Crucial Track for February 20, 2026

"Virus" by Deltron 3030

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#365songs (51 / 365)

I'm pretty sure I learned about this album from a node about "101-level" rap music on everything2 (which has been on the internet for like 30 years but is currently consistently giving me timeout errors, for which I'm blaming LLM scrapers with no more than circumstantial evidence, but I digress). Listening back to it today I was struck by how much it hasn't held up, for me, but I still retain a lot of fondness for it because it really was the album that turned me on to the possibilities of rap music.

"Virus" was, and remains, my favorite track on Deltron 3030. I love the dark and ominous chimey vibe of it, as well as the creepy samples, and despite that it exhibits the problem of much of Deltron 3030 that the techno-jargon is both primitive and incoherent for an album supposedly set one thousand years in the future, it's campy enough that it bothers me a lot less here than elsewhere. And if the jargon feels clunky and out of place, the criticism of the societal problems of this imagined 3030 feels timeless and much more believable. It's not hard to connect Deltron 3030 up to the android allegories of Janelle Monáe's work (which will probably get at least one entry this year) a decade later.