No Robits Month would be right or complete with out The Robots (sorry, no embedding allowed there), by Kraftwerk. According to that monolithic font of Wisdom and Accuracy, Wikipedia:
The lyrics reference the revolutionary technique of robotics, and how humans can use them as they wish. The Russian lines "Я твой слуга" (Ya tvoi sluga, I'm your servant) and "Я твой работник" (Ya tvoi rabotnik, I'm your worker) (also on the rear sleeve of the album) during the intro and again during its repetition at the bridge are spoken in a pitched down voice, the main lyrics ("We're charging our batteries and now we're full of energy...") are "sung" through a vocoder.
Techno group Kraftwerk captured my imagination in college, which didn't have much to do with any substances that may or may not have been present in my system at the time. Coming out of a tiny urban depression in the shale of Upstate New York (i.e. Elmira), where the only music to be had was either this or this or this, I was inspired, enthralled and otherwise taken with anti-comformist, pagan-sounding, rebellious European music I listened to as a college D.J. at WFCX. Siouxie and the Banchees, Kate Bush, Peter Gabriel, Roxy Music, and even reclaiming some Punk sounds I'd missed growing up in isolated Southern Tier suburbia. Anyway, Kraftwerk was playful, weird, and very technologique. So therefore I had to love it.
My favorite Kraftwerk pop culture reference is from The Big Lebowski:
And if you've wondered about my label "musique nonstop," which I bet you haven't, it comes from their post-Tron album Electric Cafe (the title song of which Mike Myers used in his "Sprokets" sketches on SNL).
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