The Steve Miller Band - Kow Kow (1969)

In celebration of the 50th anniversary of the album Brave New World by The Steve Miller Band, easily one of the best LPs of 1969, this is a video of one of my favorite tracks on it, "Kow Kow." Later it was renamed "Kow Kow Calqulator" as it appears in the lyrics, but on the original album it is simply "Kow Kow." The song strikes a futuristic note as sentient math machine and his alligator friend go out to see the world and solve its problems. I've taken the story much farther than the original intent, although I suspect from hearing the lyrics and music together that something bigger was always in the background of this song: the future of this sentient calculating machine. A living machine, after all, can be nothing less than Artificial Intelligence (AI). Thus we move from the math machine to the personal computer to the digital age and AI ... AI now and AI in the future.

The album's title is based on the 1931 novel Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. In 1969 I doubt anyone really knew where we were headed as we stood at the crossroads of a Utopian or a dystopian society. That of course is the problem with having a polarized outlook that is of one extreme or the other: regardless of how things look, the reality almost always ends up being somewhere in the center. There are always exceptions to that rule, of course, but not very often.

In any event, enjoy the video. The future's so bright I've got to wear shades. Well, that would be a nice alternative to the current situation.