Accompanying playlist for the article

1. Interlude 1 / Time Is Up - Poppy

2. Hot Pink - Let’s Eat Grandma

3. It’s Code - Janelle Monáe

4. Fembot - Robyn

5. We Appreciate Power - Grimes

I’ve got some news for you

Fembots have feelings too

• Robyn, “Fembot”

The fembot is Woman perfected. She’s your silky seamless uncanny valley girl; she’s oh so nearly alive (never alive enough to tell you “no”); she’s forever young, the fully programmable pseudo-woman of your manic pixel dreams. She’s been here all along, baby - and watch out, because in pop music, she’s speaking for herself.

A fembot (‘gynoid’ if you like, from ‘gyno’ + ‘android’ - there’s no Charli XCX song called gynoid though,¹ so I’ll be sticking to fembot) is a humanoid robot who is - if I may - female-coded. For a woman to be literally created from scratch automatically spotlights how we construct and perform gender, which basically makes for some really cool art when Ms. Fembot herself is handed the rhinestoned microphone. The futuristic science-gone-mad thing that she embodies can lend her a certain femme fatale badness (she could get out of control, in a sexy way), or permit her to symbolically stand-in for technology’s existential threat (she could get out of control in a scary way, and there’s nothing we can do now that Pandora’s bot is open). A robo-girl at the interface of woman and product, programmed into complete servitude, who could also explode the planet at her whim? There’s a hell of a lot of conceptual places you could take that, right? Sounds like pop music could be the perfect language through which to explore that, right?

In 1927, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis saw the first fembot to grace the silver screen; Robot Maria, created as a dead wife’s replacement, embodies sin, incites bloody revolution, and is sexualised as an exotic dancer (yas, gaslight, gatekeep, girlbot!). Ever since, fembots have been a mainstay of sci-fi from Blade Runner’s sexualised, deadly replicants, to the sexualised, deadly synths of Channel 4’s Humans, to Austin Powers’ parodically sexualised, parodically deadly fembot army. Wait, are you noticing anything? Anyway, the conceptual circuitry of the fembot runs all the way back: eternal as the idealisation of feminine perfection, the misogynistic fantasy of women as completely controllable objects, and the noir femme fatale’s seductive danger. 

The darkness in these ideas forms the soul of the fembot, a soul that had been floating about in popular consciousness just waiting for the hardware to come along and give it a home. In fact, I’ve found it’s a fun little parlour game to look back through history and ask yourself if, given a dash of abstraction, various historical femmes are- how you say- ‘giving fembot’. Eve (of The Bible fame)? Literally the original woman, created by a man from a man for a man, condemned humanity to original sin, and that’s giving very much fembot. Mona Lisa? You can’t read that smile, you can’t attain that serenity, your dreams couldn’t dream of affording her (she’s insured for $100 million, bitch, and that’s so fembot of her). But I digress. A female robot is a distillation of the ages-old spiritual corsetry of gendered expectation, the anxiety of her escaping your paternalistic control wrapped up in a sexy futuristic Frankenstein complex. She’s the ultimate product and its dark consequence all at once, a glitchy gif of a snake eating its own tail.

Aqua could’ve done Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Ovid couldn’t have done Barbie Girl

Enter Aqua. You thought I was gonna start with Poppy? Well, you’d better think again bestie, because Aqua’s 1997 bubblegum hit ‘Barbie Girl’ was the absolute blueprint for fembot pop and you know it.² It casts a wry eye towards its own grating artifice, chewing up and spitting out the eponymous plastic doll’s gendered mould with such zingers as “make me walk, make me talk, I’m your dolly” and, of course, the immortally scandalous “undress me everywhere“. For real, the subversively feminist implications of these lyrics may have been lost on me as I was tearing up the dancefloor at the Year 6 school disco, but it’s so very fembot in its frantic, hyper exaggerated performance of the absurd expectations placed on women from childhood by such societal forces as (gasp) Barbie herself. It centers the perspective of the (literally) objectified woman, albeit through a parodic lense. I also get a puerile kick out of how unexpectedly filthy it is - “kiss me here, touch me there, hanky panky”, huh? With the lyrics’ explicit sexuality, Aqua liberates Barbie from the impossible, Madonna/Whore duality-rooted expectation that us dolls should somehow be perfectly sexually appealing without ever degrading ourselves by actually being overtly sexual. And all while being really, really dumb and catchy. It’s pure art-pop.

