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Wednesday, May 16, 2007
Science Fiction Music
I’ve been writing short encyclopedia entries on SF pop and rock and any other variety of SF music I can think of for the much-anticipated third edition of this esteemed reference work. And what fun it has been. But all good things come to an end, and as I put the finishing touches to my “Frank Zappa” entry, and go back to insert a somehow-overlooked-when-I-was-doing-the-Ks “Klaatu” entry, I turn to the bleg. Below the fold is a list of the bands and individual musicians I have written entries for. Whom have I missed out?
So, for example: there’s The Fall. Now, I’ve got a couple of Fall albums, and of course I rate the group highly, as right-thinking people are obliged to do. But ‘a couple of albums’ is a long way from ‘a complete Fall collection’, and what with the often incomprehensible growling with which Mark E. Smith chooses to communicate his genius to the world, there could be dozens of SF concept albums hidden in amongst their discography, and I none the wiser.
ABARAX
ACID MOTHERS TEMPLE
ALAN PARSONS PROJECT
ÄLGARNAS TRÄDGÅRD
ANDERSON, JON
ARCHITECTURAL METAPHOR
AREA
AYREON
BABYLON ZOO
BAMBAATA, AFRIKA
BARCLAY JAMES HARVEST
BIOSPHERE
BLUE ÖYSTER CULT
BOWIE, DAVID
BRAINTICKET
BUGGLES
BYRDS, THE
CALVERT, ROBERT
CAN
CLINTON, GEORGE
COPE, JULIAN
DEVO
DREAM THEATER
DROID
DROIDS
EARTH AND FIRE
ELECTRIC LIGHT ORCHESTRA
ELOY
EMERSON LAKE AND PALMER
ENO, BRIAN
EUROPE
FLAMING LIPS, THE
FLOWER KINGS, THE
FROESE, EDGAR
FRIPP, ROBERT
FUNKADELIC
GÄA
GABRIEL, PETER
GALACTIC COWBOYS
GALAXY
GENESIS
GOD IS AN ASTRONAUT
GRATEFUL DEAD
HAMMIL HAMMILL, PETER
HAWKWIND
HENDRIX, JIMI
HIDREA SPACEFOLK
HOLST, GUSTAV
HOT GOSSIP
H. P. LOVECRAFT
HUMAN LEAGUE, THE
IDOL, BILLY
IRON MAIDEN
JARRE, JEAN MICHEL
JEFFERSON STARSHIP
JOHN, ELTON
JULVERNE
KANTNER, PAUL
KING CRIMSON
KLAATU
KRAFTWERK
LEGENDARY STARDUST COWBOY,
LITMUS
MAGMA
MANFRED MANN’S EARTH BAND
MASHINA VREMENI
MATIUSHIN, MIKHAIL
MEEK, JOE
MOODY BLUES, THE
MUSE
NAMLOOK, PETE
NEKTAR
NUMAN, GARY
OFFENBACH, JACQUES
OLDFIELD, MIKE
OMEGA
ORB, THE
ORCHESTRAL MANOEUVRES IN THE DARK
PARLIAMENT
PINK FLOYD
PORCUPINE TREE
RADIOHEAD
RUSH
RUTHERFORD, MIKE
SH’MANTRA
SOCIÉTÉ DES TIMIDES À LA PARADE DES OISEAUX, LA
SPIRIT
STEVE MILLER BAND, THE
STRANGLERS, THE
SUN RA
TANGERINE DREAM
TOMITA
ULTRAVOX
VAN DER GRAAF GENERATOR
VANGELIS
WAKEMAN, RICK
WHO, THE
YELLO
YELLOW MAGIC ORCHESTRA
YES
ZAPPA, FRANK
Comments
Excellent list! The Fall only have one concept album, to my knowledge, and I own every disc they’ve put out (with the exception of live material). *I Am Curious Oranj* was written for a ballet, and the material all loosely holds together. It’s not sci-fi, though.
There’s ESG’s “UFO,” but it doesn’t have any lyrics.
