Nuclear Beef

Live Weird Conceptual Audio Weirdness Beef Today. The Robot Ate Me takes a San Francisco audience to the Genocide Ball.

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'The Genocide Ball - Live At The Rickshaw Stop, San Francisco, CA - 07 06 05'
'The Genocide Ball - Album Version'
'Oh No! Oh My! (1994)'
by The Robot Ate Me from his 2002 album On Vacation

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The Robot Ate Me is this weird guy from San Diego who sorta looks like Jesus, but not in a sacreligious way. He has three albums out, but the one I absolutely adore is 2002's 'On Vacation,' which was recently re-released by Kill Rock Stars Records.

'On Vacation' is a concept album. However, unlike a typical concept album about Unicorns or Pinball Wizards or what-have-you, 'On Vacation' is about genocide. Mr. Robot takes samples from early jazz records and sings plaintive, haunting and.. often quite funny songs over them. It sounds as if he's trying to illuminate the ridiculousness both of genocide and our reaction to it. I'm not sure how most people would react to this sort of juxtaposition, but I find it oddly fascinating.

To give you an idea of the sort of lyrics I'm talking about, here's some of 'Genocide Ball' :

Come put your shoes on
Lets go out tonight
There's a Genocide Ball to attend
Yeah fix your hair up
And put your lipstick on
We've got the ring-side seats to watch from
I'll bet on Jordan, you've got South Africa
You'll never know who'll win next

When Mr. Robot plays live, he interacts with the audience in a half-friendly/half-hostile fashion, although my roommate was witness to an infamous recent show at SF's Make Out Room where the half-friendly side of Mr. Ate Me stayed home. The live mp3 of 'Genocide Ball' has a good example of his on-stage persona.. I particularly enjoy when he exhorts the Audience thusly :

C'mon, I know it's hard [ to get up and dance ]
But people used to have fun at shows
So we're going to try to be like them

He jumped out into the audience and started dancing with members of the audience.. and then once everyone was bopping and grooving along.. started singing a song about genocide. When I spoke with him and his girlfriend after the show, she confessed that sometimes it makes her sad to see people dancing and smiling to such sad songs.

In particular she was talking about 'Oh No! Oh My! (1994)' which as you might surmise from the date and subject is a song about the Rwandan Genocide.

All the human Africans are statistics
Doesn't really matter if they die
I've got this career to salvage
And the press on my side
How many does it take to be a slaughter?
I can't use the word 'genocide'
Because I went to the convention
I didn't read what I signed
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Oh, let's do laundry
Oh, let's bake a cake
Let's go out in to the sun
And... celebrate

When I hear this song, I think about just how blessed my life is.

Or, as I put it to Mr. Robot.. "Any day when you don't get hacked to death with a machete really is a cause for celebration." To add that eerie sensation, we have the biting (and IMO hilarious) suggestion that the politicians who refused to call it Genocide didn't actually read the conventon on genocide that they signed.

How can a song be so funny and so sad at the same time? Oh, the humanity.

(Sorry about the quality on the live MP3, it was recorded with the onboard mic of my mp3 player, which unsurprisingly can't handle the volume of a live show. Anyone out there have any suggestions as to a good, relatively inexpensive mic which I could somehow (portable pre-amp?) plug into the line-in of my MP3 player for recording shows? BTW, I first heard The Robot Ate Me on You Ain't No Picasso (via the Hype Machine Player, so I will give credit where it is due! Those who enjoy these MP3s may also be interested in this strange little film called Hitler's Hitparade which employs a similar technique of contrasting horror with everyday banality.)