Barbie Girl lit a torch for future fembot pop girls to carry onward - of course, Nicki immediately comes to mind, with Her Minajesty having made the leap into literally becoming a Barbie doll herself. There are also top notes of Aqua in the hypercapitalist “I want all my clothes designer” princess-ery of pop angel Kim Petras, and GFOTY’s deadpanning “my giant breasts are bouncin’ like a car” and “put my titties on a b-day cake” (‘BRAND NEW BRA’ is too good to choose a single quote) warping the pervasive sexualisation of women to its stupid, hilarious, funhouse-mirror extreme. There may be no escape from the existential horror of knowing we’ll always be superficially judged based on a set of societal ‘woman’ criteria, but at least we can laugh about how dumb that is, perhaps taking back a bit of agency in the process.

Being a blonde bimbo girl is fun though - life in plastic is fantastic, and in Barbie Girl, that’s about as much as we need to know. But what if, dare I say, there was more grit to it than that? Aqua gave us a sugar rush of ‘fem’, but I’m craving some ‘bot’ now. C’mon, give me a girldroid with complexity! Give me a nuanced exploration of human/android relationships! Forget a Barbie World, I’m frothing at the mouth for a robogirl living in a dystopic hell, people! Imagine if someone would write a ditty to tackle that head-on, and expand it into its own universe, complete with characters and an overarching narrative? But that would have to take a whole album.. maybe even five... maybe you know where I’m going with this by now…

I’m just really obsessed with Janelle Monáe, you guys

“Robot sex partners may become commonplace in the future”, matter-of-factly reads the entry for gynoids in one of the more unsettling sentences I’ve encountered on Wikipedia lately. Janelle Monáe’s Metropolis (á la Fritz Lang) is that future, set in the year 2719, where a subjugated working class of sentient androids are exploited by a human ruling class in an afro-futurist megacity. Android 57821 (a.k.a Cindi Mayweather), our leading lady and fembot fugitive, is a robot illegally in love with a human (“Youuuu know the rules! She is now scheduled for immediate disassembly!”, declares a fascistic Madame Morrible-type governor figure in March of the Wolfmasters, an expository track that lays out the emotional throughline of the Metropolis Suites). Monáe originally trained in musical theatre, which makes sense - her space opera epic and its cast of recurring characters has sprawled 5 albums so far, refusing the confines of genre in its cross-pollination of nostalgic and futuristic influences. 

One of the things that strikes me most about the Metropolis Suites is the tender humanity of Cindi’s internal world - a far cry from the helium babble of Barbie Girl, Monáe’s gorgeous, unaffected vocal soars from the center of the fembot in a way that brings emotional authenticity to the seemingly artificial. “I was scared to fall in love”, Cindi Mayweather croons in possibly my favourite song of Monáe’s, ‘It’s Code’. It’s a brief but arrestingly vulnerable line, and it really gets you asking yourself the big questions about the limits of artificial intelligence. What happens when robots become relatable? Is a robot that feels love, fear, and jealousy really any less than a human?

Blurring this boundary is exactly the point, as robots are used throughout the saga as a stand-in for the oppressed ‘other’. Monáe says it themself: “You can compare it to being a lesbian or being a gay man or being a black woman (...) What I want is for people who feel oppressed or feel like the 'other' to connect with the music and to feel like, 'She represents who I am'." In the case of the societal underdog, deprived of humanity by oppressive forces, this could align with Cindi’s existence as a member of a close-to-human-but-not-quite underclass, longing for freedom and the ability to openly express her love without the threat of persecution. In ‘Many Moons’, she robotically recites a laundry list of struggles:

Breast cancer, common cold

HIV, lost hope

Overweight, self esteem

Misfit, broken dream

They clunk down onto the track on a mechanised, continuous conveyor belt of sickness and misery. It’s heavy, but resists defeat, instead, inciting the listener to “revolutionize your lives and find a way out” of the injustice, and crescendoing to a suggestion of radical solidarity and community as an escape:

When the world just treats you wrong

Just come with me and I'll take you home

Monáe continuously pushes boundaries, blurring the lines between human and robot, art and pop, and ignoring genre bounds altogether, the expansive sonic universe of her albums providing sci-fi escapism to our society’s outcasts. In Cindi Mayweather, she’s given us a fembot whose surprising humanity and capacity for love could only be expressed by bursting into song; the fembot and her mode of musical expression walking hand in titanium hand.

Am I a Girl?

