Deltron 3030 – Deltron 3030

Written By Akhil Srivatsan
 
Deltron 3030 – Deltron 3030.jpg
 

Y2K was a year in which paranoia about technology and how it would interface with and perhaps obliterate humankind reached a fever pitch. The dot-com bubble had just burst, billions of people were convinced billions of dollars would just be wiped out at the start of the new millennium, and anyone with a personal computer worried themselves sick about the Y2K bug.

On Virus, when Del The Funky Homosapien raps, “I want to devise a virus / to bring dire straits to your environment,” he’s talking about a dystopia that was very much a product of 2000, the year Deltron 3030’s eponymous debut was released. But when he goes on to say, “I want to make a super virus / strong enough to cause blackouts in every single metropolis / 'cause they don't want to unify us / so **** it total anarchy / can't nobody stop us”, it feels a little like we’re living in the dystopian 3030 he’s imagining.

Deltron 3030 is a rare artefact; it’s an hour-long hip-hop concept album about Deltron Zero, a hacker mecha-human from the year 3030, and his fight against an evil new world order that suppresses hip-hop and oppresses the people of the world. Del The Funky Homosapien (of Mistadobalina and Clint Eastwood fame) supplies the rhymes, and Dan The Automator provides the beats and atmospherics. The result is an album that’s equal parts tongue-in-cheek and furrow-browed, one that will make you want to bop your head as often as it’ll make you want to get lost within it.

In some ways, Deltron 3030 continues in the tradition of Sun Ra and his Arkestra, George Clinton’s Parliament and Funkadelic projects, Kool Keith’s Dr. Octagonecologyst (also produced by Dan the Automator), and others in the Afrofuturism orbit. But in others, it charts a completely different course, with dense lyricism and heady atmospherics paving the path for a truly unique sonic experience. 

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