Legendary dancer and choreographer Martha Graham famously said that "dance is the hidden language of the soul."
If that's true, what does it say that the robots of Boston Dynamics just proved that they can dance better than most humans?
In a video posted to social media on Tuesday, a group of Boston Dynamics creations performed an elaborate choreographed dance to The Contours' 1962 Motown classic "Do You Love Me." The performers, by order of appearance, are two of the company's humanoid Atlas robots, one of their quadrupedal Spots, and a wheeled warehouse transport robot known as a Handle.
Together these four robots demonstrate their various rhythmic and acrobatic abilities. They move with genuine grace, performing their mechanized versions of the mashed potato, the twist, with various leaps and spins, touches of ballet, and even some lipless lip-synching.
Even without faces, their movements communicate clear emotions. Opening on one Atlas slumped in dismay, there is then a note of defiance as it points at the camera before the whole joyous routine kicks off.
Later, when Joe Billingslea's voice sings "little bit of soul now," Spot — looking swanlike with its grasping forelimb — does a four legged version of Swan Lake's iconic gliding spin on crossed tiptoes (not that it has toes…). In the background, the Atlases each extend a single leg in the balletic pose known as Attitude Devant.
So Boston Dynamics would seemingly have us believe that their robots not only have soul, but attitude as well. And, honestly, compared to The Contours original choreography — with three men inexplicably crammed together on a stage the size of a bathroom stall — the robots' sprawling performance is far more impressive.
Clearly the Google-owned robotics company feels that they have something worth showing off with this fleet of extremely versatile and delicately articulated machines. But does Boston Dynamic's latest demonstration indicate that there is something more human — more alive — about these mechanical creatures?
Obviously the real answer is no. As much as their movements feel — to an outside observer — like genuine, visceral responses to the music and expressions of human emotion, we know that it's a ruse.
There is no autonomy or intention behind any of these movements. Instead, there is a team of talented people directing the whole thing.
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Whether the whole routine was preprogrammed or involved some amount of remote control — like the recent video of Baby Yoda bobbing along to Robert Rodriguez' guitar on the set of The Mandalorian — the robots were functioning merely as conduits to relay what people behind the scenes were truly expressing. Even if most of those behind-the-scenes people couldn't move half as well as Atlas.
Boston Dynamics robots can't "dance" anymore than Pixar's Wall-E and Eve could genuinely fall in love. In both cases what we're looking at is a very expensive and impressive form of animation expressing the animators' humanity — whether through cartoon robots, or the real thing.
And indeed, there are moments when it's hard not to believe that Boston Dynamic's video is itself CGI. Whether that's due to a subtle jerking stiffness beneath the automatons' apparent grace, or the way their smooth, clean curves catch the light a little too cleanly the video begins to feel unreal and slightly creepy — like the 2020 version of the dancing CG baby from the 90s.
But no, it's real. The inclusion of a masked man gazing upon the spectacle from a window above the dance floor brings us back to reality.
And are we merely imagining a haunting sense of foreboding that hangs over that man? Or is he — like us — being transported to an increasingly believable future, when the robots are no longer pantomiming emotion?
When they have finally achieved true awareness and feeling — hidden depths that must be expressed through dance. Perhaps even "souls."
Is he, like us, imagining that inevitable day when the robots — five or ten generations removed from these — will be dancing with equal joy upon our graves?
The story of psychedelics is intertwined with the story of music, and tracing their relationship can feel like going in circles.
For thousands of years, artists have been using naturally-grown herbs to open their minds and enhance their creative processes. Since LSD was synthesized by Albert Hoffman in 1938, psychedelics have experienced a reemergence, blooming into a revolution in the 1960s, launching dozens of genres and sounds that focused on acid, shrooms, and all of the portals they opened. Around the 1960s, scientists also began studying the relationship between psychedelics and music, and even back then, researchers found that, when combined, music and psychedelics could have therapeutic effects on patients.