But don’t forget the kitschedelica bands, like B-52’s and The Cramps. There’s a lot of monster-movie sci-fi material there. And They Might Be Giants, who have a song that teaches children about the sun. You might even consider including Stereolab, with their “Space Age Bachelor Music” thing—which goes back to Esquivel and all that exotica primitive-meets-sci-fi bachelor pad music of the 50s and early 60s.
Man or Astroman also gets into sci-fi motifs, but most of their songs are instrumental.
The Normal’s “Warm Leatherette” is about Ballard’s *Crash*. Grace Jones did a brilliant remake of it. (Jawbox also wrote a song based on *Crash*, and it’s a great song, but I forget the name. It’s on their first major-label album.)
And what about Faust? Nothing immediately comes to mind, but Krautrock without space is like spacerock without Krauts. So Neu! too. And Einsturzende?
Grandaddy have some sci-fi songs. And Queen’s *Flash Gordon” soundtrack!!!!
This is evil, Adam. Like a Berubean arbitrary but fun Friday that’s encyclopedic, therefore not arbitrary. OCD sufferers beware.
Are you only counting groups that have made entire concept albums, or do single songs count? And how science-fictional do they need to be in total? For instance, The Residents’ Mark of the Mole includes a song “The New Machine” in which someone creates a new machine to displace the moles’ agricultural labor (they are a group of humanoids called moles because they like to work underground, they’re not mole animals, and the whole thing is a not very veiled allegory for the meeting of african-american and european-derived music in any case)—does that count, or is it not SF enough?
There’s a British rock band called Amplifier who have some very sf-nal songs (in the lyrical sense rather than the wibbly synths and theremins sense). They did an EP called “The Astronaut Dismantles HAL", for example. And if you’ll forgive the intrusion of a superficial value judgement into an otherwise academic posting environment, they’re bloody brilliant too.
Deltron 3030! Also, I think the Residents’ Mole Trilogy definitely qualifies.
Why are Can and Algarnas Tradgard on there? They may share sonic characteristics with space-rock that’s actually about space (i.e. Hawkwind), but so do Ash Ra Tempel, Popol Vuh, Brainticket, etc.
Great list.
The most explicitly sci-fi/nerd rock band I know is the Detholz!, featured in the documentary Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music?. Just generally a strange, strange band. Their first album Who Are the Detholz!? is full of theremin and the song titles/lyrics are painfully nerdy:
1. Mister Electricity
2. Rebirth Control
3. Kiss Me In Space
4. Army Of Mars
5. Dead Meat
6. Robot Insurrection Hymn
7. The Body Electric
8. Last Train To Mars
9. Scientific Eye
10. Sunburned In The Sun
11. Invisible Man
12. All For You
I’m not only interested in concept albums; singles too. But it’s a tricky business deciding what counts as SF music (patricularly with instrumental music; Tangerine Dream and Jean Michel Jarre etc). And tricky too deciding what’s important enough to merit an entry. So, I thought of writing an entry on the Carpenters, for “Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft”, but decided not to because it was a cover, even though it’s much more famous than Klaatu’s original.
There’s also a practical constraint; I don’t want to write about music only by repute; I want actually to hear it, or as much of it as possible. Now I own a fair bit of this sort of stuff already; lots more I have bought from gomusic.ru and other cheap download sites. But that doesn’t give me access to everything.
The entries I’ve written are, mostly, v. short, too. Long ones for Bowie, Hawkwind, Kraftwerk, Pink Floud and Sun Ra, medium length for eg Rush and the like, tiddly entries for the rest.
Luther: thanks for the suggestions. I considered They Might Be Giants, songs like “Particle Man”; but decided against it. Much as I love them. All your other suggestions I shall chase up.
Rich; The Residents sounds exactly the sort of thing I need to get hold of.
Paul: this is the first I’ve heard of Amplifier; I shall investigate.
AW: “Why are Can and Algarnas Tradgard on there? They may share sonic characteristics with space-rock that’s actually about space (i.e. Hawkwind), but so do Ash Ra Tempel, Popol Vuh, Brainticket, etc. “
Brainticket are already on the list (their Celestial Ocean album is about how the Ancient Egyptians were also interstellar astronauts). Can are on the list for the pulpy/comic-y stuff on Monster Movie (1969), and a handful of sf songs on Future Days (1973) and Soon Over Babaluma (1974).
