Song #72: Gary Numan and Tubeway Army - "Down in the Park"

Song #72: Gary Numan and Tubeway Army - "Down in the Park" (1979)

Replicas

"Oh, look, there's a rape machine, I'll go outside if it looks the other way; you wouldn't believe the things they do."  

  

The summer of 2012 was the summer of Gary Numan for me, after hearing his song "Cars" on the Adult Swim program The Mighty Boosh and falling instantly in love with it one morning. I wound replaying "Cars" on my phone over two-hundred times that summer for reasons I still have a hard time articulating accurately; but that's for another blog at another time.

Finding great satisfaction listening to Numan's music on his album The Pleasure Principle, recognizing he could blend human ideas with a techno/electro-sound, I decided to just work my way through Numan's lengthy discography to find other songs I liked, one of them being another sing he's recognized for by the name of "Down in the Park." For starters, the song isn't solely his, but was done by his short-lived band Tubeway Army in 1979; he often receives sole credit for the song because he is the main vocalist on it. The first six or seven times I heard "Down in the Park," I wasn't paying close attention to the lyrics, and just admired Numan's highly-digitized vocals, which made him sound almost non-human, and the electronic beats combined with haunting synthesizers that did nothing but send shivers down my spine. For a medium that is built on what you hear, I did a shocking amount of feeling during this song.

When I finally looked up the song lyrics and their meanings - while on a delivery with my father from the liquor store we worked at - I was stunned. The song concerns a wicked dystopian future, where the world has become run by "Machmans" (a popular theme or being in Numan's work, which is an android robot in human skin) and intricate machines that make it their duty to rape, assault, and kill human beings for the pleasure of an audience. All of this takes place at a park (the idea was the basis for the Replicas album, and you can see said park on the album cover above as well) and can be watched at a local club by the name of "Zom Zoms," we're told. All the robots are named with a numerical number, in addition, to assure not an ounce of humanity even works to level out the sure horror of what is taking place at the park.

"Down in the Park" sounds like a song that was lifted straight from someone's nightmare, and the instrumentation sounds as if the nightmare was recorded in progress. There's little else I can say about the song that would matter. Give it a listen, scare yourself, and learn that not all techno music is void of emotion and feeling - that is often the subject matter.

Give "Down in the Park" a listen, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ci7lssNMRI