Apple II Bits

While recently touring the Rijksmuseum, I was reminded just how influential Christianity has been on classical art. The Bible must be the most inspirational and reinterpreted book in history, as evidenced by the many paintings hanging in the Rijksmuseum galleries.

With the Apple II being just as important to the development of personal computers, I shouldn’t be surprised that it and Christianity should intersect to make history.

In 1984, six-year-old music band DeGarmo & Key released the record Communication. On this LP was the single "Six, Six, Six", for which they produced this music video featuring Satan using the Apple II as a medium to seduce a young man.

Upon first viewing, I found the premise rather objectionable. The Apple II as a tool the Devil? A Commodore 64 would’ve been more believable. Also, who loads random software into their computer without knowing where it’s from?? Then I remembered that viruses were scarce 35 years ago, and their ability to infect other programs was limited by the nature of floppy disks. As someone who was always hungry for the latest and greatest games, I probably would’ve inserted any floppy that promised a modicum of entertainment.

Good thing that kid was of a similar mindset, as otherwise we wouldn’t have this fascinating music video to analyze. I see in it many motifs that were later repeated in other movies about games, computers, and wish fulfillment. As in the movie Shazam, a powerful figure offers teenagers untold power by first tempting them with great evil. Similar to "The Bishop of Battle", the main character is pulled into the game. Like in The Matrix, anyone in this virtual world could be an agent of the enemy. And ultimately, just like Jumanji, the cursed game is discarded by the hero, only to be found by a new, unsuspecting victim.

But these are not the reasons the music video made history. According to Wikipedia:

DeGarmo & Key were the first American Christian group to have a music video appear on MTV …The original video for the song "Six, Six, Six" was one of a number of videos that MTV pulled from rotation due to violent content. The purge was a public reaction to the U.S. Senate hearings on sex and violence in music. MTV had misinterpreted the song “Six, Six, Six” as an anti-Christian statement. According to industry news reports at the time, MTV executive Sandra Sparrow was unaware that DeGarmo & Key were a Christian band when she included the video in a list of videos to be excised. MTV allowed DeGarmo & Key to submit a re-edited version, which was placed back into rotation. Removed from the re-edited video was a short scene of a man representing the Antichrist being set on fire.

I’m not familiar with those particular Senate hearings, though they’re similar to the ones I researched for my thesis on moral panics: when a new form of media or entertainment appears, adults blame it for juvenile delinquency — similar to how the Apple II is depicted here.

The resulting edited, "tamer" music video, which retains the Apple II’s role in full, is here:

Whichever the version, this wasn’t the Apple II’s last appearance in a music video — but it’s surely the first time it appeared in a banned music video!

(Hat tip to Randy Brandt!)

Chiptune music — the use of retrocomputing hardware to synthesize original melodies — is not a new phenomenon … but the creativity of artists seeking to use classic computers to produce these tunes never ceases to amaze me.

An example I recently stumbled across is by Man or Astro-man?, a surf rock group founded in Alabama in 1992 and reunited in 2010. Their 2000 album A Spectrum of Infinite Scale features a track entitled “A Simple Text File”. Although Man or Astro-man? is not a chiptune band, their music video for this piece is something any Apple II user can be proud of:

What makes this piece so imaginative is that it’s essentially a self-playing piece of hardware; once initiated, it requires no software or human intervention. Granted, the hardware featured above received its print command from a piece of software, but the result is more reliant on the hardware than on user input, making it an entirely different kind of creativity from that of, say, 8 Bit Weapon, who acquired and remastered Michael J. Mahon‘s Apple II DMS music software to help them get the most out of their instruments. It’s two equally dedicated approaches to delighting the retrocomputing enthusiast.

For a less Apple II-centric example of musical hardware, check out this rendition of Queen’s "Bohemian Rhapsody", performed by an Adaptec 2940UW SCSI card, a TI-99/4A with tape drive, an HP ScanJet 3C, and an Eico oscilloscope, among other pieces of equipment:

Which of these performances would you buy tickets to see?

(Hat tip to Stavros Karatsoridis and Shark Bait)