hypersongs

You Can Be a Robot, Too

The seventh track on Let's Dance Raw: banjo and steel guitar under a children's choir, and his most played song live.
Shintaro Sakamoto, from Let's Dance Raw (2014)

Shintaro Sakamoto wrote and produced "You Can Be a Robot, Too", track seven of Let's Dance Raw, 4:01, recorded in 2014 at Peace Music in Tokyo with Soichiro Nakamura. Banjo and steel guitar are prominent, with a children's choir. NPR's Robin Hilton quotes him in a piece of November 7, 2014 that we could read only as a search summary: since his original concept was something like a song from a children's TV show, he had a children's choral group sing. NPR called the steel guitar vibrant and infectious. Pen Online described summery pop with the choir as a homage to the cartoon soundtracks of his childhood. A search summary of the NPR piece describes the lyric as a satire about a chip-based transformation that frees you from anxiety, which we could not verify.

The video is animated, painted in watercolors by Sakamoto himself. Setlist.fm lists it as his most played song, 10 performances, ahead of "Disco Is", "Mask On Mask" and "You Just Decided" at 9 each. We found no chart entry, covers or samples.

Sources

  1. Let's Dance Raw, Bandcamp
  2. Shintaro Sakamoto: You Can Be a Robot, Too, NPR (2014-11-07)
  3. Tune of the day: You Can Be a Robot, Too, Pen Online (2018-09-15)