Of all the artists from that man/machine era who forged new musical ideas in the electrical fires at the dawn of the computer age, Gary Numan is the only one that doesn’t sound somehow dated to me. The others, Kraftwerk even, often seem like how the future was imagined in 1950s sci-fi films. Not to detract from their value, I still love them all, but Gary Numan just seems to have remained current. It remains a new sound, in the dystopian present rather than an imagining of a future.

He is often melancholic and mournful also, kind of lamenting the loss of humanity as we disappear inside and are integrated into… into what? I’m at a loss for the words at the moment. Maybe it’s a lament for the loss of real meaning?

I guess where the difference for me, and why I identify more strongly with Numan, is that while other others revel in the assimilation into the Borg, or The Matrix as it were, he is howling from the inside.

Lamenting the loss of belief…

In the innate goodness of humankind.

That one well intentioned man can make a difference.

That good intentions can make a difference.

In a meaningful career in the service of uplifting humankind.

In that one big romantic love that lasts forever.

In belief itself.

In meaning?