Algarnas Tradgard are there for their 1972 album whose title translates as “The Future is a Hovering Ship Anchored in the Past”, a future-medieval time travel concept thing.
Ash Ra Tempel, (Temple?) I don’t know. What are the Popol Vuh sf tracks? Or are you saying that Popol Vuh have no more right to be in a SF encyclopedia than eg Can?
I should add: heartfelt Thanks ... this is all really enormously useful stuff.
It worries me a bit that Sun Ra is the only Jazz musician I’ve got. This certainly reflects my relative ignorance of Jazz. Relative to my depressingly detailed knowledge of 60s pop, 70s prog and 70/80s white punk, postpunk and indie.
A little more hip-hop wouldn’t hurt. Check out Cannibal Ox’s The Cold Vein for some Blakean sci-fi beats and rhymes. The producer of this album, El-P, has worked on similar projects, of which I think this is the best, but others might nominate Company Flow’s Funcrusher plus.
One more: King Geedorah - Take Me to Your Leader. Lots of campy fun because of all the sci-fi and Saturday morning cartoon samples.
Somehow I missed Brainticket’s presence on the list. Sci-fi references in Algarnas Tradgard and Can seem fairly scanty to me (not that I’ve done much rigorous analysis of Damo Suzuki’s lyrics), apart from occasional references to the future. I brought up Ash Ra Tempel and Popul Vuh because they fall into the same vague area, sonically, as Can, Tangerine Dream, etc. Ash Ra Tempel does have an album called “New Age of Earth.”
There are synth/DIY groups from the 80s with sufficiently dystopian themes. Chrome definitely comes to mind, as well as Metal Urbain (and their spin-off Metal Boys). I know there are more, but I can’t think of any off hand.
Classical electronic composition was sort of self-consciously futuristic. M.E.V. Collective, Vladimir Ussachevsky, Morton Subotnick, and so forth suggest sci-fi in their instrumental works, much as Tangerine Dream do. Louis and Bebe Barron (who did the soundrack for “Forbidden Planet") are also among them. This music is not ‘pop’ or ‘rock’ music per se, but certainly influenced groups like the aformentioned Tangerine Dream.
As for the Fall, though technology is something of a theme on at least one album ("The Unutterable"), the references are to Palm Pilots and other devices of the here and now.
Including single songs may leave you with too wide a selection, I’d think. But...OK, I’ll scroll through iTunes and mention even the ones that come close that you don’t already have.
For the Residents, there is a whole Mole Trilogy as AW writes. But Mark of the Mole is probably the only really science-fictional one, unless you consider the whole setting to be SF. I don’t think the Residents have any other major work that would count as SF.
Captain Beefheart has the songs “The Smithsonian Institute Blues” (whimsy rather than SF, I’d say) and “Space Age Couple” (more of a complaint about pollution than SF), so probably shouldn’t be included. Oh, and “Flash Gordon’s Ape”, but that has about the same understandable lyrical content as most Beefheart songs.
I’d almost be tempted to include the Clash for “London Calling” (The ice age is coming, the sun’s zooming in /
Meltdown expected, the wheat is growing thin) but a few lyrics do not an SF song make.
The Dead Kennedys, though, might make it: the song “Kill the Poor” most famously, but also “One-Way Trip to Pluto”, “Shrink”, “Government Flu”, “Moon Over Marin”.
Laurie Anderson has a lot of sciency-sounding songs, but I can’t remember any actual SF offhand.
Lou Reed, “Satellite of Love”, probably not enough actual SF content.
Matt Howarth and Quarkspace did an interesting electronica/SF album “Node in Peril”, with a comic book, but probably no one has heard of it.
Who knows whether Snakefinger’s “The Picture Makers vs The Children of the Sea” is SF or hallucinatory, but it always strikes me as vaguely funny. ("Can’t you see? They’re the masters of the visual image!")