More modern studies have discovered that LSD, specifically, links a portion of the brain called the parahippocampal—which specializes in personal memory—to the visual cortex, which means that memories take on more autobiographical and visual dimensions. Other studies have found that LSD can make the timbres and sounds of music feel more meaningful and emotionally powerful. Today, psychedelic music still thrives, and you can hear flickers of those early trip-inspired experiences all across today's modern musical landscape.
"There is a message intrinsically carried in music, and under the effects of psychedelics, people seem to become more responsive to this," said the psychedelic researcher Mendel Kaelen. "Emotion can be processed more deeply. It's a beautiful narrative. It's like a snake biting itself in the tail."
All that said, psychedelics can be as dangerous as the archetypal live-fast-die-young rock and roller's average lifestyle. They can destabilize already fragile minds and can encourage further drug abuse and reckless behavior. Often, psychedelic revolutions have coincided with colonialist fetishizations, apocalyptic visions, and appropriations of Eastern culture.
However, sometimes psychedelics and musical talent can come together in a synergy so perfect that it can literally create transcendent and healing experiences. Hallucinogens affected each of these following musicians in a unique way, but their experiences with hallucinogens produced some of the greatest music of all time.
Harry Styles — She
In his revelatory Rolling Stone profile, Harry Styles spoke out about how magic mushrooms inspired his most recent album, Fine Line. Inspired by Fleetwood Mac, the 25-year-old apparently spent a lot of time at Shangri-La Studios in Los Angeles tripping and listening to the old psychedelic greats.
"Ah, yes. Did a lot of mushrooms here," he said in the interview during a tour of the studio. "We'd do mushrooms, lie down on the grass, and listen to Paul McCartney's Ram in the sunshine."
Things even got a little violent, as they often can when dealing with hallucinogens. "This is where I was standing when we were doing mushrooms and I bit off the tip of my tongue. So I was trying to sing with all this blood gushing out of my mouth. So many fond memories, this place," he reminisced affectionately.
Kacey Musgraves' dreamy song "Slow Burn" was apparently inspired by an acid trip. Listening to the lyrics, you can hear the influence of psychedelics twining with country and singer-songwriter tropes. "I was sitting on the porch, you know, having a good, easy, zen time," she said of the songwriting experience, which she said happened out on her porch one evening. "I wrote it down on my phone, and then wrote the songs the next day with a sober mind."
LSD, she said, "opens your mind in a lot of ways. It doesn't have to be scary. People in the professional worlds are using it, and it's starting to become an option for therapy. Isn't that crazy?" Her affection for the drug also appears in her song "Oh What A World," which contains the lyric, "Plants that grow and open your mind."
A$AP Rocky — L$D
While A$AP Rocky's affection for LSD isn't a surprise given his propensity for writing about the drug, apparently the rapper has an intellectual approach to his psychedelic experimentation.
"We was all in London at my spot, Skeppy came through," he told Hot New Hip Hop about his experience writing LSD. "I have this psychedelic professor, he studies in LSD. I had him come through and kinda record and monitor us to actually test the product while being tested on. We did the rhymes all tripping balls."
Apparently his first acid trip happened in 2012. "Okay, without getting anyone in trouble, I was with my homeboy and some trippy celebrity chicks and…" he said in an interview with Time Out. When asked how long it lasted, he said, "Too long, man. Twenty-three hours. I was trippin' till the next day. When I woke up, I was like, Damn! I did that shit! That shit was dope. It was so amazing. It was a-ma-zing. Nothing was like that first time."
Acid changed his entire approach to music and success. "I never really gave a f*ck, man, but this time, I really don't give a f*ck," he said. "I don't care about making no f*cking hits." Instead, he focuses on creating. "It's so hard to be progressive when you're trippin' b*lls," he said. "You make some far-out shit!"
