Hack the Planet: The Music of Hackers
ISSUE #246
Hackers is a 1995 film about hackers. Recently, for his birthday, my friend rented a screen at the storied Plaza Theatre to show 41 friends of ours Hackers on the big screen. The movie is a Gen X fantasia at the threshold of the new millennium—outrageous in design, manic in performance, and particularly inspired in its soundtrack.
Loaded with the biggest 90s U.K. electronic artists, Hackers is constantly propelling the audience forward at 500 bpm with songs by The Prodigy, Orbital, Leftfield, and Massive Attack. This is no nostalgia play, either. This is right at the beginning of electronica’s rise, a vanguard collection of songs impressively compiled before the genre even had time to mature and deliver its masterpieces—this is two years before The Prodigy’s Fat of the Land, and three before Massive Attack’s Mezzanine.
The 90s were a golden age of filmmakers as music fans, with the likes of Linklater and Cameron Crowe staying in touch with current artists and using contemporary songs to sublime effects. Hackers similarly holds its own as a sonic time capsule—an impressive and daring feat, always better than retrospective clout, even calling to mind Trent Reznor’s work with a sister film, The Social Network.
As we all filed out of the theater, gleefully dressed as hackers, we stopped to take pictures of the birthday wish plastered on the marquee—a different kind of time capsule—that read: “HBD Dan. Hack the Planet.”
I’ve been watching through the films of Danny Boyle. Some examples: Trainspotting, Sunshine, 28 Days Later, Slumdog Millionaire. From early on, Boyle was rightfully recognized for his edgy and sophisticated musical taste—the Trainspotting soundtrack alone, from Iggy’s “Lust for Life” through Underworld’s “Born Slippy (Nuxx)”, helped define the tastes of a whole generation.