The New Yorker Radio Hour - William Gibson on the End of the Future, and a Visit with Thundercat

Episode Date: March 10, 2020

William Gibson has often been described as prescient in his ability to imagine the future. His special power, according to the staff writer Joshua Rothman, is actually his attunement to the present. In “Agency,” Gibson’s new novel, people in the future refer to our time as “the jackpot”—an alignment of climate effects and other events that produce a global catastrophe. The apocalyptic mind-set has already suffused our culture, Gibson believes. “How often do you hear the phrase ‘the twenty-second century’? [You] don’t hear it,” he points out. “Currently we don’t have a future in that sense.”  Plus: Briana Younger interviews Thundercat, a bassist, producer, and songwriter who was a key collaborator of Kendrick Lamar on the album “To Pimp a Butterfly,” and who makes quirky, slightly absurdist music of his own. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. There's an old reporter saying that prediction is the lowest form of journalism. Now, I wouldn't swear by that, but there's certainly some truth in it at least. Fiction, however, is an entirely different story. When it comes to predicting what the future is going to look like and be like and feel like, fiction might be the way to go. And nobody in our time can beat the novelist William Gibson at prediction. Gibson's new novel is called Agency. Here's Josh Rothman, an editor at The New Yorker. When William Gibson came up with the term cyberspace in the late 70s,

there was no real internet to speak of. He'd been walking around Vancouver, which is where he lived, and he'd noticed kids playing video games in video arcades. And he noticed that when you went to a video arcade, And you watch the kids, they would duck and weave as though they were in the game. And that alone was enough to get into his mind the idea that, yeah, we want to be in there. We want to be in the computer world. And in fact, that's true.

We do want to live in the computer world. So much of what we've done with this technology over the last 30 years, 35 years, has been about finding new ways to merge the digital space and the real space. finding ways to take a selfie and get it into the digital world as quickly as possible. He would be the first person to say he got a lot of technical details wrong about cyberspace. He pictured it as a virtual world, like a VR, like Tron. That's not what it turned out to be. It turned out to be the browser on your phone. But what he got right was that people really want to be in a virtual world all the time.

They're always thinking about wanting to be in a virtual world. And the thing is that, you know, that seems really few people. futuristic, but it was true in 1979 in Vancouver. You just had to see it. And that's Gibson's special superpower. Just to look at the world that we're in right now and to notice the parts of it that are futuristic. Gibson's idea is if you want to see the future,

you don't have to picture some totally different world. You just have to take seriously what you know already is coming. Like the scientists say climate change is coming. that's the future. And one of the things you have to do, therefore, is you have to constantly update your sense of what the present is. You have to really look at the present and take it on board. And that means that sometimes things happen in the present,

and they really mess up your concept of what the future was going to be. And that's what happened to Gibson when he was writing his new book. This book mutated out of the book that I was writing, the night of our most recent presidential election. I spoke to William Gibson a couple of weeks ago at a reading in Brooklyn. I had a book that I was thinking of as sort of a romp, but I woke up in the morning

and I realized that I'd never be able to write that book because that book was set in 2017, and I thought that zeitgeist starts working with is gone. Most people haven't noticed it yet, but it's gone. And by 2017, it'll be like really gone. After, you know, actually about three months of deep unhappiness, I realized one day that I was feeling a complete sense of unreality. Like I did not believe at that moment in the news feed.

And I thought, this is bullshit, this can't be happening. I'm dreaming. And then I thought, no, I'm having a surgical procedure. They've got me way down under, but I'm starting to come up. And that's why I'm starting to question this ludicrous drug reality that, and then I thought, no, this shit's real. I looked over at the laptop that contained my, I thought, dead novel. And I thought, what if Verity and Eunice are living in a stub in which that election went the other way?

So in Gibson's new book, it's called Agency. There are two time periods. There's a future and there's a present. And they've contacted each other. And the idea in the book is, whenever the future contacts the past, it makes a new timeline. It kind of makes a divergence like a fork in the road. And this new timeline is called a stub. The people in the future have an interest in what's happening in these stubs.

