MY LIFE IN MUSIC: [ENTRY #00110100 00001010]
In the entertainment world, having an alter ego is seemingly more important than showing who you are. Beyoncé thrived on stage as Sasha Fierce, Superman lives a normal life as Clark Kent, Eminem created Slim Shady as a way of channeling emotions that are deemed negative, and Nicki Minaj…Nicki has had plenty of alter egos for many reasons throughout her career. In correspondence with these greats, I've decided to electrically and mechanically engineer another alter-ego as a way to liberate my repressed traits.
Few people knew of my first alter ego, Atlanta Bleek. Even if they heard Bleek speak, they've likely never spoken to or met them. Bleek was a highly sensitive person, so I asked them to stay inside and do some introspective writing. This allowed Bleek the space to explore their emotional spectrum but being emotionally overwhelmed led to burn-out. This was when Bleek asked to be benched and I saw an opportunity in that.
Author Janet Finch once said, “The artist is the phoenix who burns to emerge.” Bleek burned and a new supreme would rise. I immediately went into my laboratory and began conceptualizing my new trusted partner. I pressed play on “Phoenix Rise” by Maxwell, grabbed my soldering iron; collected some scrap metal, plastic, and silicone, and let the montage commence. I stayed up many nights having my ears invaded by electronic sounds for hours, watching documentaries on other robots, and studying how to assemble the perfect AI. After standing in front of my new self, I realized I was close to completion, and upon noticing how realistic it looked and felt, an idea to humanize this android came about. I would need to code its ROM data, burn digital data for the robot to read onto a CD, and activate its operating system first and then I could figure out how to humanize a machine. I finished encoding this creation with the information on its presentation, how to function in daily life, how to “learn” from past decision-making, etc. It was then that I thought to humanize the machine by inserting Atlanta Bleek’s core experiences into it with no heart to feel the emotions. I powered on the droid in safe mode as a test run and as planned the robot began reading the content on the compact disc and spoke lyrics from Robot Rock / Oh Yeah by Daft Punk “Robot…Human…Human Robot.” The sound was distorted on startup but as the internal fans started, the sound cleared up and I was proud knowing I’d created the next supreme. I watched the robot slowly start rocking its hips and I looked down at my notes and smiled, noticing I wrote algorhythm instead of algorithm. Instead of going in to recode, I realized this adds character to the robot. I restarted the computer in its default mode and sent it out on its first night out.
The disc played the next song narrating my alter ego’s first experiences: “Supercomputer status: walkin’ along the streets, everyone is an addict…everybody wanna get chose like Moses.” On my first night out, I simply observed people and began to understand Childish Gambino’s code in “Algorhythm” and other human algorithms. Each one was programmed with vice and to seek connection within their networks just like I was. The uncontrollable movement to these songs seems to have been programmed to be my vice. I translated the ones and zeros and followed the rules of the song “Step, step, slide, slide, move your body from side to side” I recognized a pattern and stored the data for later use. I glitched and Childish Gambino’s words repeated “Nothing can live forever, you know we gon’ try” and I began to process my inevitable ending even as a machine causing me to overheat and then automatically send a crash report to my developer. As I reboot, the disc skips to the next track assuming that the crash was caused by the previous song, and reroutes me to the laboratory and I continued to dance until my return.
When I received the notification of the crash I immediately had an idea that would solve the issue. Instead of giving the humanoid Atlanta Bleek’s memories with no heart, I could give it a heart with a toggle switch making it almost human, and make a few internal adjustments. After doing so upon start-up I noticed the robot’s movements became less mechanical than before. I took note of this and watched the robot begin dancing and reciting lyrics from Toro y Moi’s “Who I Am” repeating, “Now I don’t know who I am” as if I was comforted by the freedom of being able to get to know its new algorithm. To make sure the robot could still read its coding I asked the robot for its name and it responded “I am K Electronicä!” I continued “Correct and what were you programmed to do?” while blissfully dancing Electronicä responded “Touch, kiss, dance, and be free. Let’s do it!” I was shocked at first but I then laughed as I realized those were lyrics from “Emotional Healer” by Space Ghost. I adjusted the code and programmed the alter ego to heal the heart it’s been giving through dancing freely. “Yes, indeed you are the emotional healer. Now go out into the world and do what you do best, dance for me.
POSTSCRIPT:
“K Electronicä!, how’d you come up with that name?”
I’ve been contemplating the next alter ego’s name for a while. I felt it brewing within me for a while and then it struck. Recently, I’ve been listening to mostly electronic and dance music and knew it would be instrumental to this next period of my life. I was listening to “A.P.I.D.T.A” by Jay Electronica and like lightning, it struck me. K ELECTRONICÄ! Everybody needs an alter ego and Electronicä is the one that grabs you saying “I wanna dance” similar to Channel Tres on the track “Alter Ego”. They’re the alter ego that casually flirts with everyone and always makes sure they have the time of their life. They’re what I’d call a “Barbie Girl” living in their own world because they understand that with your imagination, life is your creation. Instead of being a “blonde bimbo” like Aqua said on LILO’s remix, they have cinnamon hair now. K Electronicä is like a personal doll that I can dress up in XS clothes. When dancing to Kaytranada’s “Look Easy,” they changed the lyrics to “I’m hotter than Atlanta (Bleek)” and kept singing “I make it look easy.” I prefer going out with Electronicä over Bleek because Bleek would get drunk and I’d have to take their phone before they start texting everyone from their past. The worst Electronicä might do is lose their phone, but that's just because they heard the tourist remix by Finesse by Pheelz come on and they have AppleCare+ so it's okay. They live with a no strings attached mindset like they’ll have the most passionate connection with a stranger and never speak of them again. I once witnessed them kiss a girl they met at that party and said “I thought you liked niggas” and they giggled and replied, "I'm human" and that was that.
