The Future Soon

My first ever JoCo song. I heard it on a podcast. This guy is amazing. He released 52 free songs in a year called thing a week and they are all amazing. (yes, even resolutions) And this song is just perfect, the way it's so blunt. Because, seriously, how many of us have not considered taking over the world in the name of love?

Yeah, I've been there—dreams of taking over the world in the name of claiming some lovely lady as your robot bride. Who hasn't?

things will get better in the future is a pretty obvious moral. the girl he likes will eventually be his (but against her will), he'll be respected(, or feared), and he'll be a genius...and a cyborg...awesome.

I am in the same age bracket as Coulton and remember seeing how cool the world was SUPPOSED to be by the time I was in my 30s. Our Weekly Reader had all these stories about how science was going to launch us to Buck Rogers-style awesomeness where we, the geeks, would inherit the earth. Well, the geeks are inheriting the Earth and we are all wondering where our monorails, Mars bases, and cybernetic upgrades are.

On the bright side, I did get the girl. No coercion, threats, or mind-control devices necessary.

This is one of my favorite songs, and the first of Jonathans that i'd heard. I was 14 at the time, and my quest for world domination was just beginning, and it described my social awkwardness and fear of rejection very well.

In the messed-up Western model of courtship and marriage, guys go after ladies and it doesn't always work out.

This song is gentle guidance that it's ridiculous to want to force someone to marry you, or anything like that. You can stack your cards and see what happens.

The problem is that most people can't handle this sort of reckless and insane cultural model, then blame themselves instead of their culture. Arranged marriages are superior and ubiquitous. The West is retarded. At the altar of individual choice, we sacrifice the better part of our lives chasing after increasingly unmarriable and incapably selfish fellow-Westerners.

The song is also about sci-fi geeks who retreat into fantasy because the real world is terrible, thus making things worse. They should all know better, but as long as someone is making a dollar off their souls, any warnings to the contrary will be squashed, they'll just keep cooking up the kinds of stories that appeal to sci-fi fans.

I really love this song.

I think the premise is relatable to anyone who was labeled a nerd (and didn't have much success with the opposite sex) while growing up. The language and the premise are both quirky kind of funny in a childish, relatable sort of way. Yet it manages to hit those beats that makes it resonate on an emotional level and reminds you of how you sometimes felt when you were younger.

It's so well written in that sense that it took me years to notice how dark the last line of the song really is. No matter which way you look at it...

"She will scream and try to run But there's nowhere she can hide When a crazy cyborg wants to make you his robot bride"

... is neither quirky nor relatable, and it really does clash with the otherwise pretty innocent tone of the song.

At first this kind of put me off, but the more time has gone by, the more I've come to really appreciate it, not in spite of the pretty uncomfortable turn, but rather because of it.

I think this song is not so much about the innocent childhood fantasies of nerds in love that vow to use their superior intellect to take revenge upon the world and claim the women who laughed at them, but rather about how toxic thoughts like that can be. No matter how much of a victim you feel like, even if the unrequited love is unfair, even if the shit you have to take is cruel, giving in to bitterness never leads you anywhere good. Seeing yourself as the villain and vowing for revenge might feel good, but it leads down a trail of thoughts with pretty dark conclusions.

It's not an uncommon theme, but the upbeat tone of the song and the way it's written makes it all the more effective. Not letting your bitterness twist and distort you into a bad person is not just some made up science fiction narrative, it's a challenge faced by a lot of people growing up, and something a lot of us should be able to relate to. Maybe most of us won't end up becoming masters of a giant robot army, but ultimately it's not just the narrator's body that has been stripped of its humanity by the end of the song, but his mind as well. It is (as so many of Jonathan Coulton's songs) a pretty heavy message wrapped up in a rather innocuous package.

Now, I might be overreacting at those last lines (I know a lot of people that I've talked to who didn't reacted at all as strongly to them as I did), or I might be reading too much into the song. I can't speak for the author's intention, but at least this is the effect it's had on me ^^