Robot Friends

Western religion is heavily steeped in numerological precepts. Numbers like 7, 40, and especially 3 are literally and symbolically prevalent throughout both established doctrine and elastic interpretation. Thankfully, I am glaringly secular.

In my mind, it all comes down to the number 4. There are four seasons, four cardinal directions, four food groups, and four Superman movies starring Christopher Reeve. As far as I’m concerned, there are Four Great Ills that blight the world: zombies, spiders, clowns, and Christian puppet shows.

I shudder at their very mention.

Likewise, there are Four Bastions of Magnificence: monkeys, pirates, robots, and beer.

It is this third element on which I would like to elucidate.

When I burst from the womb in the year of my nation’s bicentennial, robots were there. They were there when I started grade school, and still endured when I graduated high school. On the day I wed, robots were there, and, with any luck, on the day I shuffle off this mortal coil it will be a robot – a bear-shaped, hulking mass of steel muscle and alloy sinew, blaring from its internal loud speakers a flawless rendition of Van Morrison’s “Caravan” – that lays me in my final resting place.

My affinity for robots is only outshined by my love of music. Sweet, nerdy music. Of course, it would only make sense that I should spin these twin loves into tapestry of acoustic anarchy, a tuneful tribute to the ‘bots who came before and the ones yet to be manufactured. Oddly, happenstance felt it necessary that my southern-born brother from another mother, yo-yo slinger extraordinaire Doctor Popular, would arrive at a similar design.

As such, the good Doctor and I have elected to join forces (à la Voltron) and present to an eager listening public a two-part robocentric musical event. Robot Friends beings together Doc’s podcast Drown Pirate Radio and my own meager offering Radio Free Hipster into a gestalt of sonic cybernetics the likes of which the world has never heard. We’ve scoured our considerable music collections to find the best and brightest android jams imaginable, and our robot-loving buddies have even chipped in some as yet unheard tracks to sweeten the deal.

Next Wednesday (that’s February 7^th, for those of you tied to the calendar) Drown Pirate Radio Free Hipster will rain down upon you a torrent of mechanical melodies centered squarely on that most respected (and feared) institution: the robot. Science created them, but we shall sustain them with song.