Some sci-fi-themed songs
feel like outer space; others come right out and sing about it. I tackled this dichotomy while writing
Strange Stars, my book about science fiction’s influence on the music of the ’70s. In doing so, I discovered some of the most stunning sci-fi lyrics of the era — and rediscovered some old favorites. Here are a few examples of sci-fi songs from the ’70s that contain my favorite, most cosmically evocative lines.
“Big Brother” by David Bowie
David Bowie’s 1974 album,
Diamond Dogs, was originally intended to be a musical adaptation of George Orwell’s
Nineteen Eighty-Four, but Orwell’s estate put the kibosh on that. Instead, Bowie borrowed a handful of elements from the novel and worked them into tracks like “Big Brother,” which contains the lovely lyric, “Give me pulsars unreal,” a sentiment that might as well have been Bowie’s mission statement in the early ’70s. Of course, there are no pulsars, unreal or otherwise, in
Nineteen Eighty-Four — but “Big Brother” remains a testament to Bowie’s ability to take sci-fi influences and morph them into interplanetary poetry.
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“A Funky Space Reincarnation” by Marvin Gaye
Silky and sexy — I mean, this
is Marvin Gaye — “A Funky Space Reincarnation” is an epic trip into the sensuous depths of outer space. But there’s more to this often overlooked 1978 song than meets the eye; after offering romantic enticements beyond our solar system, Gaye expands his scope, absorbing pop culture and Afrofuturism effortlessly with the lines, “
Star Wars interplanetary funk / Still getting down / Music won’t have no race, only space.”
“Starsailor” by Tim Buckley
When Tim Buckley released his masterpiece
Starsailor in 1970, the album’s jazzy, progressive folk seemed centuries ahead of its time. The title track had a lot to do with that. As Buckley sculpts a dizzying assemblage of drones and chants, he delivers one of the most intergalactically mind-bending lines ever (written by his lyrical collaborator, Larry Beckett): “Beyond the suns I speak and circuits shiver.”
“The Day the World Turned Day-Glo” by X-Ray Spex
Poly Styrene, the lead singer of the punk band X-Ray Spex, was obsessed with how consumer culture had transformed society into a thing of slick surfaces and happy emptiness. On the group’s 1978 song “The Day the World Turned Day-Glo,” she taps into the weird energy of sci-fi B-movies while imaging a world in the very near future that’s been entirely replaced by artificial substances: “The X-rays were penetrating / Through the latex breeze / Synthetic fiber see-thru leaves / fell from rayon trees.”
“After the Gold Rush” by Neil Young
Neil Young has never been known as a sci-fi songwriter, but there’s no denying the astral implications of his 1970 folk rock anthem “After the Gold Rush.” In it, humanity must depart an imperiled Earth and seek asylum among the stars. But they also want to remember the planet that gave Homo sapiens birth by “Flying Mother Nature’s silver seed / To a new home in the sun.”
“Space Junk” by Devo
Oddly enough, the new-wave band Devo wound up befriending Neil Young by the end of the ’70s, even going so far as to make the dystopian film
Human Highway together. Devo, though, had always been immersed in science fiction, from their innovative use of technology to their satirically warped views on human evolution. On their 1978 song “Space Junk,” they joke darkly about an almost biblical deluge — not of rain, but of chunks of wayward artificial satellites in decaying orbits: “It smashed by baby’s head, space junk / And now my Sally’s dead, space junk.”
“Unfunky UFO” by Parliament
George Clinton, Bootsy Collins, and the rest of the Parliament crew took sci-fi music to another dimension in the ’70s — starting with
Mothership Connection,
their bombshell 1975 album. The songs were knitted together to form a sprawling mythology of cosmic good and evil, with funk being a universal energy akin to
Star Wars two years later. All Earth needs to survive, Parliament is saying, is for humans to harness and unleash their latent funkiness: “You’ve got all that is really needed / To save a dying world from its funkless hell.”
“Flaming Telepaths” by Blue Öyster Cult
Like Parliament, the hard rock band Blue Öyster Cult wove an elaborate mythos through their songs — and across multiple albums. Their
Imaginos story line was concocted by their lyricist and producer, Sandy Pearlman, and it involved everything from aliens to secret societies to time travel. Their 1974 song “Flaming Telepaths” embodies all the sci-fi mystery of BÖC, telling the cautionary, cyberpunk-like tale of a scientist who, with Doctor Frankenstein-level hubris, claims that “Yes, I know the secrets of the circuitry mind.”
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Jason Heller is a Hugo Award-winning writer whose work has appeared in
The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, and
The Atlantic Monthly, among other publications. His latest books include
Taft 2012 and
Strange Stars.