World’s Worst Songs: “Mr. Roboto” by Styx

Detail From the Cover of "Kilroy Was Here"

Everybody who loves music also hates music — certain specific examples of it, anyhow. This feature is about those songs: the World’s Worst Songs.

In 1983, Styx was riding high on a six-year streak of hits that made them the most popular band in America, at least among teenagers. Those lofty heights made their fall all the more spectacular, thanks to the disaster that was the album Kilroy Was Here, and its lead single, “Mr. Roboto.”

Styx had started as a prog-rock band, but had avoided making a pretentious concept album. Kilroy Was Here was that pretentious concept, something about robots taking over humanity. The songs on Kilroy fit the album’s concept, all right. Most of them were, as Allmusic.com observes, “weakly composed and rhythmically anemic.” In other words, as if they’d been composed by machines and not by people.

When “Mr. Roboto” hit the air at my radio station in the spring of 1983, I hated it. But I didn’t just hate it — it made me angry. Here was a band that had reliably produced solid hit songs for six years, as close to a sure thing as there was in the business — and now they were coming around expecting us to play this tripe?

Yes they were. And “this tripe” proved to be the second-biggest hit single of the band’s career. But that didn’t make me hate it any less — cold, mechanical, pretentious, a couple of minutes too long, and declaimed by Dennis De Young as if it were Shakespeare while sounding like he’s jacked up on a cocktail of caffeine and helium. And the video didn’t help it, either.

If you think we blew it — if there’s a case to be made for why this song is better than we think it is — click “Add a Comment” and tell why, then listen to and debate more of the World’s Worst Songs.