And that's because what lies between the stubs and them, or between us and the future, is something that Gibson calls the jackpot. And the jackpot is Gibson's term for basically, you know, the end of civilization in the natural world as we know it. Are people happier there? she asked. Happier than they were here, then. I gather they aren't. particularly. Pity, she said. Ready for tilapia tacos? Place on Tottenham Court Road. Better Mexican in your new stub, no doubt. Why aren't they happy there? The drivers for the jackpotter are still in

place, but with less talk at that particular point. He took a seat at the table. There's still a bit in advance of the pandemics, at least. She took the seat opposite. Nothing before the 20-20s has ever seemed entirely real to me. Hard to imagine they weren't constantly happy given all they still had. Tigers, for instance. So if you think about like a Michael Bay disaster movie, you know, it's one thing that does us in, like an asteroid or a plague or, you know, aliens, something like that, one thing. But that's not how Gibson thinks about this. The idea of the jackpot is if some of the stuff you read about in the paper that's happening right now, already, if all those scary things, you things just keep happening, you get the jackpot.

The reason it's called the jackpot is it's because, you know, it's like in the slot machine. If everything comes up cherries, if it turns out that the oceans do rise quite a lot, coronavirus actually is really bad, and there's actually many other coronaviruses, a lot of wildfires do happen and continue to happen. The hurricanes really are pretty bad. 80% of people die, and the result is a world that's clawing its way back, that's trying to survive and rebuild it. looks like this. To the horizon stretched a regularly spaced array of towers roughly similar in height.

Through which, she saw, lowering her gaze, wound a river's serpentine curves. There, said Rainey, pointing out something Verity couldn't distinguish. London eye, only tall thing aside from the original shard that you'll have seen before, they took down what was left of the rest. These are called shards, too, after the first one. and relatively few are habitations. What are they? Windows were lit, a few if the light she saw were windows.

They scrubbed the air, the woman said, behind them, now standing. An older, lower city at the feet of the towers, like lichen in comparison. There were forests, too, she saw, with greenways between them. That's the Thames? Of course, said Rainey. But with more bridges, at least two of them planted with what looked like forests of their own, and tributaries, none of which Verity remembered, some of them appeared to have been roofed with glass, illuminated. CG, Verity said, VR, A-R, a game. That's the commonest initial assumption, the woman said, on first seeing it,

though I suppose natives of eras earlier than yours might assume dream, hallucination, visit to a supernatural realm. You're saying it's the future? Entertain the idea, to one side, so to speak. A mere possibility. Gibson isn't saying that this is inevitable, that there's no possible future but this future. He's just saying, if you look at what's happening right now, this certainly seems to be eminently reasonable.

You're in a unique position of being someone who, for a really long time, has thought about an imagined the future. And how is that changed? How is our idea of the future changed over that span? Well, something that I find quite significant is that, you know, my childhood self watching the wooden TV would hear, hear or see the phrase, the 21st century, virtually every day, often several times every day, often with one or more. exclamation points following it.

It's like, it's coming the 21st century. This is back like in 1953 or something. And how often do you hear the phrase the 22nd century? Don't hear it.

Currently, we don't have a future in that sense. We no longer have that sort of cultural anticipation that we took for granted through most of the 20th century. I mean, I sometimes feel that the future

is sort of claustrophobically foretold. So like I think of like the Elon Musk future, which is, you know, all-powerful artificial intelligence takes over everything. And climate change happens and all the terrible things that will come from that happen. And in that sense, it feels like the future,

it's almost hard to think about because it feels closed off. I wonder, is that how you feel about the future? It isn't, I, hmm. Well, something I've watched, having been a science fiction fan since I was 12 or 13, I began to realize that when science fiction writers got old,

They started to complain about the world ending and everything going to hell in a handbasket. And it seems to me that probably when everyone gets old, the world does end because the world they grew up in starts to go away. But then there's this thing of sort of transferring all of that to a younger generation. So yeah, the world is ending, but young folks today,

you know, what can you expect? That's ancient. Well, it turns out that's ancient. You know, you can find that on pot shards from Babylon. It's always been going on. You can find it in ancient Greece. So I put it at the top of my list that kind of don't do things.

Like when you get old, don't be that guy. Don't be that guy because it's bullshit like things are going to go forward. And I think I was right, but now I find myself old and looking at a situation that really does not look good. And it has, like all of those grumpy old sci-fi uncles of mine, I heard moaning in the 70s and 80s about how the world was going to hell in a handbasket, they still believed in a future.

