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February 22, 2021
Rebecca Morgan Frank's Playlist for Her Poetry Collection "Oh You Robot Saints!"
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Rebecca Morgan Frank's poetry collection Oh You Robot Saints! is a brilliant exploration of the automata we create with our hands and minds.
Jericho Brown wrote of the book:
"'The truth is in the job, not the wound' is one of my favorite lines in Rebecca Morgan Frank’s daring Oh You Robot Saints!, a book in which the beauty, jealousy, and worship of the gods take center stage. Part of the precision of this book and every one of its lines has to do with Frank’s commitment to showing us tragedy as the Greeks would through her indomitable use of second person like a director giving instructions: 'Fill the ark: start / with the giant flower / beetle . . .' And part of it has to do with full-on Sapphic tenderness: 'The women I’ve loved and lived with are dead, / and today it felt like spring might return.' This volume proves Rebecca Morgan Frank is a poet of the exact and the harrowing."
In her words, here is Rebecca Morgan Frank's Book Notes music playlist for her poetry collection Oh You Robot Saints!:
My new collection of poems, Oh You Robot Saints! is populated with automata and their future incarnations, the rapidly evolving robots we live with now. As a Gen Xer, I grew up in the early days of electronic music, infused with robotic sounds and repetitions. I couldn’t have imagined the lasting imprint that electronic music would have, or that we would live in a world run by computers and inhabited by such realistic humanoid robots, much less a range of multi-use robotic creatures. Join me in this “robot parade” of robot songs of the last four decades. If anyone else is home, you may need to put on your headphones as we travel back in time, or maybe invite them to dim the lights and join you in “the robot and the robo-booge,” the only two kinds of dance in the future, according to the Flight of the Conchords’ song “Robots.”
Kraftwerk, “The Robots"
Martin Gore of Depeche Mode called Kraftwerk the “godfathers” of electronic music, and in the original Kraftwerk video for “The Robots,” the four members of the band pretend to be robots. Over the years of live performances, the band replaced themselves with robots pretending to be them. Now you can watch a band of Lego robots cover this song. Maybe we’re all replaceable by Legos.
Companion poem: “How to Make Your Own Automaton”
Styx, “Mr. Roboto”
Did you know that the 1983 hit “Mr. Roboto” is part of an album that’s a rock opera/concept album? The narrative of the album Kilroy was Here follows rockers jailed by the Moral Majority– “Dr. Righteous” is concerned with sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll, including satan backmasking. But have no fear, the protagonist escapes disguised as a robot.
Companion Poems: “The Fool of Aljaferia Palace Encounters Death”
Men at Work, “Helpless Automaton”
This was the first cassette I ever bought, purchased alongside of my yellow Sony Sports Walkman for my thirteenth birthday, spent alone at an arts boarding school. Who would have imagined that the lyrics “I stay in my room / All alone in the gloom” and “To dream of your face/But a video screen takes its place” would feel so timely again now during the pandemic? Go ahead, turn it up and dance like you can’t go anywhere!
Companion poem: Ode to Loneliness
Red Hot Chili Peppers, “Go Robot”
The Red Hot Chili Peppers played in a small room at Columbia when I was at Barnard, and I have clear memories of a packed room of pungent bodies and my tiny roommate bodysurfing: I had dragged her along to her first concert ever. The thing about robots is they don’t have BO.
Companion Poem: “Mechanical Birds”
Lemonheads (with Kate Moss), "Dirty Robot"
You have to love the line, “I hate your every bolt and screw,” right? A supermodel joins the Lemonheads to cover Dutch artists Arling & Cameron’s song, “Dirty Robot” from their 2001 album We Are A & C. Check out the original and you can sing along your favorite fake robot voice with Francoise Cactus of Stereo Total, who guests on vocals: “You’re a dirty robot, I’m a dirty robot.”