The Kinks: “Supersonic Rocket Ship”
The Rolling Stones: “2000 Light Years from Home”
Bill Haley and the Comets: “Thirteen Women (and Only One Man in Town)” (a post-atomic holocaust song)
Re jazz: Chick Corea and Stanley Clarke played on L. Ron Hubbard’s “Battlefield Earth” LP (not the movie soundtrack, but an earlier “soundtrack"), which has been described as “lukewarm synth-pop." Corea later released a CD called “To the Stars” and another called “ The Ultimate Adventure,” both based on Hubbard SF works of the same names.
This article has some info on the Battlefield Earth LP, as well as a few other projects.
Neither “rock” nor “pop” in the narrow sense of those terms, but some dub Sufjan Stevens’ great album Come on! Feel the Illinoise! (aka the Illinois album) as space folk.
A second for Del tha Funky Homosapien!
I believe Granddady is the band with the songs about the sad robot?
If you count early new wave music videos, you’ll need about a hundred more entries. Sigh --- new wave videos! :)
Ok, back to sanity.
For classical music, if that’s included, there is a very important one: Stanislaw Lem has a short story about a poetry-composing robot in _The Cyberiad_. Esa-Pekka Salonen, the composer who was the director of the LA Phil until recently, created an avant-garde vocal/flute/piano piece based on this short story called “Floof.” When Barnes and Noble was pushing its classical collection it was giving away a “sample CD” of avant garde music with every classical purchase, which is how I found it. The two are wonderful (and strange) to teach together. No one I talk to has ever heard of it, though.
Further re jazz:
To varying degrees, some of Miles Davis’s electric material can definitely be considered “spacey” or sci-fi. “In A Silent Way” has always sounded to me like it was being played by guys floating in space. “Agharta” and “Pangea” are really dark, dense, apocalyptic-sounding stuff: if it were the end of the world and a comet was visibly hurtling through the sky towards Earth, I imagine most music would sound a lot like those two albums.
A Brazillian guy called Deodato had a hit in the early 70s with a jazz-fusion version of “Also Sprach Zarathustra” (aka Theme from 2001), for what that’s worth.
Some of what Steve Coleman does with his weird M-BASE collective has a very disconcerting and futuristic vibe; unsettling dissonant funky jazz that I imagine they’ll play in the hipster night clubs of the future. Try “Black Science” to get an idea of what it sounds like, if you think it works go for “Rhythm People” too.
Good call on mentioning Stereolab & Esquivel upthread, they’re a definite must.
The Battlefield Earth LP? I always knew that there must be something deeply wrong with Chick Corea.
I’d call it religious music and disqualify it from being listed for that reason. Elron has his own religion; his gold-covered, buried archive to survive the centuries; a movie; minions to buy copies of his SF books and keep them in circulation. He doesn’t need an entry for this too. Plus, if you describe it as lukewarm synth-pop, you’ll probably get sued for blasphemy or hate speech or something.
Nervous Norvous, “The Fang”—a sort of space-age rockabilly song from the 50s about a trip to Mars to find some chicks. And I’m sure there are more than a few rockabilly/early rock songs with space-age motifs.
Rodd Keith, *I Died Today*—John Zorn put out this collection of Keith’s songs. Keith would collect lyrics sent in by readers of pop music magazines and set them to music. There are a bunch of sci-fi loony-tunes on this one. Real spacey stuff from the early 60s.
For jazz, I’d look into Anthony Braxton and other AACM-type avant folks.
Hip-hop: Death Comet Crew. All of MF Doom’s various projects.
I also wonder what you’d find in the Cabaret Voltaire, Throbbing Gristle, DAF area.
Your mentioning DAF reminds me: Der Plan’s album “Normalette Surprise” includes such tracks as “Robot Bolero” and “Ich Bin Ein Computer.”
You know I’m always happy when I get to reference Nine Inch Nails. Reznor’s new one, Year Zero, is a sci-fi concept album that takes place in 2022.
(Note: it was not released in a special DVD-only collector’s edition, and the collector’s edition did not feature commentary by Slavoj Zizek. But is this not precisely what would have happened if I’d been put in charge?)
Cabaret Voltaire have a future dystopia/cyberpunk feel, but perhaps not any definitely SF lyrical themes.