And now I'd like to believe in a future. and again I kind of go, well, human nature and kind of look at some of the worst examples of that around these days. And it doesn't really look good. And so I'm torn between believing that I'm just doing what the uncles have always done and that I'm recognizing something that we haven't ever, ever as a species,

actually seen before. The novelist William Gibson. He spoke with the New Yorker's Joshua Rothman at a live event at Murmur Theater in Brooklyn. Gibson's new book, Agency, is out now. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, and in a minute, our music editor talks with the artist known as Thundercat.

Stick around. You're listening to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. That's music by Thundercat, from his album coming out next month called It Is? what it is. Thundercat has cut an unusual path for himself. He was born Stephen Lee Bruner and started out playing bass with his father, who had played drums with Diana Ross and The Temptations.

Bruner was in a boy band and then, strangely enough, moved on to a punk band called Suicidal Tendencies. As a session bassist, he worked with Erica Badu, Childish Gambino, and the late rapper Mac Miller, who was also a close friend of his. Thundercat's particular way of merging jazz R&B, funk, and hip hop caught the attention of Kendrick Lamar, and they collaborated on Lamar's record to Pimp a Butterfly. Brianna Younger writes and edits music coverage for the New Yorker, and she talked with Thundercat last year while he was on a week-long residency at the Blue Note Jazz Club in New York.

I guess we'll start with where we are now, like with you in the midst of this residency. Like, how has that been going so far? Like, this is your first residency of this caliber? Yeah. Oh, ever. Yeah, like, I've never had a residency before. Well, congratulations. Thank you.

So people know you from, to Pimpa Butterfly. A lot of people, at least, were introduced to you that way. But you also, you know, have a long resume from suicidal tendencies to playing with Erica Badu. But let's go to the very, very beginning. And what even made you pick up a base to begin with? Well, I think I just had a natural affinity for like swords and, you know, sticks. You know, there's that one kid that, you know,

they always got to tell them to put stuff down or you're just playing a little too rough with things. There's a bit of that. But then there's also mostly my dad that inspired me because it's like growing up in a house of musicians. You know, it's not saying that, I mean, it's indirectly saying. you're going to play an instrument. Like, it doesn't matter, you know. It's intense, you know, and it's like it's not always for the feign of heart. You know, and you have a family that does music because everybody has an opinion.

You know, everybody feels things differently. And you have to respect that, but, you know, it's like it's just you learn and you grow. You still grow and learn together, but it's like, it's just different. Me and my older brother would grow up playing together more than me and my younger brother. And in growing up with my older brother being, you know, that he's this virtuoso drummer, it was very intimidating, but it caused me to grow. You know, if I didn't have my brother around, I wouldn't play the way I play. So some of your early records like young jazz giants sound more in the vein of traditional jazz than, you know, as your work is Thundercat. How did you develop that sound and what would become the Thundercat voice over time?

The real thing is that I started writing music from my instrument. And a lot of the time when you have an instrument that you play, it can become a bit of a role. You know, where like I was saying, you start to fall into the idea of like, I'm working, so it's cool. But I would push out a bit, you know, and because I didn't play piano, you know, because I wasn't like this guy trying to be this R&B singer, I would always create from my bass. and once I realized that that was an option, it kind of took over, took on its own life. You've talked in the past about kind of your decision to play six strings versus four strings and how in your collaborations with other artists, that was kind of a thing where people may have wanted you to play more contained or essentially to shrink yourself.

So why the six string, like what are some of the nuances of that and how has it allowed you to become the artist that you saw yourself as? It's like, you know, like I would say, like sometimes when people see the six-string, it's immediately intimidating or it's immediately denotes to you about to play too much. It's just like, you know, you know,

but a lot of the time I would be writing and that would be the best tool to write with for me because it gave me the most facility. And I wouldn't always take it out with me, but I would always be playing it. six string on records that I would record for myself. It didn't become a reality until I had my other bases stolen, where I had to take that base out, and that's where it started. So your sense of humor is such a big part of what people know of you. Like, it's in your records, it's in your interviews.

