the web hosting fees were not paid, subsequently it was taken down by the hosting ISP several months after launch and has not been available since.

wow this is rapidly drifting into turrican territory. again: "fwiw my point was not that 'computer world' and 'computer love' were vaguely about computers as the Future but that they specifically are dealing with the digital cyber space age." but go ahead and attribute a dopey spelling of "computers" to me if it makes you feel better?

we can split hairs about the technology of computer dating in 1985

I was going to mention Neil Young's "Sample and Hold" from 1982 here, but, on reading the lyrics, it seems to be about androids.

fwiw my point was not that 'computer world' and 'computer love' were vaguely about computers as the Future

Fwiw you seem to have incorrectly inferred that I said you said that they were.

but go ahead and attribute a dopey spelling of "computers" to me if it makes you feel better?

Also something you have mistakenly inferred. That's not something I did or would do to "make myself feel better." But go ahead and attack me for no reason.

but that they specifically are dealing with the digital cyber space age.

Computer World is (although it's a vague phrase - maybe you mean in some vague public conception sense.)

But I think what Computer Love actually describes is probably that rather low tech "computer dating", although yes you can argue even that is a bit "cyber" I suppose. Using a telephone is "cyber" so whatevs.

I call this number
For a data date

Neil Peart was another relatively early adopter (1996) with 'Virtuality' from Rush's 'Test For Echo':

'Net boy, net girl
Send your signal 'round the world
Let your fingers walk and talk
And set you free
Net boy, net girl
Send your impulse around the world
Put your message in a modem
And throw it in the Cyber Sea'

first hit record to mention the Internet/www?

Although these are some spectacularly badly written lyrics, they prophesize the internet of today surprisingly well for 1994. No wide-eyed techno utopia for Ray & Anita:

Technology
Virtual Society
Info superhighway interaction
Into the future, into the future
Technology
See the world progressing all around us, it's a virtual society
Info superhighway interaction, computer pal or enemy
So communicate with me
Won't you interact with me?
Technicians, technique, technology
It's the most important thing in the industry
It's going further nowadays, 'cause they want to get paid
Every day new discovery and plans to be made
Now get connected like an electric wire
Look out for the shock, look out for the fire
Just imagine how it would be
Without the thing they call "technology".
Interact with me
Interact with me
Info superhighway
Technicians, technique, technology
It runs the world and society
Digital revolution, technical solutions
For some it only brings more and more confusion
Do we still talk about civilization
'Cause we gotta look out for the computer invasion
Radio, telephone, or TV..
Would it be there without technology?
Into the future
Into the future
Energy from the inner mind
Technology
So communicate with me
Want you interact with me
Info superhighway interaction
Technology
Technology
Technology

Earliest mention of the internet in a song or title

THAT'S the thread I was looking for earlier, thank you