Grandaddy’s ‘Everything Beautiful is Far Away’ (on Under the Western Freeway) is about someone marooned on an empty planet - ‘Since the shuttle had crashed, many years had passed...’. And their second album The Sophtware Slump contains several songs about a conscious robot called Jed. And they’re great.
Gong have a lot of silly stuff about flying saucers/teapots.
Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds surely counts.
Incidentally, it’s Peter Hammill, not Hammil.
What fun of a Thursday morning. Adam, you spoil us.
How about Frank Black/Black Francis, ‘The Cult of Ray’ specifically but sundry Pixies and solo stuff? A la that bloke from The Troggs, he’s something of an amateur ufologist (is there any other kind)?
Ladies and Gentlemen, We Are Floating in Space by Spiritualized?
Out of Space, The Prodigy
Intergalactic, Beastie Boys
(Much as it pains me) We Are All Made of Stars, Moby
Blur - Quite a few songs now I think about it: Strange News From Another Star
Far Out
Trouble in the Message Centre (hard to determine quite how this is SF, it just is)
The Enterprise-esque cover art to the End of a Century single
And, of course, the Beagle 2 theme toon, plus Alex James and Dave Rowntree’s involvement with the Beagle project
Telstar, The Tornadoes (check out the single cover at wikipedia - pure Sputnik-pop)
Countdown Time in Outer Space, The Dave Brubeck Quartet
Didn’t Queen record the Flash Gordon soundtrack?
Scratching my head to come up with some hip-hop beyond the Beasties but no joy (I dare say there’s some comment to be made on the genre’s rhetoric of authenticity being inimical to outer space etc.), although countless hip-hop, rap and r n b vidoes are ridden with sci-fi imagery.
hip-hop:
Kanye West, “Spaceship”
Kool Keith, “I’m Seeing Robots” & several others from the *Black Elvis/Lost in Space* LP
Swell Maps, “Robot Factory”
The Tornados (under Joe Meek), “Robot”
Futureheads, “Robot”
Damon & Naomi, “The Robot Speaks”
(Yes, I searched for “robot” in iTunes)
Tim Buckley’s “Starsailor”?
All excellent. Thank you.
Sam C: good catch on ‘Hammil/Hammill’. Sloppy of me. And me a VdGG fan, too.
Anthony: “that bloke from The Troggs, he’s something of an amateur ufologist” .... indeed. Reg Presley, no? But is there any actual Troggs music that is sf, though?
Led Zeppelin also had UFOlogist interests; but I can’t think of any of their music that is sf.
Now that so much has been added for consideration, perhaps a turn to negative critique—why is Holst, Gustav on the list? For The Planets? But that’s science-y (or, really, astrology-y), not science fictional. If you include everything that just mentions science, planets, etc. your list will be far too long. (Though if you do, it would be a good excuse to include MC Hawking).
Holst’s Planets science-y? I disagree. Surely the first few are astrological; then the later ones are all spacious and weird and sense-of-wonder-y. It recapitulates the evolution of the genre.
There’s also his choral fantasia The Cloud Messenger (1912), about a sentient cloud don’t you know.
Great post. Right, let’s get to it. (Sorry of some of these are repeats. I think they are mostly not.)
You need “In the Year 2525”, by one-hit wonders Zager and Evans.
And “Science Fiction/Double Feature” from the Rocky Horror Picture Show.
You need “Tonight, Tonight” by Smashing Pumpkins, for the Melies “voyage to the moon” homage video. (See YouTube.) Toss in “Spaceboy” for good measure.
From iTunes, the Flaming Lips - you’ve got that - Styx “Mr. Roboto” - need that one.
How about the Aqua Bats, “Ska Robot Army”?
James Kochalka “Monkey vs. Robot” (basically a spin-off of the author’s fine comic of that name.) You can download that one for free somewhere or other.
At the moment I’m listening to Toto, “Robot Fight”, from the Dune Soundtrack. Guess that doesn’t count.
Brother Cleve, “School For Robots”, from the Dimension Mix album. That’s a good’un.
Buffalo Daughter “Robot Sings (as if he were Frank Sinatra With a Half Boiled Egg & the Salt Shaker On a Breakfast Table”.) I like that one.
