#robot pop

Kraftwerk, Brussels 1981

All 80 photos I had to choose from to make the Robot Pop album cover art 👾 💿

Even the most mainstream of Italian pop music often has a tinge of the absurd to it, but David Zed’s uniquely bizarre “Zed” character went well beyond the outer limits of mainstream sensibilities. The perfect encapsulation of this character (which was created by an American born mime active predominantly in Italy) is the Sanremo featured song “R.O.B.O.T.”

    The music video is a psychedelic, effects laden clip of Robert performing the song as the Zed character, who is singing an absolute nonsense song that veers from Kraftwerk’s more hard sci-fi descriptions of robotics, to describing the kind of meatballs he eats. The video is presumably from some sort of televised performance, since in the middle of the song (during the “input, output” part) a very Italian sounding man announces the name of the song and pronounces the word “robot” in a distinctly Italian way (without the T at the end).