Malcolm McLaren, the subculture hacker who created the Sex Pistols, discovers the new underground sound. It's called chip music. Can you play lead Game Boy? Until recently, I was feeling stifled by the tyranny of the new. New corporate lifestyles for doing everything well. Too well. iPod this. PowerBook that. Listening to albums, like Madonna's latest, that were made using Pro Tools - software that reduces virtually every mixdown effect to a mouse click - left me with a depressing sense of sameness, like everything on TV. I had decided to make an album about the "look" of music: the visual gestalt of youth culture. For me, music has always been a bridge between art and fashion, the two realms I care about most. It's one of the most natural expressions of the youthful need for confrontation and rebellion. Now it was lost in the hearts and minds of a karaoke world. I couldn't find my place in it. The quest led me to the outskirts of Paris: Ivry sur Seine, to be exact, dead south of Chinatown. In that desolate industrial district, I had a 10 pm appointment with two guys named Thierry and Jacques.  ... The low light revealed the Frenchman's T-shirt. Emblazoned across his chest were the words FUCK PRO TOOLS. The phrase described perfectly what I'd been feeling for months. Like any fashion victim who comes across a new and stylish idea, I was smitten. Fashion is most easily used as a disguise - it allows you to be something you're not. It's much more difficult to use it to express who you are. I understood immediately that this was no facile fashion statement. ... The essence of chip music is in reverse engineering an electronic interface - whether it's a Game Boy or a computer's sound chip - and subverting its original design. Chip music can be made using run-of-the-mill equipment, like a Casio keyboard, but first the insides must be scrambled. The lo-fi sound of the White Stripes and their ilk has a certain aesthetic kinship with chip music, but it's less tech-centric and not nearly as subversive. Kraftwerk might be the grandfathers of chip music - like today's reversible engineers, they invented many of their instruments. As for programs like Pro Tools, chip musicians don't think they're really creative. The sound isn't generated by circuitry, and you can't alter it by twisting a knob. Read full Wired News article