Oingo Boingo “Weird Science”.
Sufjan Stevens, “Concerning the UFO sighting near Highland, Illinois”. But that’s just plain religious.
Nina Hagen “UFO”
Husker Du, “Books About UFOs”
Oh, yeah, the techno band S.P.O.C.K. Dude, you need that one. Now I’m listening to their “All E.T.’s aren’t nice”. “Face the fact/Beware of an attack/All E.T.’s aren’t nice/They might be here any night/So get ready for a fight/All E.T.’s aren’t nice.”
There’s the band Spacehog and the band Spaceman Three.
Flock of Seagulls, “Space Age Love Song”
The Byrds, “Mr. Spaceman”
Fountains of Wayne, “Lost in Space” “And she walks the earth/But she’s not of the human race/She’s a pretty little thing/But she’s lost in space”
“A Space Boy Dream” Belle and Sebastian
“The issue of tissue (spacecake)” Gwar (ick, don’t like that one)
“Jesus Came From Outer Space”, Supergrass
“Spaced Cowboy”, Sly and the Family Stone
“Planet Rock”, Afrikka Bambaata and Soulforce
“Another Girl, Another Planet”, The Only Ones
“Planet of Sound”, Pixies
“Rocketman”, Elton John
“Major Tom (I’m Coming Home)” Peter Schilling
“Silver Rocket”, Sonic Youth
“Rocket Queen,” Guns N’ Roses
“Kelly Watch the Stars,” Air (Air has a bunch)
The band Golden has an entire album, Apollo Stars, dedicated to the Apollo project. Every song is about it.
“We Are All Made of Stars,” Moby
“Laser Love” After The Fire
“Genetic Engineering,” X-Ray Spex
I wonder if I should include Aleksandr Scriabin for his Mysterium.
“Scriabin intended that the performance of this work, to be given in the foothills of the Himalayas in India, would last seven days and would be followed by the end of the world, with the human race replaced by ‘nobler beings’."
Nice to find an artist with a proper sense of the importance of his own work.
Thanks John. A couple of your suggestions are in my list already, but most are not, and should be.
Ah, yes, Reg Presley (can’t help thinking Elvis Costello hi-jacked the better of the two names). I can’t think of any Troggs’ music that is sf (and I, perhaps unjustly, assume that Reg’s interest in crop circles is ufological - I haven’t read his research).
Add Add N to X; Styx - Come Sail Away; Elvis Costello - Satellite; Man, Or Astro-Man? to the burgeoning list.
As I waste yet another half hour thinking on ‘sf music’, it occurs to me that Michael Jackson, who seems so obvious a candidate for lyricising outer space (the relationship with George Lucas, the ‘film’ Moonwalker in which he reveals himself to be a Transformer, the video to Scream, the resemblance to one of The Family in The Omega Man, etc.), doesn’t have a sf song i can think of. He’s done horror and crime.
"I turned into a Martian,” the Misfits
“Teenagers From Mars,” the Misfits
"Big Eyed Beans From Venus”, Captain Beefheart
“Saturn,” Stevie Wonder
“Uranus,” The Descendents
“Pluto,” Bjork
“The Day That Lassie Went to the Moon,” Camper Van Beethoven - not really SF, though
“The Moon,” Cat Power
“Fly Me To the Moon” (bit of a stretch)
That appears to be it for the solar system
Moving out we get Chick Corea, Return To Forever (that’s the band) “Hymn to the Seventh Galaxy” 9that’s the album”
urgh, I can’t believe I know this, let alone remember this, BUT
Automatic Man
Steve Hillage (one-time member of Gong)
Spiritualized
And there must be more . . .
dave mazella
There’s the group ‘30 Seconds to Mars’ with the film-star chappy in it. But they’re rubbish. And are they sf? Apart, that is, from their name?
