Tag Archives | Science Fiction

Three songs today instead of two! Well, it’s hard to separate these three; and you know I’m not fanatical about rules. (As my friend Josef Šíma likes to say, “We are not Prussians.”)

Elton John’s song “Rocket Man” is well known (in fact an Elton John biopic with that title is in theatres now), but another, less famous “Rocket Man” song preceded it by two years:

19. Pearls Before Swine, “Rocket Man” (1970):

This “Rocket Man” song is heavily inspired by the Ray Bradbury story of the same name. As in the Bradbury story, this song’s rocket man is a kind of addict (like Major Tom), but addicted to outer space rather than to a drug:

20. Elton John, “Rocket Man” (1972):

Elton John’s “Rocket Man,” while echoing the Bradbury story and/or Pearls song to some extent, seems to owe more to Bowie’s “Space Oddity” than to Bradbury.

The line about being as “high as a kite” has also been read as yet another space-travel-or-drug-use ambiguity.

The 2017 music video, by Iranian dissident and refugee Majid Adin, adds yet another layer of meaning, by turning space flight into a metaphor for Adin’s own experience smuggling himself from Iran into London:

21. David Bowie, “Like a Rocket Man” (2013):

If “Ashes to Ashes” left it ambiguous whether space flight was being used as a metaphor for drug addiction or vice versa, there’s no such ambiguity here.

The title references Elton John’s “Rocket Man” obviously, and Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” a bit less obviously:

17. David Bowie, “Ashes to Ashes” (1980):

After more than a decade, during which he’d struggled with drug addiction, Bowie revisits the world of “Space Oddity” and Major Tom. The revelation that “Major Tom’s a junkie” is often interpreted as treating the protagonist’s outer-space predicament as a metaphor for the danger of drug addiction, while the maternal warning “you’d better not mess with Major Tom” might imply that the protagonist himself represents that danger; but while those are both legitimate readings, Bowie in one interview suggested nearly the reverse reading, namely that drug addiction might be a metaphor for the outer-space predicament rather than vice versa:

I was thinking of how I was going to place Major Tom in this 10 years on … what would be the complete dissolution of the great dream that was being propounded when they shot him into space. The great technology … capable of putting him up there, but when he did get up there, he wasn’t quite sure why he’d been put there …. We come to him 10 years later and find the whole thing has soured, because there was no reason for putting him up there… The most disastrous thing I could think of is that he finds solace in some kind of heroin-type drug, actually cosmic space feeding him: an addiction. He wants to return to the womb from whence he came.

But it’s my impression that Bowie in interviews tended to say whatever came into his head, so I don’t really think this interpretation is any more authoritative than the others.

And continuing the theme of junkies in space:

18. Leslie Fish, “Some Kind of Hero” (1989)

Where Major Tom despairs of “stay[ing] clean tonight,” lamenting that he’s “never done good things” and “never done bad things,” this next song gives us a heroic addict who “finally died clean,” with “a smile on her lips”:

15. David Bowie, “Space Oddity” (1969):

Bowie’s first hit (and probably his best-known sci-fi song), released a year after 2001: A Space Odyssey and a week before the Apollo 11 moon landing, looking back toward one and forward to the other, and frequently revisited and reinvented over the course of Bowie’s career:

Another version:

And another:

And yet another:

And still another:

And one more:

16. Peter Schilling, “Major Tom (Coming Home)” (1982):

And then – partly an homage, partly a re-telling, and partly a sequel (Major Tom fanfic, perhaps):

13. David Bowie, “1984” (1974):

Bowie wanted to adapt Orwell’s novel as a rock opera, but couldn’t get the rights; so instead he wrote a number of 1984-themed songs that weren’t specific enough to run afoul of the Orwell estate. Here’s one:

Another version:

And another, combined with a different 1984-themed song, “Dodo”:

And continuing the theme of year-specific songs prophesying dystopia:

14. Zager and Evans, “In the Year 2525” (1968):

Two non-Bowie songs this time, but the first one counts as Bowie because I’m also including Bowie’s cover of it. Incidentally, Bowie not only covered it but reportedly based the name “Ziggy Stardust” on its author, the Legendary Stardust Cowboy (Norman Odom), though the two don’t really seem to share an aesthetic:

11. Legendary Stardust Cowboy, “I Took a Trip on a Gemini Spaceship” (1968)

Yes, the song’s title says “spaceship” (and “on”) but the lyrics say “spacecraft” (and “in”). I can’t help it.

As for the line “I shot my spacegun / and I thought about you” – well, that could mean either that he’s masturbating to thoughts of the addressee, or else that he’s fantasising about killing the addressee. (Or possibly has already killed the addressee: “I looked way back: / the stardust trail / leading back to you / What did I do?”)

The whole thing comes across as rather less creepy in Bowie’s 2002 cover:

12. Nick Cave with Grinderman, “Man in the Moon” (2007):

If the above song was a morose, lonely ballad of separation-by-space-travel from the standpoint of the person who left, this next one is a morose, lonely ballad of separation-by-space-travel from the standpoint of the person who was left. Though the line “That’s what I was often taught” immediately makes one doubt that his father’s disappearance had anything to do with outer space: