It’s fitting that “Paranoid Android” comes off of Radiohead’s 1997 album called Ok Computer. The song’s lyrics are classically cryptic, as the band seems to do so well.
St. Vincent issues some commentary on living life in the digital age asking, “If I can’t show it and you can’t see me, what’s the point of doing anything?”
You’ve probably heard it more times that you’d care for, but this Styx song is probably the most prominent entry in the robot music canon. (That’s a thing, trust us.)
The first video to air on MTV basically said it all about what happens when new technologies take over.
Paisley can be unexpectedly funny, as evidenced by his song about a guy who lives at home with his parents \u2013\u2013 but as soon as he gets online, he “drives a Maserati” and grows about a foot taller thanks to the power of fibbing on the internet. The point? “I’m so much cooler online.” Bonus points: Williams Shatner is in the music video.
If you’ve ever thought to yourself that Neil Young would be so much better with synthesizers, here’s your chance to see if you were right.
From 2010’s Travellers in Time and Space, comes C.P.U., a blippy, glitchy song about being away from our central processing unit for too long. Apparently that’s a problem for The Apples in Stereo.
This title track comes from one of the band’s best known and best loved albums, and tells the story of, well, Yoshimi battling pink robots.
If you ever caught the cheeky New Zealander duo’s show Flight of the Conchords, then you might have heard this tune about the robot uprising of the late 1990s. (FYI, it didn’t end well for us.) Best part of the song: the binary solo.
The robots don’t stray too far from what’s digital. “Technologic” is an entrancing round up of just about everything you can do with technology — “Charge it, point it, zoom it, press it” — you get the idea.
Space never sounded lonelier than when Elton John sang about raising kids on Mars.
Scratch that. Space is lonelier when your ship goes haywire and floats away. Just ask Sandra Bullock.
Erin Carson is a Staff Reporter for CNET and a former Multimedia Editor for TechRepublic.
