Spatial Orientation

From Nada Surf’s second full length album The Proximity Effect (1998), “Robot” tells the tale of normalized rape culture in the party scene:

You’re just walking ’round your little mazes

Figuring out how to get by

How to get laid and get famous

Get yourself paid, impress the guys
You’re taught to divide the world into

Buddies and wives, sluts and wimps

And ever since, you’ve kept a scorecard

How else to prove you’re such the pimp

 

You are just a robot

Executing a program

 

Get on the train where the crowd is tightening

To push yourself up against a girl

And when you’re not getting play, you keep trying

You don’t understand the consensual way

 

You are just a robot

An imitation of a man

 

She told me one night when we were lying quiet and cold

“Something not right”

It had been months since the good times

Once there was sun and now there was night
And she said to me as she turned on the light

“There’s something you don’t know keeps me from feeling right

I once knew a guy, I’d seen him around

He knew all my friends, he came from town
One night at a party, we both were there

He followed me into the bathroom, he grabbed my hair”

And she said, “I still remember just how the floor felt

And how my head would hit the tub”

 

Now where is that robot

Is he alive or is he done?

Does he breathe air that I breathe

Is he kept warm by the same sun?