The Beatles' later music is essentially synonymous with LSD, and the band members often spoke out about their unique experiences with the drug. According to Rolling Stone, the first time that Lennon and Harrison took it was actually a complete accident. A friend put LSD in their coffee without their knowledge, and initially Lennon was furious. But after the horror and panic faded, things changed. "I had such an overwhelming feeling of well-being, that there was a God, and I could see him in every blade of grass. It was like gaining hundreds of years of experience in 12 hours," said Harrison.
Paul McCartney had similar revelations. LSD "opened my eyes to the fact that there is a God," he said in 1967. "It is obvious that God isn't in a pill, but it explained the mystery of life. It was truly a religious experience." Of LSD's effect, he also said, "It started to find its way into everything we did, really. It colored our perceptions. I think we started to realize there wasn't as many frontiers as we'd thought there were. And we realized we could break barriers."
Using the drug not only helped the band create some of the most legendary music of all time—it also brought them closer together. "After taking acid together, John and I had a very interesting relationship," said George Harrison. "That I was younger or I was smaller was no longer any kind of embarrassment with John. Paul still says, 'I suppose we looked down on George because he was younger.' That is an illusion people are under. It's nothing to do with how many years old you are, or how big your body is. It's down to what your greater consciousness is and if you can live in harmony with what's going on in creation. John and I spent a lot of time together from then on and I felt closer to him than all the others, right through until his death."
Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds (Remastered 2009)www.youtube.com
Ray Charles — My World
The soul music pioneer allegedly once described acid as his "eyes." Charles was blind, but LSD is said to have allowed him some version of sight. Though he struggled with addiction, Charles eventually got clean, though his music always bore some markers of his experiences with the subconscious mind.
Actually, blind people on LSD and hallucinogens can experience hallucinations of different kinds, though it's somewhat rare. According to a study in the journal Consciousness and Cognition, this happens because during a trip, "the plasticity of the nervous system allows the recognition and translation of auditory or tactile patterns into visual experiences."
Clapton struggled with drug abuse throughout his life, and LSD certainly had an influence on him. While he was a part of Cream, he frequently played shows while tripping, and according to outontrip.com, he became "convinced that he could turn the audience into angels or devils according to the notes he played."
Before he was creating the ultimate dad rap, Chance the Rapper was an acidhead.
"None of the songs are really declarative statements; a lot of them are just things that make you wonder...a lot like LSD," said Chance the Rapper of his hallucinogen-inspired album, the aptly named Acid Rap. "[There] was a lot of acid involved in Acid Rap," he told MTV in 2013. "I mean, it wasn't too much — I'd say it was about 30 to 40 percent acid ... more so 30 percent acid."
But the album wasn't merely about acid; like much of the best psychedelic music, it was more about the imagery and symbolism associated with the drug than the actual drug itself. "It wasn't the biggest component at all. It was something that I was really interested in for a long time during the making of the tape, but it's not necessarily a huge faction at all. It was more so just a booster, a bit of fuel. It's an allegory to acid, more so than just a tape about acid," he said.
Jazz great John Coltrane was a regular LSD user who used the drug to create music and to have spiritual experiences. Though he struggled with addiction throughout his life, LSD was one drug that had a major artistic influence on him. While it's not known for sure if the album Om—which includes chanted verses of the Bhagavad Gita—was recorded while Coltrane was on LSD, many rumors theorize that it was.
"Coltrane's LSD experiences confirmed spiritual insights he had already discovered rather than radically changing his perspective," wrote Eric Nisenson in Ascension: John Coltrane and His Quest. "After one early acid trip he said, 'I perceived the interrelationship of all life forms,' an idea he had found repeated in many of the books on Eastern theology that he had been reading for years. For Coltrane, who for years had been trying to relate mystical systems such as numerology and astrology, theories of modern physics and mathematics, the teachings of the great spiritual leaders, and advanced musical theory, and trying somehow to pull these threads into something he could play on his horn. The LSD experience gave him visceral evidence that his quest was on the right track."