Then, on the other hand, there’s Poppy. Part popstar, part video performance artist, fully lab-made android, Poppy (a project by Moriah Rose Pereira) is a creature of the internet: saccharine, self-aware, sometimes unsettling. She has no love for humans to speak of, she’s beyond that - we’re ‘meaningless (...) like cockroaches’, she declares gleefully in the absolute banger Time Is Up. Whereas the robo-soul of Cindi Mayweather is achingly human, Poppy is a full-time resident of the uncanny valley, occupying a space between person and product which highlights the absurdity of Information Age hypercapitalism. Rather than a story as such (there is a Poppy lore book out there, but I don’t feel like it’s essential to understanding her whole thing) her albums explore different genres and concepts - Am I A Girl? is the most pop one and deals with gender and consumerism; I Disagree (in my opinion, her best) fuses bubblegum, 60s sunshine pop, and metal into a horror-pop exorcism of trauma and female rage. I love how the former articulates the essential meaninglessness of what it even is to ‘be a girl’, alternating between overperforming femininity to the point of Barbie Girl camp hilarity (“my hair and makeup make you envious and want to die”)  and abandoning gender constructs altogether (“don’t evaluate me as woman or man”). Hard Feelings is a highlight, with Poppy’s impassioned, existential Frankenstein monster pleas to her creator to tell her if she is “man or machine” showing a side of the fembot we barely get to hear from her point of view. Oh yeah, it’s also really queer:

Am I a girl?

Am I a boy?

What does that even mean?

I'm somewhere in between

• Poppy, Am I a Girl?

The track Am I a Girl opens with the lyric ‘I want to be a girl in all the normal ways’, slicing right to a pressure that comes with many queer people’s relationships with gender. Who hasn’t felt the weight of knowing that appearing ‘palatable’ or male gaze-y or whatever - fitting neatly into a binary role, in ‘all the normal ways’ - just makes life a little easier, giving the omnipresent societal jury less to latch onto and pull apart? 

Sometimes I'm feminine

Sometimes I'm masculine 

The fembot who unplugs from her binary coding is a fitting avatar for an increasingly post-gender world. Far from decrying the feminine altogether (tell me, would the girlies be blasting Vroom Vroom through the aux every Friday night if it was a pious condemnation of bubblegum and lipgloss? I think not), fembot pop reclaims performed womanhood from those who would call it frivolous, while gently mocking the reductive binaries which got us here to begin with (I’d argue that it’s pretty drag-adjacent in that way). They may be conceived as feminine perfection, but to me the real interest in both Poppy and Janelle Monáe’s Cindi Mayweather is in when they malfunction, feeling too much, questioning too much, something like a soul spilling out of the seams in the polished chrome. 

Long live Electric Ladyland 

One of the most exciting things to me in pop music is when the sonic and lyrical universe of a song work in tandem, each elevating the other towards a fully realised art piece that pushes the boundaries of the 3-minute pop song. The fembot is an archetype with so much potential for exploring what it means to be perceived as a woman, with the treatment of nearly-persons providing a stand-in for the dehumanization of the othered. Pop music as a medium provides a perfect mouthpiece to center the perspective of the oft-infantilised and sexualised fembot,³ in a way that- in film or television- is arguably impossible to detach from the constraints of the male gaze (for example, the Austin Powers parody of the sexualised Bond girl’s femininity is still, ultimately, couched in the male gaze; the very thing it’s parodying. There is nothing titillating about Poppy growl-screaming on a concrete floor in an empty warehouse, however.)

As technology continues snowballing and times get crazier, yet more fembot possibilities lurk in the wings - I haven’t even gotten into the rise of V-Tubers (a steadily growing wave of artists who perform behind largely female virtual avatars, the most notable example probably being Lil Miquela), frankly because I don’t know enough about them and I’ve spent enough time in Wikipedia rabbit holes lately. In fact, I have so much work I could be doing to become a more efficient and productive modern girl - maybe there’s a shiny new processor chip for that, out there in the cybersphere? Until then, I’ll catch you at the karaoke bar in the uncanny valley when the weight of organic being all gets too much.

Addendum

While I was researching for this article, I found this cool and interesting blog by H.D. Ingham - they go into the infantilization + sexualisation of fembots in film and TV, you should give it a read if you found this interesting: https://www.room207press.com/2017/12/sexod-20.html

1 I did look up ‘gynoid’ on Spotify and found this chirping, clanking industrial (?) thing you might be into, however: https://open.spotify.com/track/55MlonWn6N7gkh2ytIia7i?si=81609457db9a4a44

2 In fact, I’ll say it - all 90s/2000s ‘primary school disco’-core is proto-PC Music. The Village People collaborating with Dorian Electra just makes sense. If Kero Kero Bonito made a song about eating Kentucky Fried Chicken and a Pizza Hut? Logical next step. But that’s another article.

3 The Born Sexy Yesterday trope is relevant, here have a classic video essay if you’re unaware: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0thpEyEwi80