I agree that it is a tricky business deciding what counts here, esp. with instrumental music. So I won’t list a thousand electronic “space music” bands/people. But you should have Richard Pinhas/Heldon on there. For example, RP’s Chronolyse has tracks called “Paul Atreides,” “Duncan Idaho,” and “Bene Gesserit variations”. Plus it’s a great record, but I’m not sure what your criteria are there. By the way, you all may remember an article in the sadly departed Lingua Franca which mentions him (a picture too, I think). He was a big fan of Philip K. Dick (q.v. “Doctor Bloodmoney” from Heldon III, or “Ubik” from DWW), and tried to get in contact with him, but unfortunately Dick was in his psychotic/paranoid phase at the time and turned his name over to the FBI. He (Pinhas) also runs a Deleuze site here (in French, mostly).
And if Edgar Froese is spacy enough, then so is the master of that genre Klaus Schulze. (I’d mention his record Dune, but it’s not his best ...).
Bill Nelson is another guitar god who belongs here. If his Cocteau obsession doesn’t do it for you, then his retrofuturist yen for big pointy rocket ships should.
Is Bo Hansson’s Lord of the Rings too fantasy?
Gee whiz, now I want to go digging up old vinyl (can’t just search digitally like some people...).
"The band Golden has an entire album, Apollo Stars, dedicated to the Apollo project. Every song is about it.”
Stop the madness! If Adam wants to include The Planets despite its astrologicity that’s up to him, but the Apollo project is just not SF. Next people will be saying that the Hubble Space Telescope is SF. It’s not SF without the F, people.
Speaking of astrology reminds me of an incident from astrophysics grad school when one of the grad students recounted his bad date. According to him, they got in the car to go wherever they were going, and she asked him what he did. He replied that he worked on astronomy. Her response: “Oh yeah? I really believe in that stuff.” The fact that he didn’t immediately turn the car around and drive her home again, although he wanted to, stood for a long time as an example of geek shame.
Oh, alright, here’s more:
Sigue Sigue Sputnik, and
Thomas Dolby
dave mazella
The heavy metal Fear Factory are a science fiction band.
The latest album by Nine Inch Nails I believe is a concept album based on a dystopian future.
Marilyn Manson has some science fiction songs on the album Mechanical Animals (about an alien come to earth.)
Tool have a couple of science fiction tracks; the hidden track at the end of ‘Lateralus’ and a couple of tracks off ‘10,000 Days’.
I reckon we’ve about doubled the length of my list. Lots more work for me to do ... thank you, everybody.
Sorry, if the following title was mentioned in one of the comments (I did not read all of them), but I cannot help but notice your list does not include Tony Banks’s concept album “A Curious Feeling” (from 1979), which is, after all, about Daniel Keyes’s “Flowers for Algernon”.
Miles Davis “RATED X” is a MUST, can’t believe I forgot that one.
The new Nine Inch Nails album is most certainly a science fiction album. For more information about it, here is a nice summary: http://www.9inchnails.com/discography/official-releases/year-zero.php
Don’t forget Air, and *Moon Safari* in particular. The song “Robot Boy” is fab.
Rainer, yes: I have already written an entry on Banks, actually; not sure why he’s not in the list above. Mike Rutherford also makes the cut, for Smallcreep’s Day (1980)
I will get the new NiN. Miles Davis and Air = both good suggestions.
What about Kiss? I am not saying “Love Gun” is sci fi but, you know, the spacey costumes. The cinematic classic “Phantom of the Park” is sci fi.
C’mon, you know had the lunch box.
I keep thinking there ought to be some sf Talking Heads ... they seem to me a band somehow intrinsically sciencefictional.
I think a mention of Tom Rapp and Pearls Before Swine for Rocket Man (which Taupin once claimed inspired his version) would be in order.
You might also want to include something Nerdcore. MC Frontalot, for instance, has some SF themed work - Forbidden Planet, Yellow Lasers and Secrets from the Future.
Best of all, your secret: nothing extant could extract it.
By 2025 a children’s Speak & Spell could crack it
Yellow Lasers isn’t science fictional—unless it’s completely unbelievable that, in the immortal words of Luther Blissett, someone wouldn’t have to pay extra cash for that.
