Some 35 years after Gary Numan cast himself as the android pop star of your future shock nightmares, I would guess he looks out at the Daft Punk landscape of 2013 and thinks “hey wait a damn second here…”
Using a synthesizer hooked up to a guitar pedal, Gary changed the face of pop music with “Are Friends Electric” and “Cars” and he changed it so thoroughly that all these years later he still seems like a post-modernists and when you watch everyone from Tune-Yards to Ed Sheeran you are seeing a variant on the post-punk one hit wonder.
Or rather, two hit wonder. But who can build a career on just two hits? I would claim the minimum needed is five big hits. Then in concert you can open with one, leave two for the middle and play one for the penultimate song of the set and one for the encore.
But it looks like Numan is a little more culty than that. Both of the albums the songs were off were pretty damn big hits and his subsequent career is just a series of replicas that failed to ignite the world but for those who got it were a surrender to the machine. The beeping rhythm of “Cars” is something that seems to follow you everywhere, it is like the sound of beginning of the finale of organic pop, very Philip K. Dick, very follow the machine into the soul of the man stuff.
This year, Numan has released a live album and a remix of his 2011 Dead Moon Falling album, and between the two I remain unconvinced of Numan’s meaning, of his musical alchemy. In a word: he’s a post-futurist in android drag. He is like Bowie with all ambivalence and subtext removed.
So why go and see him at Music Hall Of Williamsburg, Tuesday, October 29th. Because he is like Bowie with all ambivalence and subtext removed: all that’s left is a profound alienation.