Songs About AIs and Transhumans

[CraigD]

An old bandmate of mine had a show last night, which got me thinking about my own set: the songs I can perform at least half-decently given a guitar and no advanced warning that’ll entertain a coffeehouse crowd for hour, give or take.

 

Being into it, I decided I need to have a comprehensive Transhumanist song set. Since such music isn’t popular chart topping stuff, I can write my own or borrow from other obscure songwriters as easily as including “famous” songs in this genre. The only requirement is that the song has to be about a fully or somewhat non-biological person: an AI, a VR avatar, a cyborg, a genengenered organisms, etc., and that the song can be got across by one, maybe two singers with acoustic guitars

 

Here’s the list I came up with within a few minutes, all of them “famous” to differing degrees:

• , written by Yoko Kano, performed by Scott Matthew and his band.
  
• , written by Jonathan Coulton, here performed by him, better known by a couple of pro female vocalists.
  
• , written and performed by members of BOA (something of a stretch, as the song’s pretty clearly about regular flesh-and-blood people, but associated with the transhuman character “Lain” by virtue of its adoption as the opening song of the anime)
  

Not a very long set yet, expecially if I want to be able to pick and chose from among them. :(

 

I’m looking for more of this theme, original, famous, or obscure, again, something suitable for small venue acoustic guitar performance, and at least arguably about AIs or transhumans.

 

Whatchall got?

[iViolet]

what an interesting post!

 

(interesting enough to cause me to take a look through my [vast] music library and post about it.)

 

 

 

unfortunately, i only found a handful of selections of "potentials", the most viable one being perhaps being, "mr. roboto" by styx.

 

i'm not certain that it meets the specific criteria for your set list, but i do wish you all the best should you ever get the chance to perform any of them.

 

 

:)

[CraigD]

unfortunately, i only found a handful of selections of "potentials", the most viable one being perhaps being, "mr. roboto" by styx.

 

i'm not certain that it meets the specific criteria for your set list, but i do wish you all the best should you ever get the chance to perform any of them.

Thanks, iViolet.

 

“Mr Roboto” make me “consider” list because it does mention some sort of cyberpunkishness: confusion and ambiguity about the biological, mechanical, and computerized, which is more than I can say for Duvet, but with demerits, because the song is truly about a fully human, ex-rock star, escaped political prisoner pretending to be a robot to escape robot prison guards. Or so I’ve read, having never seen the actual “Killroy was Here” rock opera that’s said to explain all this visually.

 

Your find got me thinking, iViolet, about the 70s-80s period. For me, born in 1960, this was “my time”. Some years before Styx emerged as a successful enough band to put on rock opera tours, The Alan Parsons project produced a couple of concept albums named and themed (vaguely, in the second case) after world-building short story anthologies: “Tales of Mystery and Imagination” (from Edgar Allen Poe’s) and “I Robot” (from Isaac Asimov’s). “I, Robot”, which I knew well (had a cassette tape copy), was widely thought to be about Asmovian robots, but unlike its predecessor, which took many of its lyrics verbatim from Poe, you had to interpret the songs pretty liberally (It helped to stare long and hard at the album cover, which, in this pre-a-copy-of-everything-on-the-internet era, I could only do by visiting a friend that had one), to get that they were about other than regular flesh-and-blood humans.

is perhaps the most robot-y song on the album (and like a lot of bass and drum-driven pop rock, a bit of a nightmare to pull off bass and drumless acoustically), mostly from the “freedom, freedom, we will not obey” coda.

 

Songs about AIs and transhumans from before ca 2000 are an elusive quarry, in large part, I think, because few musicians though much about them, or even knew of the latter concept. Most musical takes on the subject, like Styx’s and the APP’s, were cautionary and dystopian – computer minds not as potentially liberating, but likely oppressive. The idea of transhuman utopias were certainly around then – Fred Pohl’s Hugo and Nebula-winning Gateway, which arguably stars an AI, was published in 1977, and 2 sequels later, in 1984, had bloomed into a full-transhumanism, with many of, and ultimately, the series’ main characters’ minds hosted in computers – but the idea wasn’t mainstream outside of SF fandom, which didn’t much overlap the society of serious musicians. At least that’s my take on it, which I hope and expect has some major exceptions I don’t yet know about.

 

An easy solution to my setlist is to just cover one guy, Jonathan Coulton (the guy who wrote “Still Alive”, from my first stab at a setlist). He writes a lot of stuff (and just plain a lot of stuff, having spent a year writing and publishing a song every week) that’re practically anthems for transhumanism (eg: “The Future Soon”, with its refrain “Cause it's gonna be the future soon / And I won't always be this way / When the things that make me weak and strange get engineered away”). However, I’d risk murder or worse at the hands of my favorite musician, music critic, and wife of 26 years, who hates Coulton with a passion – the lyrics only, not the catchy and subtly sophisticated insturmentals – and curse the day last year I discovered his stuff. It’s probably best not to attempt to be a one-person cover band for a songwriter hardly anyone’s heard of, anyway. ;)

 

My search for songs about AIs and transhumans continues. Keep ‘em coming, please!

[labelwench]

Perhaps some of the additional songs on this list, compiled by another, may be of some use to you, as you have identified a couple of these as being what you seek.

 

As an intro, they present to you The Top 10 Songs About Robots:

1. The Robots by Kraftwerk
2. Mr Roboto by Styx
3. I, Robot by Alan Parsons Project
4. Friday by Rebecca Black
5. Paranoid Android by Radiohead
6. (My 1st) Big Break by Cut Chemist
7. Robot Rock by Daft Punk
8. The Body Electric by Rush
9. I’ll Replace You With Machines by Guided By Voices
10. I Love You (Miss Robot) by The Buggles

Subscribe to this Mixcast in iTunes

 

http://www.fakedpota...s-about-robots/

 

I have not listened to any of these, merely done a quick search of key words while enjoying my morning coffee and hubby is cooking us breakfast. Weekend for us as we both work in retail grocery which is a 21/7/364 operation in these parts.

[Turtle]

not sure how adaptable to solo guitar these are, but Tarkus and Karn Evil 9 by emerson lake & palmer strike me as having transhumanist elements/leanings. :shrug:

[danielmccorry]

[*]

, written by Yoko Kano, performed by Scott Matthew and his band.

 

I love Yoko Kanno and Origa. You must be a fellow Ghost (in the shell).

 

As for AIs and H+, the music from Deus Ex: Human Revolution is quite fitting.

 

Although the music doesn't reflect it, the Halo franchise is also plump with AIs and H+.

 

How about Faunts?

[blamski]

robots by tv on the radio -

its cool AND funny :)