I don’t have a spin on it. It’s simply a frustrating line that voids the character of meaning. People focus on that part a lot, and for good reason since the megacorps are runaway capitalism, but Johnny also says (paraphrasing) that he’s not dreaming of an America from times gone by. The statement is an escape hatch, as if having an ideological bent would make things shallower instead of deeper.

This is also when you’re earnestly asking Johnny just what the hell he wants and believes. I can’t take it on the surface level, because the way Johnny talks about it is obsessive and troubled. With the conversation looping in on itself at least once and V being able to point out that Johnny’s rhetoric has a disorganized urgency to it, I think we’re supposed to see that as the case. That does sadden me a bit. The personal is still political and no amount of incoherence or trauma should divest it of meaning.

So does Johnny believe in nothing? I don’t want to think this is the case since the character writing hasn’t missed thus far. What’s happening is a theme stated too loudly and a failed empathy check on the line level.

A better version of these scene is a quest that starts on Jig-Jig Street. You hear a busker playing Black Dog, one of Johnny’s last hits. “Black Dog” has some greater significance that I can’t tell you is generated by the authors or fan speculation. The lyrics and intent are a whiter take on Robert Johnson’s “Hellhound on my Trail.” Something chases the speaker. Johnson’s keeps moving, despite a foreboding feeling evoked through vignettes. “Black Dog” has its speaker wanting to turn the tables and knowing this will mark him for ill.

I’d say Johnson has the more nuanced grasp on what he was talking about. Johnny would just say the oldies are better, since he hates the busker’s guitar playing. The busker is playing from the heart, though, and in that he “gets” what feelings Johnny wanted to purge through his music. The topic turns to Johnny’s concerts and he mentions there was a time people recorded Samurai without knowing who the heck they were. My V comments these might be worth a pretty penny.

“Black Dog,” the short story in Cyberpunk RED, concerns these bootleg recordings! This is not a very deep or complex setting, but it is rich with connective tissue in the media mix. Specifically, “Black Dog” is about an edgerunner crew trying to find the full lyrics and in the process accidentally finding the activation codes for a nuclear bomb.

But I digress. Johnny sets up a waypoint for an old dive bar where someone might know where to find a bootleg, and instead you find a slop shop. The owner is pissed to find another weirdo is asking him about the dive bar, but is weirded out that you’re not in your twilight years. He points to a stand that deals in vintage music so you can get out of his hair. Johnny comments that moments like these are why you don’t bring warriors back from the dead, making me think he’s reliving a bit of his disorientation from returning home after his tour of duty in Central America.

The record dealer is a semiotic ghost from 2020. He’s got a leather jacket, and a very strong SI about Johnny’s band, Samurai. Ballparking the numbers, he’s got to be anywhere from his sixties to eighties. As Corpo V, I proved my cred by mentioning a ghost story about Johnny that’s told to new suits. The man, who talks like the secret third Bill and Ted, hands V the record.

Johnny pops off in a fit of rage. He hates the music guy more than he hates the dive bar reno. At least that space changed. Johnny complains that bombing Arasaka Tower did nothing, because by some sick force nobody wanted to change, not even his followers. In terms of music, I see Johnny wanted people to find and create the new hotness. There’s a bit of a thematic bridge with the dealer’s hatred of lazrpop and Kerry’s vendetta against Us Cracks; and I’m glad the game flags this sentiment as a bad thing. We can see what Johnny means politically, too. It’s been forty years and there has been no new ideological projects after what he hoped to inspire with the nuke. The material base is the same, and so are the symbols (in Johnny’s case that’s represented in Arasaka).

The world, however, is still changing. I believe this is what drives Johnny ideologically. Many a thinkpiecer has pointed out that this is still an “end of history” move, and they’re totally right. For my money, “entropy,” and “end of history” are motifs to an overall theme for how hegemonic forces try to reassemble themselves after ruptures or times of crisis into ostensibly worse forms of themselves, though this is at best intertextual and at worst extratextual.

That depends on whether you consider Cyberpunk RED an intertext to 2077 (they were made in close tandem), or a different text altogether (which some Twitter jabronis have insisted to me by saying that plans for RED predate collaboration wit CDPR). There’s limits to the former while fully insisting the latter feels disingenuous. Both games were released on the same year, and Mike Pondsmith closely consulted to make sure his vision was reflected in 2077. RED presents the more gameable setting of the two, taking place in 2045 in a Night City still feeling the scars from Silverhand’s terrorist attack and a political climate burnt from the unchecked greet which started the Fourth Corporate War.

However, there’s not much from RED that you see in 2077. The entire cast of significant NPCs in RED have been replaced with new ones, for example. There is signs of 2077 in RED, though. The Voodoo Boys are being marked for death by Haitian refugees who will form the new Voodoo Boys in 2077. The Tyger Claws are trying to rebuild Japantown and fill the power vacuum, which pays off in it becoming their personal fief. We’re welcomed to plot a trajectory between the Time of the Red and 2077.

Because of this, I see RED as a story about the breadth of opportunity that come with crisis. All the old systems have failed and are on the back foot. It is a horrible time to live, one marked by ecological crisis (the Time of the Red is named as such for the chemicals tinting the sky for the two decades after the war), and the the hegemonic centre crumbling (both Militech and Arasaka are maimed by the Fourth Corporate War). Figures like the PCs, especially fixers and nomads who maintain the failing supply chains, have an outsized influence while the corporations tread lightly. Dual power structures abound, the material base for change is there. If Johnny could see 2045, he’d be electrified.

With RED in mind, 2077 is then a failure of all those possibilities giving way to anything new. If your players were hoping for change, it can be a campaign lose state, or it can be a point of tragedy. People do want stability, even if that closes doors to new and better ways of being. The trick of the state is presenting the veneer of a return to peace and prosperity while only offering what’s sufficient to keep itself solvent. In a world where corporations are more powerful than the state, that’s enough to keep the rich feeling safe while damning a reserve army of labour into a state of perpetual precarity (your hustlegrinding murderviolence in 2077).

That is the world that 2077 evokes when viewed within the media mix. It’s a counterpoint I keep in mind while playing, even if that’s more of a contextual read of and likely not what CDPR intends: Change is possible, but is resisted on all levels either out of malice or habit. With moments like the set-in-his-ways Silverhand fan, I think CDPR is still capable of articulating how resisting that tendency trickles down from the systemic to the individual level, and quite beautifully.

Sometimes I wish CDPR could tell when they’re evoking a world that’s closed itself off, and when they themselves have closed their minds off. This seventy-something holding onto his old records you encounter on Jig-Jig Street is the more the former, Johnny’s “capitalism isn’t a thorn in my side” speech is the latter.