Like, anytime people hear Thundercat, it's a very lighthearted kind of situation, but, you know, life gets real, and that's also in the records. And I feel like, dream. drunk was like the perfect culmination of I'm I'm this funny guy but also it's not always great. Yeah. You know, music sometimes can be like therapy. It can be, you know, you know, soft and gentle or it can be really, you know, intense and abrasive. And I don't know. I feel like humor is for the soul. You know what I mean? Like it's it helps you get through. even if it hurts, it's still better to laugh, I think. One of the hardest things that I would imagine about being an artist is those tough times

and the idea that you're expected to kind of process things in this very public way. Yeah. Obviously, you've dealt with a lot of loss in your lifetime, but is that something you're filling now with the recent loss of MAC and this idea that you'll be expected to somehow process this on your next record? Well, I think it's the inevitable, first of all. It's like real life in art, you know, the imitation thing is real. I don't think it's expected.

I mean, if I put out a trap album next, I would imagine that's just as expected. Fair enough. But it's just, moments like that, it's just what it is. It is what it is. I can't make up for something as precious as a life lost like Max. You know, it's just, it's no way it's not going to touch different places in my life, you know. There was a movie that came out some years ago with Denzel Washington and John Goodman, and it was about this, like, demon that would follow him through the city.

Fallen? You remember it. There were moments, like, after he died that felt a, bit like fallen or like they live because it was like everybody was in my personal life in that one moment and I couldn't walk down the street without somebody looking and saying I'm sorry or like trying to catch my eyes and it was a bit intense for me at first but the truth is everybody mourns you know and Mac didn't just touch my life that was just what that was proof of and I had to see through that you know and like realize it is big again it's bigger than me you know so my processing

of it is like I said it's going to get touched. Back to Tipinpea Butterfly. Was that different than anything you've done prior? Oh yeah. That was a very demanding moment. You know, to this day, I still think I look back on it and I think about how much output was going on in that moment. And along with that, you know, realizing that that is the genius of Kendrick Lamar's writing

and like it's rare you know it's like a lot of the time especially in the rap game rappers get far off into thinking it's just them kendrick was not afraid of anything like and that would inspire me all the time he would run up on all of it we would have conversations about joe henderson we have you know talk about those miles albums we talk about all kinds of stuff like that It was just this continuous dance of like, it was almost like a trust fall. It was like I didn't know where I was going. And it was one of those things where when that album was finished, being there for the very last mastering session up until 7, 8 o'clock in the morning. And I went home.

I just almost fainted and cried because it was just so, I was like I had gone as far as I felt I could. I had given it all I could. You know, if I had lost like 100 pounds. that would have made sense, you know, but it was just like, I put my all. That's what I have from that, you know, it's like, and then we look up and then it's, you know, it's like, oh, 11 Grammys, you were like, Jesus, you know. I was going to say, did you know? Did you know it would be this?

No. I didn't even have a suit on at the Grammys. It really changed jazz and improvisational music. It wasn't just the awards. It became a political statement. you see what it sparked. As much as everybody, there's moments that moments in history when we look back,

there's Dave Chappelle, there's Barack Obama, and then there's that time when Kendrick put out the Pimp of Butterfly. And it pushed, it made people uncomfortable, it made everything a bit disheveled, it brought the cream to the top, it shook everything up. And I think this album is, this is definitely one of those albums that when we look back,

it will stay in the test of time. Oh, of course. You know, it's just thank Kendrick for being the vessel, you know what I mean, like letting it happen. Because he could have easily been like, you know, I'm going to just put out this trap album. I think you have a trap album on the way. Yeah, I'm just.

You keep saying this. I think you're hitting. You think I'm joking. Love it. Thank you so much. Absolutely. The musician known as Thundercat. He spoke with the New Yorker's Brianna Younger last year.

Thundercat goes on tour this month for his new album. It is what it is. That's the New Yorker Radio Hour for this week. I'm David Remnick, and thanks for joining us. Please join us next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garvis of Tune Arts, with additional music by Alexis Quadrado.

This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Carrillo, Riannon, Corby, Calaliyah, David Krasnau, Gauphan and Putubuele, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses, and Stephen Valentino, with help from Alison McAdam, Morgan Flannery, Meng Fei-Chen, and Emily Mann. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.