Yellow Lasers isn’t science fictional
Rich, this treatment does end up at a very non-SF place, but it starts met her at the star wars convention
and later:
I could be jaba, a jawa, an ewok, when we talk “oo ga la gee bla!”
wait—I seen all the flicks, all the books that I read,
don’t remember any character tied to the bed
but that’s all right, I’ma just pretend that I’m encased in carbonite
I didn’t notice Holst was on the list. If you’re doing classical music, too, there’s Aniara, an opera by Karl-Birger Blomdahl with a libretto by Erik Lindegren. It was based on a poem by Harry Martinson, who won a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1974.
>I keep thinking there ought to be some sf Talking Heads ...
“Life during Wartime,” maybe?
Mansun’s “Attack of the Grey Lantern” (and possibly “Six”, although i haven’t heard it). It takes its name from a superhero, who came into being through Marvel comic-like fantastic means. But the most sci fi line is probably:
“If I start this small debate,
The centre of the universe is up for sale”
JP Stormcrow, Yellow Lasers tells a story of somewhat abusive sex between SF fans, but that doesn’t make it SF. SF fans are actual living people in an actual existing society, and fiction involving them isn’t necessarily science fiction. For example, Evan Dorkin’s comic book series about The Eltingville Comic-Book, Science-Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, and Role-Playing Club isn’t SF just because it features people who like to buy Star Wars figurines. That would be like saying that a novel whose protagonists were Civil War reenactors was a Civil War novel, or that one about an ironically alienated romance novel reader was a romance novel.
Adam’s goes to have enough to go through without calling anything about science SF, or anything about SF culture SF.
At the Drive-in
Powerman 5000
sorry, too lazy to check if these have already been suggested or figure out what my own definition of sf music would be.
Can’t believe I forgot this one: Dimension Hatross by Voivod is a prog-thrash concept album about a scientist who creates a ‘parallel micro-galaxy’ in a particle accelerator and then goes exploring in it. And yes, it is at least as silly as that sounds.
No White Zombie or Rob Zombie yet? “More Human Than Human“ (or “bore hubid thad hubid”, as we say when singing along). There are other Zombie songs, band and solo, which surely merit inclusion.
Arguably the KLF should count as well.
And Chemlab.
Indeed, I suspect a sizable fraction of the old-school Industrial music with which I damaged my hearing would count, if only we examined it track-by-track. Dystopia, don’t you know.
Now you’ve gone and done it. Things we used to play often are now rolling out of the boxes.
Spacehog’s “Space is the Place” and “Spacehog” are back in my ear.
And that other one. Oh, damn. Began with an R....
I can’t believe that no one mentioned Wendy Carlos. What about “Timesteps” from the Clockwork Orange sountrack?
The Incredible String Band’s U album does descend from all the mystical guff about substance, space and time to the jolly stomp of ‘Robot City Blues’. It was big when I was a sixth former…
Probably way too late for this edition, but Albert Ayler (and apparently a few other young jazz musicians of the late 50s and early 60s) somehow was convinced he was from space, or so a friend told me.
You also might include Klaxons, who have an SF-themed album.
My favorite Korean freak-trance-folk musician, Hwang Sin Hae Band (but it’s really just one guy) is also very spacey: does shows in costumes that straddle SFnal and Dynastic and some of his songs or albums seem to have the theme as well. His Best of album was called “Woojoo is a JjamBbong” which means “Space/The Universe is a Bowl of Spicy Chinese Soup,” roughly.
Of course, that last guy shouldn’t go on your list (because who has heard of him?) but a look at him may amuse you.
The Collectors, a Canadian group have a song about a precocious child prodigy who..."developed a way he could change the molecular structure of clay.He could change it from clay into silver and gold.Don’t forget as of yet he was just three years old.” Give a listen. I won’t spoil it by giving away the surprise ending. Oh, and-Definitely-Do you already have The United States of America on your list? e.g. the song; Where is Yesterday? (GREAT!) Check out The Jive Aces,too. A song from a Robt. Heinlein story:"We pray for one last landing on the globe that gave us birth. Let us rest our eyes on azure skies and the cool green hills of Earth.” has also been put to music by Johnny Webb and possibly The Flying Burrito Brothers.
I definitely agree with the inclusion of ELO and The Byrds. Both of them have a real trippy, other worldly quality that I think a lot of groups are missing nowadays