Yacht – 8 Tracks From The Future

This is easily the best song ever written about the future. It was Zager & Evans’ only hit, and it had no chorus, only a continuous series of speculations in 100-year increments. It was #1 on the charts when we landed on the moon! It’s like a dystopian novel, made even more exceptionally weird because it was written and performed by two guys from Nebraska.

This is part of David Byrne’s “Knee Plays,” which he composed for the experimental theater producer Robert Wilson in the 80s. It’s all brass and drums, very repetitive, tone-poem kind of stuff. Every single stanza in this song would make a great science fiction novel.

Assuming everything will be sorted out in the future is something only Scientologists and people planning on being cryonically preserved really buy. It’s just too easy. Thankfully this song’s manic idealism (“In the future, fun is fun!”) reads extremely satirical, like all the best Sparks songs. One YouTube comment on this performance video pretty much sums it up: “drugs were really good back then.”

This is a cover, actually—the original is by Exuma, an unclassifiable Bahamian musician who painted and made some incredible calypso/reggae records in the mid-70s. The lyrics (“man is woman, woman is man / even your brain is not your brain / your heart is a plastic thing / and can be bought”) are wild and loose and bleak. Nina Simone’s version, like most Nina Simone versions of things, cuts deepest.

We’ve always wanted to cover this song. It’s actually very profound: human supremacy is just a construct, something that happened as a consequence of our mastery of tools on this particular planet, but it’s not inalienable (so to speak). It could well be that our mastery of tools eventually mutates into tools which master us—we would make great pets for aliens and Artificial Intelligences alike.

A theme is beginning to emerge here. None of these songs are particularly hopeful about tomorrow. This is a weird period of Leonard Cohen’s career, mid-90s, post-comeback. He looks like Richard Nixon in this video. He’s eviscerating as usual: “I’ve seen the future, brother: it is murder.” Fuck.

This one’s from a rare category: intergalactic future sex music. In 2093, predicts Marvin Gaye, captain of a space bed and holding some potent Venusian grass, “we gonna be getting down on the moon.” He’s not wrong.

Finally, a palette-cleanser. This song was a hit when I (Claire) was visiting my grandparents in the UK in 2002. I remember being blown away by how totally terrible it was—it reaches a level of unbridled nonsense, lyrically, beyond anything I’d ever seen or heard before. I still can’t believe it, thirteen years later. The chorus speaks for itself: “I’ve been to the year three thousand, not much has changed but they lived under water, and your great-great-great-granddaughter is pretty fine.”