Metaphor Blog #1 - Flight of the Conchords "The Humans Are Dead"

The Humans Are Dead - Flight of the Conchords


Flight of the Conchords are a comedic folk musical duo from New Zealand who have released several albums and had a popular HBO show.  Their song "The Humans Are Dead" depicts two robots singing about how they killed all humans so that they could rule the world.  While the song is obviously written to be comedic, it utilizes some common literary and film themes of technology versus humans, also seen in such works as The Matrix, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and I Robot. The struggle between technology and its creators has been a popular theme for years, but only with the most recent advancements in robotics technology has it become a realistic concern.

In the video above, Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement are dressed as robots that sing and dance now that the humans are all dead in the distant year 2000.  They express no emotion during this song, which is a characteristic often depicted of robots, particularly in Ridley Scott's film Bladerunner, loosely based on Phillip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?.  Toward the end of the video, they sing "Once again, without emotion.  The humans are dead." to enforce their lack of human emotional qualities.  Interestingly, though, we usually assume that singing and dancing are activities that would be done for fun, implying that the robots are incapable of emotion but are still capable of enjoying themselves and having a good time. They sing, "We used poisonous gases and we poisoned their asses...It had to be done/(The humans are dead)/so that we could have fun," and follow that with a "binary solo" composed of zeros and ones and the phrase "Come on, sucker, lick my battery," implying that these robots engage in recreation of the non-musical variety as well.  The song ends with, "Once again, without emotion.  The humans are dead..." before the robots power down.

The robots' relationship to humans is obviously not good, as the only human depicted in the video is lying dead in the street, and their only interaction is when the Jemaine robot kicks him in the toe to confirm that he's dead.  The robots are celebrating now that the humans are gone and state that "the world is very different...there is no more unhappiness" since their uprising, implying that the humans were oppressive before the robots "poisoned their asses" so that they could dance the robot and the robo-boogie.  In the second part of the song, which ran during the credits of HBO's Flight of the Conchords pilot, the Jemaine robot asks if they can talk to the humans to make things better, but the Bret robot responds "No, because they are dead," before they both launch into a "binary solo" and "robo-boogie" session.

A few differences between Bret and Jemaine's robots and traditional robots appear in the song.  For instance, the Jemaine robot errs in stating that, "There is only one kind of dance: the robot," which we see when Bret corrects him to include the robo-boogie as well.  The commonly held perception of robots is that they don't make mistakes when it comes to memory, but these robots contradict themselves and each other.  Also, many traditional robots don't interact socially or have levels of formality that vary depending on who they're addressing, but these robots assert that they use the word "affirmative" instead of "yes," "unless it's a more colloquial situation with a few robofriends."  While these robot contradictions were obviously placed to add to the comedic effect of the video, they also set the Bret and Jemaine robots apart from classic robot standards.