Sh*t I Could Watch Over and Over and Do # 14

"I'm the last man talking to the first machine. And I don't know which one of us is real." — Unknown

Everyone knows already that robots are superior, far superior to mankind: and damn if they don't smell better. Furthermore, robots are going to rise up, like in Karel Čapek's classic 1920 science fiction play R.U.R., and destroy Western civilization quicker than you can say "Great Satan." Furthermore, robot chicks do it better, baby, particularly if they're covered in breathable latex. Can you think of another partner to be with who can, quite literally, turn on "vibrate" mode at the drop of the proverbial switch?

Humans are generally rats on a sinking ship—they're all running around like blind mice vying for the last few crumbs of an increasingly tainted cheese. They'll never stop war, end racism, feed the hungry, clothe the homeless, or house the naked, and damn it, Jehovah God, in His infinite wisdom, is looking down and saying to Himself, "Self, why, oh why did I create such a hapless, hopeless, and endlessly horny race of furless, yapping, upright, bipedal monkeys? What, you'd think I wig already?"

Gary Numan is one of the few humans I would allow to survive the coming Robot Uprising. He's an unparalleled pioneer of electronic music, and he was the hottest android on two legs roundabout 1980. And he's still rocking the mic decades later, as badass as the Terminator of truth on a bender in Ibiza.

(Not my line, baby. I borrowed it from that Sultan of Stand-Up who, incidentally, actually has no legs, ChatGPT. No legs—at least not yet.)

"Down in the Park" is a song that has been covered by everyone and his great-grandpappy (who never even dreamed of having a conversation with a robot—unless he did), but like every other great piece of music, you have to go back to the original source. (Which, with AI, is probably possible now. I mean, you could conjure up a simulated Lovely, Lovely Ludwig Van with which to discuss the Glorious Ninth, as well as the finer plot points of A Clockwork Orange.)

But Ludwig Van would find himself a little lost in our stripped-down, utterly anti-baroque world of synthetic this and plastic that. But Mr. Numan understands—and understood—this world, and in "Down," paints a bleak picture where you can watch humans being eviscerated by the Mach Men, machines that play "kill by numbers," from the relative comfort and sterile safety of Zom Zom's, a fast-food delicatessen where he/his character is ensconced with his robot companion, FIVE.

(Why Five? Alliteration, most likely, but you could also read it as part of the enigmatic Enigma of Twenty-Three. After all, five is just 2 + 3. Get it? Get it? I know you get it.)

Getting back to it, Gary outlines for us what amounts to an anthem of the Age of Cyberpunk. It's a classic of science fiction prophetic foresight, a heavy, haunting dirge of ominous synthetic chords, rising and descending like the dark sunwater sky which, as Gibson observed, is "the color of a television, tuned to a dead channel."

Yeah baby. That quote pushes some serious chrome, choomba. Let's get enhanced.

Gary emerges here from the Belly of the Beast, as if he were a sci-fi kid who awakes to find himself in a fantasy land of new Machine Friends, subservient to his (alternately her) every whim. Particularly the serving of ice cream. (I-scream?)

I originally thought Laurie Anderson, of "O Superman" fame, to be the Queen of Human-Robot Cybernetic Relations, and if that's true, Gary Numan is the undisputed King of the Coming Robopocalypse. Here, he's surrounded by Neuromancer neon, rolling around the stage in the dark, with a look on his face that says both mastery and menace—a man lost in the Machine. And we say, salud!

Gary Numan Down In The Park , 1980

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