I would have guessed that the first great love song to a robot would have been by David Bowie, or Gary Numan, or Radiohead and Fischerspooner with special guests Shields & Yarnell improvising during the encore jam at Live 8: Kandahar. It turns out it was by Steely Dan, and then only if one allows a fairly idiosyncratic reading of the phrase we got your skinny girl here at the Western World conceived while pondering Yul Brynner's oeuvre and the metal phallus behind the music.
Did someone say metal phallus? By which I mean, wouldn't it make sense that the great song in question would be sung by a woman, with "robot" standing in for a more familiar, less anthropomorphic love machine? Which brings me to "Robotboy" by Robyn, on her album Robyn, which will apparently be made available to the American CD-purchasing public (that is to say, those remaining Americans without computer access, or the ones who are strictly bottoms when it comes to capitalism) in the reasonably near future. Anyway, "Robotboy" turns out to be a ballad, shy piano chords giving way to bleeps and boops beneath the proto-Britney's sigh of a vocal, stately and melancholic in way you don't get from a lot of former Swedish teenpop stars:
yr battery's low, did you crash again?
robotboy do you need a friend?
and at about this time you notice how that drone-syllable in the background is Robyn singing the word "home" over and over, homehomehomehomehome,
hush now boy, please give in,
robotboy, you've reached the end,
hey lil droid, let your x-ray shine
and the na-na-nas drop in and really, it's just heartbreaking, the one you listen to seventeen times in the attic after everyone's gone to bed, just loud enough to wake nobody up so you can have the lonely world all to yourself, as if that was your idea.