ego.istic.org

There is a trend in sf—I'd go as far as calling it a cliché—of creating beings without emotions, be they machines, aliens, or bio-engineered life. Doing this allows the author to explore what emotions are, what they mean, and what it would be like to not have any. It also gives the more mathmo elements of the audience someone to identify with, someone completely rational and who has trouble understanding the motivations of the people around them.

The real cliché comes when the robots start wanting feelings, wanting to be human. Why do they always do that? If they're really emotionless, they shouldn't be showing any desires of that sort. I suppose authors always come up against a paradox: that you really can't have characters who don't have something you can call feelings. I've heard and read robots lament their lack of feelings or humanity so many times that I didn't think there was anything new at all to say about the subject.

Songs, on the whole, have quite a limited range of topics. Sure, there's the occasional song about the periodic table, or the Secretaries-General of the UN, but in modern music, the subject is almost always love. Loving your country, sometimes, or loving your family, or loving your mates, but usually romantic love. There's that, and there's protest songs, and there's not much of anything else, and even the protest songs are usually pretty bad. The emotional range of these things is almost as weak as the aforementioned robots whose only emotion is wanting to be human. Sometimes they're so samey it reminds me of the pornography-writing machines in ‘1984’.

So, given both of these trends, it's nice to listen to a song like ‘be Human’, from the album of the same name. The album is about and inspired by the tachikoma robots from GitS SAC, and it's surprisingly good. But of the whole album, it's this title song that really haunts me. It's the best expression I've ever read, seen, or heard of this overdone motif. Scott Matthew sings in the part of a tachikoma expressing its wish to be human.

Perhaps what gives the song its best opportunity to do this is the tie-in with the TV series. In GitS SAC, the tachikoma are much more human, in terms of desires and emotion-led reasoning, than any of the characters realise. They play a crucial rôle with this feature, that as the robots become more human, and cyberisation makes humans more like robots, the distinguishing feature between the two classes shrinks down to this concept of the “ghost in the shell,” that turns out not to be that distinguishable at all. The song picks up on this established humanity to avoid many of the pitfalls of the “I want to be human” motif, and to suggest that being able to express the desires that the lyrics express is itself sufficient.

Mr. Matthew sings with no less emotion than in any other song, with nothing mechanical or suggestive of robots in his delivery. With the nature of the medium separating us from the usual visual stereotypes of robots, and what we hear displaying no robot tendencies apart from the choice of words at the start, it's much easier to not be distracted from the humanity of the message.

The music is synthesized, as a gesture to computers, but has a very childish, nursery-like style, and the lyrics share this childishness. The sort of activities the tachikoma narrator would engage in as a human have an open innocence, like being afraid of the dark, and some are very reminiscent of what children dream they would do when they grow up. But interspersed with this, the narrator's curiosity about more philosophical issues is very grown-up. The effect, overall, is a little like listening to an extraordinarily precocious child.

There's one, perhaps accidental, piece of fun. “If I only was more human, I would count every single second the rest of my life.” It's clearly intended to express the sentiment that as a human the narrator would live life to the full, wasting nothing, but as any experienced computer user knows, computers do count every single second, whereas humans generally do not.

All of these little touches, as well as the medium, make ‘be Human’ a refreshingly different take on a tired theme, and a great song to listen to.