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Whether you consider him a drum-pattern-programming master or a male-pattern-baldness-beset embarrassment, Gary Numan deserves a better rep than he's got. The sometimes father of synthpop is worshipped by legions of professional ironicists such as Shellac and Six Finger Satellite, idolized by modern-day new-wavers such as Romania and Magnetic Fields, and ignored by more or less everybody else. Except, of course, the English, who still buy his records. Numan's records regularly hit the Top 50 over there, and his annual concert tour is always a sellout. But to most of us, he's that guy who sang "Cars."
Which is fine, really, but as this collection shows, there's a lot more to Gary Numan than filter sweeps and whiny, Bowie-esque vocals. There are, well, some digital keyboards too. And some rather trenchant lyrics (in "Are 'Friends' Electric," for example, and "Down in the Park," the latter covered by Foo Fighters in a particularly low point of Western civilization).
Gary Numan made music that, at the time, sounded like the music we'd be listening to in the future. He was wrong (as it turned out, the future turned out to be a never-ending parade of bands that sound like watered-down Black Flag). Rather than run from the prospect of a cold, technological society, Numan made the world that science-fiction writers were predicting his schtick, anticipating that the loneliness and anomie of workers displaced by technology in the 19th century would be magnified by the advent of digital society. Of course, since we all love our jobs, this view has proven to be incorrect. I, for one, love being without health insurance or job stability; plus, spending eight hours a day staring at a computer screen is doing wonders for my back and eyes.
And playing this record on the CD-ROM drive on my computer as I tap merrily away at some stupid project makes me wonder if Gary Numan's idea of the late-20th century wasn't pretty darn romantic after all.