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The video for \u201dEveryday Robots,\u201d off Blur frontman Damon Albarn<\/strong><\/a>‘s forthcoming solo debut, is as minimalist and hypnotizing as the song itself. The imagery’s progression shows the slow creation of a digitalized portrait of Albarn\u2014first a skull forms, with a gold front tooth, mouth and eyes take shape out of what looks like red putty, abstract tubes turn to neck muscles that stretch over the skull’s face. Once completed, the Alburn turns grey and two more identical copies appear, bouncing back and forth along the parameters of a white backdrop, like images floating across a computer screensaver. The video’s design is richly detailed and extremely fun to watch, thanks to creative designer Aitor Throop, but comes off a little clinical\u2014and overstated\u2014given the music it’s matched to.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are everyday robots on our phones,\u201d<\/i> Albarn sings, over a looping stanza of clock-like electronic rhythms and violin trills. The lyrics cast long shadows over a society of alone people, working always towards greater isolation and more total immersion in virtual reality. It’s an unspecial gimmick. Who hasn’t griped about technology dependence? The song, like a piece of Danish furniture, is gorgeous but manicured to hell. Albarn’s voice has always had an impassive transparency to it that helped him sing sentimental lines without overloading on theatricality, but with material so streamlined and dispassionate, the vocals are frigid.<\/p>\n

I’m trying to imagine this song pinned against a more obvious kind of music video, something more recognizable as a story line\u2014cold, gray cities, maybe, cars on a highway, Albarn standing still as a blurred crowd rushes by. It probably wouldn’t be as good as the video is in its current form. The details, like the ridges along the skull’s bone and the sporadic, and how machine-ishly the head swivels, offering each of its angles to best advantage, are stunning. The perspective from inside a computer, though\u2014when lopped on top of the subject matter of the song and the pulsing electronic beats\u2014are too much. Especially so when, at the end, the rhythm moves from basso continuo-status up to the foreground of the music, recalling a heart monitor machine, with all of its connotations of melodrama. It’s just so damn serious<\/i>.<\/p>\n

Pop songs that wrap a moral into themselves always walk a tricky line. Of course the music has a history of social involvement. Protest music, jazz, reggae, and soul all arguably emerged in response to a need for music to enact social reorganization. Popular music harnesses large groups of people into an action because of its singalongability, so it’s interesting that both \u201cEveryday Robots\u201d and our next video, \u201cThe Apple (For Alan Turing)\u201d repeat melodies and lyrical phrases. Vagueness works well in pop, too: lyrics are short, bendable, mishearable; key shifts can be interpreted according to mood, and what the music means is often linked to a memory or association unique to the person listening to the music. Conversely, when something is so fixedly about what it’s about as \u201cEveryday Robots\u201d is about technological development in society, the scope of the song feels rigid and loses much of its power to surprise us, to be free-flowingly beautiful rather than just, as \u201cEveryday Robots\u201d is, pretty.<\/p>\n