This week’s music is one of those one-hit wonders that are ahead of their time when they come out and continue to be so even decades later. Rick Evans of Zager & Evans wrote the 1969 song in the span of half an hour, and it would remain the only song the duo brought out that hit the charts.
Zager and Evans apparently produced and sold the first 1000 singles out of the trunk of their car, until it was picked up by local radio stations and later by the RCA music label, at which point it became a best-selling, number-one hit. It sold a million copies less than two months after its release.
The ballad imagines humanity’s future over the next 10,000 years, giving vignettes of technological developments after a millennium that show an uncanny similarity with many of the realities we see today, or at least the trends that we can make out on the transhumanist horizon.
Machines and robots replacing human labor, test tubes in place of the female womb, thoughts and words programmed by your daily mind-control pill. . . dystopian facts of our time. The song is a reminder and a call to action—to not let complacency and passive acquiescence enable a global technocracy to rule our lives.
In the year 2525, if man is still alive If woman can survive, they may find In the year 3535 Ain't gonna need to tell the truth, tell no lie Everything you think, do and say Is in the pill you took today In the year 4545 … Now it's been ten thousand years Man has cried a billion tears For what, he never knew, now man's reign is through But through eternal night, the twinkling of starlight So very far away, maybe it's only yesterday...
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