Jenny Lewis — Acid Tongue
Rilo Kiley frontwoman Jenny Lewis wrote the song "Acid Tongue" about her first and only experience on LSD, which happened when she was fourteen. She told Rolling Stone, "It culminated in a scene not unlike something from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas—the scene where Hunter S. Thompson has to lock the lawyer in the bathroom. I sort of assumed the Hunter S. Thompson character and my friend – she had taken far too much – decided to pull a butcher knife out of the kitchen drawer and chase me around the house… At the end of that experience, my mom was out of town on a trip of her own and she returned to find me about 5 lbs lighter and I had—I was so desperate to get back to normal I decided to drink an entire gallon of orange juice. I saw that it was in the fridge and decided that this would sort of flush the LSD out of my system, but I didn't realize that it did exactly the opposite."
The Beach Boys' mastermind Brian Wilson was famously inspired by psychedelics, which both expanded and endangered his fragile and brilliant mind. After his first acid trip in 1965, an experience that he said "expanded his mind," Wilson wrote "California Gurls." After the trip, however, Wilson began suffering from auditory hallucinations and symptoms of schizophrenia, and though he discontinued use of the drug, he continued to hear voices; doctors eventually diagnosed him with the disease. Wilson later lamented his tragic experiences with LSD, stating that he wished he'd never done the drug.
Though it led Wilson on a downward spiral, LSD inspired some of his band's greatest work—namely the iconic Pet Sounds, which launched half a century of "acid-pop copycats."
The Flaming Lips — Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots
The Flaming Lips' "Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots" is widely believed to be the product of lead singer Wayne Coyne's LSD experimentation. This theory is corroborated by the fact that the album's cover features the number 25 (and LSD is also known as LSD-25). They also frequently reference LSD in their music, which includes an album called Finally, the Punk Rockers Are Taking Acid.
the flaming lips yoshimi battles the pink robots part 1www.youtube.com
Jimi Hendrix — Voodoo Child
While there is still some general contention on whether Jimi Hendrix hallucinated frequently, nobody really doubts that he did. According to rumors, the legendary musician even used to soak his bandanas in acid before going onstage so the drug would seep through his pores.
According to one source, Hendrix did more than just play music while tripping. He was also an expert at (of all things) the game of Risk.
"Jimi would play Risk on acid, and I never — and me personally — ever beat him at all," said Graham Nash in an interview. "He was unbelievable at it. He was a military man, you know, he's a paratrooper, and I don't know whether you know that about Jimi, but no one ever beat him at Risk."
The Doors — The End
Jim Morrison was a documented LSD user, and it eventually led him out of his mind. "The psychedelic Jim I knew just a year earlier, the one who was constantly coming up with colorful answers to universal questions, was being slowly tortured by something we didn't understand. But you don't question the universe before breakfast for years and not pay a price," said John Desmore in Riders on the Storm: My Life With the Doors.
Morrison used many different drugs during his lifetime, but apparently LSD had a special place and he avoided using it while working. "LSD was a sacred sacrament that was to be taken on the beach at Venice, under the warmth of the sun, with our father the sun and our mother the ocean close by, and you realised how divine you were," said Ray Manzarek. "It wasn't a drug for entertainment. You could smoke a joint and play your music, as most musicians did at the time. But as far as taking LSD, that had to be done in a natural setting."
Morrison himself—a visionary who was also a drug-addled narcissist—was kind of the prototypical 1960s LSD-addled rock star. Alive with visions about poetry and sex but lost in his own self-destruction, he perhaps touched on something of the sublime with his art, but in the end he went down a very human path towards misery and decay.
Like many of these artists' stories, Morrison's life reveals that perhaps instead of using hallucinogens and psychedelics as shortcuts to a spiritual experience, one should exercise extreme caution when exploring the outer reaches of the psyche. When it comes to actually engaging with potent hallucinogens, that might be best left to the shamans, or forgotten with the excesses of the 1960s.