Companion poem: “Here Come the Parasitic Robots”
Robyn, “Fembot”
“Fembots have feelings, too”! There’s much to be said about gender and robots, but I squeezed several of my favorite research finds into one poem, “The Mechanical Eves.” We live in a time of “real dolls,” but before that Edison made a bunch of talking girl dolls that were so terrifying they were reportedly destroyed, maybe even buried alive. (Can we do that to the “real dolls”?) Most “fembots” have been designed by men, so it’s nice to see one come from a woman, even in a song.
Companion Poem: “The Mechanical Eves”
Dresden Dolls, "Coin-Operated Boy"
Of course, then there’s the coin-operated boy of this Dresden Doll’s single: “I can’t imagine any flesh and blood could be this match / I even take him in the bath.” But when I think of coin-operated automata, I remember one of my favorite spots from my research travel for this book: London’s Novelty-Automation, an arcade of satirical automatons. Some of my favorite automata were “Pet or Meat,” “Autofrisk,” and “Is it Art?” I hope this arcade survives the pandemic.
Companion Poem: “I Don’t Like Its Computer Face”
Alexander Bonus, “Automaton Turk”
The “Automaton Turk” was an automaton chess player that toured and beat many a champion and celebrity, but in reality¬–spoiler alert–was a hoax and one of the more fascinating fake automata I wrote about in my book. It turns out there was an expert chess player crammed into a secret compartment to move the pieces. (Edgar Allen Poe debunked the automaton chess player in depth in his essay “Maelzel’s Chess-player.) This album explores the same world of early automata as my collection, and a few more songs are populated by some of the same figures as my poems, including the tracks “Automaton Monk” and “Automaton Aviary.”
Companion poem: “The False Automaton”
Daft Punk, “Robot Rock”
When Gertrude Stein said there’s no such thing as repetition, she couldn’t have foreseen electronic music. This song makes me think of the talk I recently gave on the repeated-line sonnet, except the three-word line of Robot Rock is repeated forty or so times rather than fourteen. Yes, I counted. (Has anyone made a digital track of “A rose is a rose is a rose”?)
Companion Poem: “Ode to the Robobee”
Flaming Lips, “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robot”
I know, you were probably expecting this one, and I really did consider the also great “One More Robot,” which gets at the heart of what separates us from robots: we can love. In the end, not only did Yoshimi win in my quick Twitter poll, but honestly, as someone who came of age receiving mixed tapes from everyone I ever dated, I believe transitions are key, and this had to come after Robot Rock, right? And it doesn’t get better than “But you won’t let those robots eat me, Yoshimi.”
Companion poem: “Aquanauts”
Flight of the Conchords, “Robots”
From the pilot episode of Flight of the Conchords, this song is the characters’ first music video, filmed in robot costumes made out of homemade boxes. In this pretty funny send-up, the humans are dead, robots rule the world, and “There is no more unhappiness / Affirmative / We no longer say yes, instead we say affirmative / Yes, affirmative / Unless it is a more colloquial situation with a few robo friends….” The album version offers extended lyrics and, of course, the same refrain: “The humans are dead.” Perhaps a few of those humans uploaded their consciousnesses into robot heads before they died and live on, like Bina48, which was created to mirror the (living) Bina Aspen.
Companion Poem: “Imagine Loved Letter to Bina48”
They Might Be Giants, "Robot Parade"
It seems appropriate to wrap this playlist up with a little They Might Be Giants and a robot parade. In my poem “Not Everybody Else’s Bestiary (Yet),” the parade is full of such existing creatures as octobots, robot snakes, robot cockroaches, and robot children. Remember, in the future, “Robots obey what / The children say.”
Companion Poem: “Not Everybody Else’s Bestiary (Yet)”
Rebecca Morgan Frank’s fourth collection of poems is Oh You Robot Saints! (Carnegie Mellon 2021). Her debut collection, Little Murders Everywhere, was a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and she is the recipient of the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay di Castagnola Award for her next manuscript. Her poems have recently appeared such places as The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, Pleiades, 32 Poems, Women’s Review of Books, and The Slowdown podcast, and her collaborations with composers have been performed and exhibited across the country. She teaches in the MFA Program in Prose and Poetry at Northwestern University’s School of Professional Studies and edits the online literary journal Memorious.
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