Extraterrestrial songbook
Since the '50s, rockers have watched the skies
by Matt Ashare
There's a scene in Apollo 13 -- a curious wrinkle in the film's
otherwise seamless, action-adventure plot -- that's there to remind us how easy
it is to grow bored with the tedious reality of outer space. It's the scene in
which it becomes clear that network television has opted not to carry live
footage of the three Apollo 13 astronauts on their way to the moon
because the ratings in previous broadcasts just hadn't been strong enough. Of
course, as soon as the mission escalates to near disaster, the media and the
public get real interested real fast. But by that point their interest has more
to do with the human drama of three men fighting for their lives against all
odds than with what James T. Kirk used to call "the Final Frontier."Not much has changed since. Everybody remembers the Space Shuttle that exploded, and just about every major media outlet made a big deal of covering that event's 10-year anniversary. But how many of you recall the last successful Space Shuttle mission? Fewer, probably, than know what agents Scully and Mulder have been up to every Friday night at 9 for the past three years.
Each time we launch another manned or unmanned craft into outer space, the bytes of reality that get beamed back to NASA simply confirm the notion that outer space is just one big vacuum, refuting the existence of the Venusians whom Jack Nicholson raved about in Easy Rider, the Martians whom Ray Bradbury once promised in his novels, even the very human visitor of the '50s sit-com My Favorite Martian.
But lack of evidence hasn't put a cap on the proliferation of fictions that embrace the possibility of life forms other than our own, or on claims of alien abductions and UFO sightings. Indeed, it's only made the fantasies more convoluted and scary. If The X-Files is the Star Trek of the '90s -- and that seems to be the case -- then we've traded the righteous moral simplicity of Captain Kirk for the paranoia and intrigue of the renegade Agent Mulder, the benign bureaucracy of the Federation for some vague, menacing government-condoned conspiracy, the innocent quest for empirical knowledge out there for a desperate search after the salvation of a dark and disturbing truth down here.
Fortunately, pop music has stepped in with a potent back-to-the-future remedy for UFO and alien-abduction anxieties. Unlike novels, movies, or television -- all of which seek to frame science fictions in terms of an archetypal quest for knowledge -- pop music deals with the immediate thrill of the unknown in the familiar language of verse/chorus/verse, with no strings of complex narrative attached. Pop songs are a temporary escape hatch for the anxious imagination, a place where fantasies are confined to three-minute bursts of melody, fears are abandoned in the silky embrace of fleeting reveries, and fear and loathing are disguised as harmlessly cartoonish nightmares like the one Rob Zombie and Alice Cooper team up to deliver on Songs in the Key of X: Music from and Inspired by "The X-Files" (Warner Bros.).
That a disc inspired by a Fox television series was able to attract alterna-rock heavies the Foo Fighters (covering, of all things, the Gary Numan tune "Down in the Park"), Grammy winner Sheryl Crow, and talents like Elvis Costello and Brian Eno (collaborating for the first time on the Costello-penned "My Dark Life") is a pretty fair indicator that aliens and UFOs have mounted yet another invasion of the pop mainstream. When the Pixies celebrated the "Motorway to Roswell" -- as in the road leading to the infamous hangar 18 where an alien craft is thought to be housed -- on 1991's Trompe Le Monde (4AD/Elektra), you could just chalk it up to the undeniable eccentricities of frontman Frank Black (a/k/a Black Francis, né Charles Thompson). When Perry Farrell's Porno for Pyros scored a hit with their extraterrestrial fantasy "Pets" (as in "We'll make great pets" for whatever alien civilization conquers us), it was easy enough to attribute the song's success to its undeniable hook and the cult of Farrell's personality. But when the number one single on the British charts is "Girl from Mars" by Ash, a young Irish band who titled their album 1977 (Reprise) because that was the year Star Wars was released; or when there are bands like Supernova, Spacehog, and Man or Astro-Man? out there countering the alienation of grunge with a savvy fusion of revved-up retro-rock and alien notions -- then it's time to start taking notes.
Pop has an extraterrestrial history that predates the Pixies, from the eerie, theramin-laced "Moon Moods" orchestrated by space-age cocktail swinger Les Baxter in 1946 to the raucous novelty of Billy Lee Riley's 1957 classic "Flying Saucer Rock 'n' Roll"; from the glam-rock thunder of David Bowie's The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972, Rykodisc) to the slick, techno surfaces of '80s new-wavers like A Flock of Seagulls and Gary Numan; and from the intergalactic free jazz of Sun Ra and his Arkestra to the post-Velvets trance pop of Spaceman 3. Today's rock-and-roll abductees are well aware of space pop's diverse legacy. In fact, most of them draw more inspiration from the rock-solid past than from the uncertain future, and that's a big part of the appeal.
