The INQUIRER Top 12 Songs About Technology

YOU HAVE probably read that Universal Music Group is to sell songs without copyright protection, a move that sticks it to the DRM man, or at the very least offers an opportunity to shift more Bon Jovi, Ms Dynamite and Ocean Colour Scene product.

These days, everybody gets pretty hung up on MP3, DRM, Ipod and Zune but computers have long had a role in music, not just in generating a racket but also as subject matter. So let's get the hell out of this soft introduction from the keyboard, ask the drummer to give us a roll then have twin axes chiming against a rock-solid bass guitar pulse as we introduce The INQUIRER Top 12 Technology Songs.

12. Watch Us Work It (2007). Potty new-wave band Devo took the Dell dollar to promote its latest laptop. Good to have them back though, whatever those words mean.

Sample lyric
Now, watch us work it
Work it out
Watch us work it
Work it inside out

11. Video Killed The Radio Star (1979). Dreadful tat by The Buggles that scarred my early-teen development in 1979. It was a poor time for music generally. The west-coast rockers of the mid-Seventies had succumbed to various excesses while punk rockers wanted anarchy but the right to keep a large sum of money from royalties and performing rights. Then this lot came along prefiguring the 1980s with lurid video clips and washes of synthesizers, drum machines and bleeping sequencers. The sense was that the future was very modern with no requirement to write good lyrics or play instruments. We could get rid of old analogue things and disguise the lack of a song with a video. Some of felt a chill in the air, and remember, this was even before anybody had heard of Duran Duran. Strangely, the Buggles later joined forces with members of prog-rockers Yes. Less strangely, singer Trevor Horn went on to produce some of the worst music ever created. The song lingered on, appearing in several computer games, including Grand Theft Audio: Vice City. In 2006, The Raconteurs sang a spoof entitled Internet Killed The Video Star.

Sample lyric
They took the credit for your second symphony.
Rewritten by machine and new technology,
And now I understand the problems you can see.

10. Computer Age (1992). Early in the 1990s the great singer-songwriters had reached a nadir. Dylan later confessed he had come close to packing in the game, Lennon was dead, Bowie and Joni Mitchell were sub-par, Macca had gone juvenile and poptastic. But Neil Young was never one for standing still and in his album Trans, he set off to describe the soul of the new digital era, complete with vocoder and elctronica sounds, and titles like this one and Computer Cowboy. It had a dreadful cover with a computer-generated 3D image of cars on a futuristic boulevard and Neil Young's name was in modernistic fonts. Interesting, but not one of the great Canadian's finer moments.

Sample lyric
Precious metal lines
Molded into highways
Running through me
So microscopically
Days and nights
Weeks and months and seasons
Rolling through me
So chronologically.
Computer age computer age
Computer age.

9. Computer World (1981). Not yet another magazine but the title of a Kraftwerk song with characteristic straight-faced, nay miserable, top-button-done-up electro-pop. This was a time when playing Horace Goes Skiiing on a Speccie and writing ‘Big Boobs' on a calculator was the peak of entertainment because somebody had already taken the three available titles from the Beta-Max shop and your TV wouldn't work with the fourth channel we Brits had been granted. Come to think of it, Kraftwerk also had a song called Pocket Calculator, possibly even worse than this one.

Sample lyric
Interpol and Deutsche Bank, FBI and Scotland Yard
Interpol and Deutsche Bank, FBI and Scotland Yard
Business, Numbers, Money, People
Business, Numbers, Money, People
Computer World
Computer World

8. Electric Dreams (1984). Phil Oakley had only a couple of problems as a performer: he couldn't sing or write songs. What he could do, however, was leech onto catchy tunes and, like many others at the time, lean on Giorgio Moroder's production that was used like a fat layer chocolate spread to make any old crap vaguely palatable. Plastering on a bit of ersatz Philip K. Dick was also vogue-ish at the time.

Sample lyric
We'll always be together
However far it seems
(Love never ends)
We'll always be together
Together in electric dreams

7. 1984 (1984). Such was the crushing literalism of the times that you knew some doofus would want to do a film and song of the Orwell dystopian novel in the year he was writing about it. And there was always the chance that Eurythmics would be called upon to bring a vocoder along and do their wretched worst. Dave Stewart and Annie Lennox have been relatively quiet recently but we're still not ready to forgive. Not strictly about computers but part of the computers-will tyrranise-us spirit of the time.

Sample lyric
And so i face the wall
Turn my back against it all
How i wish i'd been unborn
Wish i was unliving here

6. I Don't Like Mondays (1979). Way before his missionary times, Bob Geldof had a big hit with this taste-free tale of a shooting. But its main effect was to make you think of this song every time you hear the words "silicon chip". The clingy tune even survives Saint Bob's awful rendering.

Sample lyric
The silicon chip inside her head
Gets switched to overload
And nobody's gonna go to school today
She's gonna make them stay at home

5. Are Friends Electric? No chorus. No hook. Lots of pretension. Imagine a poor man's David Bowie, then a poor man of that poor man and keep going for a month. That was Gary Numan and this was what passed for entertainment in 1979. As with the Oakley/Moroder combo this played on the Philip K. Dick, will-we-all-be-robots-in-the-future, do- computers-cry-at-night shtick. Very poor.

Sample lyric
You know I hate to ask
But are friends electric?
Only mine's broke down
And now I've no-one to love

4. Fitter Happier (1997). Radiohead's OK Computer has plenty of technology influences and visions of anomie as the name suggests but with this track the band went the extra yard by using a Power Mac to read the lyric.

Sample lyric
no longer empty and frantic
like a cat
tied to a stick,
that's driven into
frozen winter shit
(the ability to laugh at weakness),
calm,
fitter,
healthier and more productive
a pig
in a cage
on antibiotics.

3. Don't Download This Song (2006). Weird Al Jankovic is popular across the pond but remains a mystery in this green and pleasant land. This song is not subtle and not very funny either.

Sample lyric
Don't download this song
Or you'll burn in Hell before too long
Go and buy the CD
Like you know that you should
Oh, don't download this song.
2. Digital Man. Canadian rockers Rush have always taken an interest in matters etch and this was possibly their finest word on the subject. Possibly but as I haven't heard anything by them since the Eighties, I'm not too sure.

Sample lyric
He picks up scraps of information
He's adept at adaptation
Because for strangers and arrangers
Constant change is here to stay

1. I'm Gonna Leave Old DRM Town. Roger Whittaker penned this far-sighted protest about the future of digital music.

Sample lyric
I've got to leave old DRM town,
I've got to leave old DRM town.
I've got to leave old DRM town,
And the leaving's gonna get me down. µ