On the other hand, we might do well to learn from the lessons that people have gleaned from hallucinogens over the years—lessons that reveal just how interconnected everything is, that shows us that music and memory and nature may just all stem from the same place.
The climactic scene from Universal Studios Hollywood’s “Waterworld” show
Photo by John Ruddock (Unsplash)
Would you rather be trapped on a raft with Kevin Costner when he has matted hair and a seashell earring or return to using AOL dial-up? Would you prefer to discover a demonic cat boy in your home or be cursed by hearing every man's waking thought?
If Hollywood movie executives were forced to answer those questions, then maybe they'd show more discretion towards what source material they choose for film reboots. As of now, we're braced for a barrage of superhero flicks and live-action Disney remakes. Not that Hollywood cares, but if we're going to fall into the nostalgic void, some movies deserve revisiting more than others.
Rebooting any of these 80s and 90s favorites would be better than a sixth Grudge movie:
1. The Craft (1996)
The Craft (1996) Trailer #1 | Movieclips Classic Trailerswww.youtube.com
It's the cult hit that confirmed a teenage girl and the devil are one and the same. Coming-of-age movies always find an audience, but a remake of The Craft would be a reprieve from the overly-saccharine tones of today's young adult films and CW network's teen dramas. Robin Tunney, for one, has been ready for a remake of her breakout film since 2016, when the studio first teased the idea for the film's 20th anniversary. While producers confirm they're still developing a script, Tunney regularly reunites Fairuza Balk, Neve Campbell, and Rachel True for fan conventions and occasional exorcisms.
Even though Eddie Murphy favors his hit Coming to America to this John Landis comedy, he and Dan Ackroyd were excellent at exploring class and racial differences during the economic boom of the 80s. Remaking the comedy today would be a biting satire of today's socio-economic turbulence.
It sounds classy to say this was loosely based on Jane Austen's Emma, but this teen flick was written purely for 90s mall rats and sexually frustrated high schoolers. We're stoked that a remake is supposedly in progress with Glow-writer Marquita Robinson, but a modern-dayClueless would be a massive undertaking, remapping the original's fashion, technology, politics, and dating culture.
Original director Joe Dante has been teasing a remake of the creepy-cute horror-comedy for decades. In 2014, he acknowledged fans' fatigue with the wait: "I am not involved with it. It's something that we hear about every six months for the past five to 10 years. I know there have been many attempts to do it. It's tricky because the rights are jointly owned by Warner Bros and [Steven Spielberg's] Amblin, so you've got to jump through two hurdles to get your idea approved." More Mogwai are always welcome; if we can live with Will Smith as a big blue genie in Aladdin, we can accept anything.
5. You've Got Mail (1998)
You've Got Mail (1998) Official Trailer - Tom Hanks, Meg Ryan Movie HDwww.youtube.com
Admittedly, outdated social features in this 90s rom-com include chat rooms, independent bookstores, and a triumphant human spirit. But reimagining the film's conflicts over corporate takeovers and communication technology would be a refreshing take on today's Amazon Prime addictions and bad Tinder dates.
It seems every 80s movie imagined the future was full of junkyard robots and abandoned laws of physics. A reboot of the Short Circuit films would bridge a comedic middle ground between Ex Machina and Wall-E. Again, our hopes for a remake have been toyed with since 2012, with IMDB claiming that writer Brent Maddock re-envisioned the sentient robot and his weird human friends: "Number 5, one of a group of experimental military robots, undergoes a sudden transformation after being struck by lightning. He develops self-awareness, consciousness, and a fear of the reprogramming that awaits him back at the factory. With the help of a troubled young boy, Number 5 tries to evade capture and convince his creator that he has truly become alive."
Someone dare James Cameron to remake Waterworld. In 1995, it was the most expensive film ever made. With the Avatar director resetting this record with nearly each of his movies, he'd probably flood an entire American city to shoot the opening titles.
