Songs of '83: "Mr. Roboto"

Forty years ago this month, Styx--motivated partly by the enormous success of their previous two albums, partly by a desire to give the finger to conservative Christian activists who protested their concerts, and partly by the fact that the pop sound they'd only recently embraced seemed increasingly defined by computerized synth beats--released their most ambitious album ever: the rock-opera Kilroy Was Here. Nominally the story--complete with an accompanying film--of the "Majority for Musical Morality" outlawing rock 'n' roll music and using advanced, made-in-Japan robots to throw Styx's lead singer Dennis DeYoung in jail on false charges, who then breaks out and leads a rebellion, I suspect the only thing that most people remember from it is "Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto." Its Nipponophobic caricatures are best forgotten, and the whole production just has not aged well, despite the huge success of its lead single.

Listening to "Mr. Roboto" today, you can hear in it a weird--though still catchy--attempt to both embrace and push back against computerization ("The problem's plain to see / too much technology / Machines to save our lives / machines dehumanize"). Maybe Styx never stopped being prog-rockers at heart? The tensions the band felt over their new direction led them to break up pretty much immediately after this album, so perhaps jumping head-long into the new cosmopolitan, synthesized style wasn't a good idea. I can cut them some slack, though; it was 1983, the Time Magazine-endorsed Year of the Computer, so it's not like they were the only ones experiencing technological angst.