Take Frank Black, a guy who was starting to sound more and more like an abductee, or at least a wanna-be abductee, even before The X-Files became a reality. Black is clearly fascinated by the truth that's out there and by the revelations that the future may bring. The title of his most recent disc, The Cult of Ray (American), refers to followers of sci-fi writer Ray Bradbury. Songs like "The Marsist," "Men in Black," and "Punk Rock City" all draw on the language and iconography of contemporary cyberpunk-conspiracy theorists. But Black sets his futuristic vision to music that's drawn straight from the past -- a quirky fusion of surf-style guitars and backbeats, overdriven punk power chords, and new-wave hooks.
Black's lyrics, especially in the song "Men in Black," may echo Agent Mulder's out-there speculations, but the verse-chorus-verse fundamentals of the music is analogous to the conventional wisdom that Agent Scully brings to the X-Files dynamic. The result harks back to an era when the future didn't look quite so menacing, when Billy Lee Riley's little green men from Mars arrived with the intention of rocking out, when one could imagine the moon as the perfect setting for a really cool rock club instead of knowing that it's just a big, cold rock in the sky. "Take me to somewhere cool," Black sings in the opening verse of "The Marsist," but it's not clear whether he means the somewhere in the uncertain future or somewhere in the same futuristic past alluded to by the disc's Jetsons-style cover art.
Black is not alone, at least not in terms of his nostalgic retro-futurism or
his fondness for surf punk. He's got groups like Man or Astro-Man?, Laika &
the Cosmonauts, and Supernova out there to keep him company. The connection
between surf music and outer space may seem a little far-fetched, but the
Tornadoes, whose 1962 instrumental "Telstar" topped the pop charts for three
weeks, were surf-rockers. And it actually makes a lot of sense when you listen
to a disc like Man or Astro-Man?'s Experiment Zero (Touch & Go) or
Laika & the Cosmonauts' Zero Gravity (Upstart). Both treat the
surfaces of Mars and Venus as nothing more than exotic vacation spots like the
beaches of Oahu or Zuma, space travel as nothing more than catching a monster
wave on a very fancy surfboard. Supernova take the intergalactic shtick one
step further by incorporating homemade spacesuits into their playfully raucous
live show. But one of the main ideas of Supernova's Ages 3 and Up
(Amphetamine Reptile/Atlantic) seems to be the comforting thought that even
punk rockers from another galaxy have a lot in common with their counterparts
from Earth, including an abiding disdain for hippies.
Spacehog, a group of self-exiled Brits based out of New York's East Village, keep their feet firmly planted on the same glam-rock terrain that Ziggy Stardust once ruled on their Elektra debut Resident Alien. The retro version of the future Spacehog allude to in songs like "Space Is the Place" and "Starside" is one where cool, androgynous clothes, gleaming guitar hooks, and getting high get top billing. And it's got a hell of a lot more in common with the hopeful future Bowie imagined 25 years ago in songs like "Starman" than with the steely, unforgiving future he constructed on last year's Black Tie, White Noise (Virgin).
You have to travel to the outer orbits of pop to find music that strives to capture the sound of the future -- to an ambient dub group like the Orb, a techno outfit like Underworld or Orbital, or atmospheric specialists like the producers at the Astralwerks label. But even there you'll discover echoes of the not-so-distant past, of Brian Eno and Pink Floyd in the music's execution and aesthetics, and even of Sun Ra and the Space Age Bachelor Pad Music of the '50s in its implications, which seem to look to the Final Frontiers of the future for nothing more than cool, unusual sounds.
To the fictional crew of the Starship Enterprise and even the real astronauts of Apollo 13, space may have indeed been the Final Frontier -- in more ways than one. But to Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, X-Files producer Chris Carter, and rockers from Billy Lee Riley on up to Frank Black, space was and continues to be the ultimate inexhaustible gimmick, a plot device/conceptual hook that continues to resonate. Growing bored with the tedious realities of what's out there or down here is just as easy today as it was back when the Apollo 13 mission hit the launch pad. But finding a catchy, extraterrestrial rock song is even easier.