Cyberpunk 2077, The Avalanches, and Rural Punk

While it had a tumultuous launch, Cyberpunk 2077 really is a hell of a game if you play it today. After its 2.0 patch came out back in September of last year, it became a beautiful, bounteous game far more representative of the CD Projekt Red we knew and loved from The Witcher 3.

As you cruise around Night City and its surroundings in a vintage Porsche 911, flip on the radio. There’s plenty of amazing music on here, from the extreme metal of 96.1 Ritual FM to the hip hop of 101.9 The Dirge. 

My favourite radio station sits at the far end of the dial: 107.3 Morro Rock Radio. Tune in to this station at any time and you’ll likely end up hearing a song from Samurai, Johnny Silverhand’s in-game band, portrayed musically by Swedish hardcore band Refused. 

Every so often though, you’ll end up hearing something altogether less common in the world of Cyberpunk: an acoustic guitar, with only the slightest distortion. You, my friend, have just encountered “So It Goes” by Fingers and the Outlaws. In the middle of Night City, it feels out of place – a song from another era. Drive out into the desert, however  and it all begins to slot into place. It’s a song that could have emanated from the Desert Sessions or ended one of Kyuss’ famous generator parties, making the dust resonate as revelers leave in various altered states.

Mellon Collie and the Infinite Rural Boredom

The track speaks of being a rural hoodlum (non-derogatory). It speaks of being an idiot youth in the middle of a big old nothing. It speaks to me precisely because of that.

In my youth, I never really got up to many hoodlum activities, a shy and anxious lad that I was, but I solidly belonged to that genre of person as a man in my late teens and early 20s. I’d have set off fireworks inside a house for something to do, or played music far too loudly in the middle of a farmer’s land. The thread of this genre of person, for me, starts with Kyuss’ generator parties and winds its way up to Wildflower, the second album by Australian plunderphonics outfit The Avalanches.

Released back when I was 23 and no longer living in a rural area, it still affected me deeply. Not only was it a love letter to psychedelic spirit journeys, it contained every genre of music that I loved, from hip-hop to chillwave. The album’s entire plot of sorts moves from a city to a more rural area in terms of vibe, while tripping your head off. Having recently done the journey in reverse, albeit sober, I got it, maaan.

Light Firecrackers While We Crack Cans of Beer

If it’s difficult for you to understand what I mean, listen to Wildflower and you’ll get it. If you don’t have time, the only song that really matters for this article is the penultimate track on the album: “Stepkids”. The song revolves around being a kid without any grand aspirations, in need of things like better clothes or a new asthma inhaler, but still making your own fun with whatever you could get.

The song’s core refrain describes cracking cans of beer, lighting up firecrackers and painting pentagrams and pot leaves at a giant drainpipe. It’s the sort of mindless shit that you get up to when you’re young and have nothing to do, no great aspirations, and very little money. It feels like an ode to being a misfit in a misfit town. Once again, I get it.

As Billy Pilgrim Says, “So It Goes”

So, how does all of this connect to Cyberpunk 2077, and more importantly to the wonderful “So It Goes?” At its core, “So It Goes” is a stoic phrase. Familiar to many people from Kurt Vonnegut’s masterpiece Slaughterhouse-Five, it’s about accepting the bad things in life and carrying on anyway. It’s perfect for a game like Cyberpunk 2077, where things rarely, if ever, go well for everyone involved.

The song of the same name has a fascinating history and boasts vocals from Honus Honus that lend themselves superbly to the song’s melancholic tone. The sense of being slightly lost in life is exemplified by the first verse’s lyric ‘maybe you coasted far too long’.

It’s the last two verses of “So It Goes” that really sum up the rural punk feeling:

“Is this all that there is even after 

Years of trial and error 

Learning how to love, be loved and destroyed   

Let’s board up the bedroom windows 

Fire off Roman candles 

Watch all the ghosts in our clothes 

Disappear.”

Much like with “Stepkids,” there’s a sense of youthful abandon in those lyrics. The sense of teenage desperation that comes from seeing a romance fail, perhaps without any one person being at fault, and seeing your trial and error not be as successful as you imagined it had been. It neatly encapsulates what makes Cyberpunk 2077 so great, and so tragic. You can do everything right and still get screwed over by circumstance. 

You can befriend Johnny and still have to say goodbye because he’s just that – a ghost in your clothes, going for one last ride in the land of the living before the inevitable occurs. Even though V survives the events of Cyberpunk, their future is far from certain, but they’re certainly going to spend their remaining time living on their own terms, trial and error be damned.

All that’s left is to do stupid stuff like you did before; in this case, deciding to say screw it and board up your windows and let off fireworks. These lyrics fit well with the idea of being a rural hoodlum, but above and beyond that, they’re a metaphor for being stuck doing the same things over and over until you eventually age out of it, disappearing from that life and exorcising the ghost in your clothes.

I Wonder How Many Friends Roll Past My House in the Night

So you’ve got these two songs and a loose idea of their similarities. But what is it that renders rural punk its own genre, beyond folk punk or hardcore from California suburbs? Rural punk is about isolation – you’re isolated from witnesses to your stupid hoodlum antics, sure, but you’re also isolated from other people.

I lived in rural areas for most of my life until my early 20s. I know what it is to feel isolated, when you only ever really see the same people, day in and day out. The great expanses around you end up feeling stifling, lacking new people. It’s a breeding ground for either extreme loneliness or load-bearing friendships, and for me, it was the former.

The two songs in question understand this: they know what it is to have the free reign to get up to your hoodlum antics while having it be balanced by the low stakes of rural life cutting deep into your soul. You see the same people, get captured by routine, and wind up painting pentagrams and pot leaves or being destroyed by tumultuous relationships because there’s really nothing else to do.

The antics are born of being bored, isolated and lonely, for the most part. These songs recognize that whether you’re Johnny Silverhand idly wondering where he’s buried or simply a bored teenager wondering what to do with your life, we’re all capable of experiencing extreme isolation, regardless of any external factors.

Rural punk might only exist in a handful of songs, but if you’ve ever been young and stuck in the middle of nowhere, whether in rural Spain as I was or out in the vast stretches of the Midwest, it’s an essential part of the punk landscape. I may be getting into my 30s, but the punk hoodlum lives on in me, and will do, forever. And it lives on in me every time I visit Night City.