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Wednesday, June 02, 2004

Rockin' the Paradise

One time, back in the 80s, they asked Dennis DeYoung from STYX to write a song for the movie version of DUNE and he wrote such a crappy, sappy-assed load of crud, they couldn't use the thing. Here's a sample to prove it:

Those summer nights when we were young
We bragged of things we'd never done
We were dreamers, only dreamers
And in our haste to grow too soon
We left our innocence on Desert Moon
We were dreamers, only dreamers
On Desert Moon, on Desert Moon


He wrote that for DUNE. DUNE. The book in which everyone gets high on spice and ride around on giant worms. Did he bother to read the book? Here's what he said about his "song":

Desert Moon' represents a time and place we all wish we could return to.

Giant spice worms, Dennis, you dope. Who would want to return to that besides Everett McGill? See, DeYoung had peaked a few years earlier with STYX.

Imagine how awful it must have been for the guys in STYX, having Dennis as their front man. No wonder they use Larry Gowan now. They probably liked to sit around and strum their guitars and get a little groove going and then Dennis would run in and start jumping up and down, shouting, "Hey guys! Let's dress up as ROBOTS!"

And as bad as they were, they never really recorded the definitive version of Mr. Roboto. That honour falls to a cover floating around on the Ares P2P network. Search for the title 'Mr. Roboto' and the artist 'Kidz Bop'. Your ears will thank you.

Mr. Roboto is a neat-o song; a dirge for a passing culture. It marks the exact point when North American society shifted from being an industrial, car-centred society to a gadgety, computer-centred one. The point at which tough guys like the Fonz and Bruce Springsteen lost the good fight to nerds like Bill Gates and ... um, other nerds. The point at which brains beat brawn. And the tension from that shift is heard clearly in the song, the lyrics overtly criticize technology:

The problem's plain to see: too much technology
Machines to save our lives. Machines dehumanize.


Oddly enough, the whole Mr. Roboto storyline has actually come to pass:

In Mr. Roboto:
Everett Righteous, a religious conservative, uses a cable tv network to gain control of US politics! At the time the album was released, RUSH was a popular Canadian rock band.

In contemporary USA: a big, fat drug addict named Rush and a cable news network that employs anchors with southern accents (so they seem 'down with the people') helped get George Bush almost elected!

In Mr. Roboto:
Rock & Roll music is banned!

In contemporary society:
"Rock" music is a spent genre that caters to politically-inert, middle-class twits in shopping malls!

In Mr. Roboto:
Robots are bad!

In contemporary society:
Robots are fun!

STYX pretty much evaporated after Roboto, they'd intersected with their point in history and then, irrelevant, they became the punchline to late-night talk show jokes. And Dennis DeYoung ... ?
 

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