Record #9: "In The Year 2525 (Exordium and Terminus)" by Zager and Evans

I thought I'd have a stab at topicality with today's blog post, what with what's happening in Copenhagen, although a song covering the years 2525 to 9595 at roughly 1010 year intervals is probably a bit optimistic for the times we live in.
2525 isn't really about climate change of course, but a sister cause, that of over-reliance on technology and overexploitation of the world's resources. It's an extraordinary song, for several reasons. First of all, there's the bizarre Mariachi intro, which bears very little resemblance to the rest of the song, which has a driving rhythm and ascending chords (I think it's ascending chords with a dramatic key-change in the middle, but I'm not sure. I'm not terribly musical in that way) before ending in a terribly pessimistic way.
It's a terribly pessimistic ending for a song recorded at any time, but this song is more remarkable in that it was number one in America from the 12th of July until the 16th of August, 1969. You may be thinking, "well, that's a good long run for such a gloomy song," so let me rephrase it. It was number one in America on the 20th of July, meaning this was number one when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon.
The Apollo programme is still seen by many as the apotheosis of American science and technology, with Apollo 11 its crowning achievement. It was, in a lot of senses, a golden age. There's a bewildering amount of precognition going on, because looking at it now, we recognise that Apollo 11 was the beginning of the end for all that - manned spaceflight, NASA and all the related industry and science have not, so far scaled such heights again. (Such metaphorical heights - the moon programme continued but the goal had been reached - America got a man on the moon first.) It was the end of the decade (the single charted in the Uk a little later, at the end of August) and just a couple of months before the Altamont Festival, with Hell's Angels security, brought what are traditionally known as "the sixties" in pop culture (which began in 1963. Confusing isn't it?) to an end. 11 years later the first test-tube baby was born and now genetic selection is a hot scientific issue. From our historical perspective, it at first glance it seems to fit the narrative perfectly. We have a lot more information now about the 70s than the record-buying public of 1969 though and know how it all turned out, Could they forsee what was coming?

Of course not, the question is absurd, but it is a salutary lesson in the dangers of painting history with broad brush strokes. Listen to the song again. It's an unpleasant future they're describing, so imagine how much closer it must have seemed in 1969. Men were walking on the moon and they hadn't even invented pocket calculators. You can forget 2525, what about when your children are 25?
The song was written much earlier in the decade, around 1963 or 4 (accounts vary). It was issued as a single in 1967 and wasn't a hit, but was picked up by a radio station in 1969 and re-ished off the back of its popularity there. It struck a chord (no pun intended), I guess because the dawn of a new technological age might be magnificent but it must also be a bit frightening, considering we're not that far from cave-dwellers yet. References to future tech are fairly basic scifi fare, a genre of course that flourished with the coming of the space race. That they got some stuff right means they picked their innovations with some care but isn't supernaturally improbable. They never had another hit, but I'm not sure how you'd be expected to follow this one up.
My copy is the German issue of the single, with an amusingly awkward definitive article on the sleeve. I bought it from the excellent Second Hand Records in Stuttgart when I was on my year abroad with university, despite my record players being at home and me not having one there, so I owned it for months without being able to play it. This was in 2006 or 7, I think it was January 2007, from memory, although the price in Deutschmarks above the Euros suggests it had been in the shop a while. I don't know why though - a bit corny it may be, but I've played it regularly since then.

Postscript
Generally when I'm writing this I favour my memory over Wikipedia, because although they're both fallible I trust the former more than the latter, and supplement my memory with a couple of books and other websites. However, I notice that the wikipedia article on this song asserts
""Their followup single on RCA-Victor, "Mr. Turnkey" (a song about a rapist who nails his own wrist to the wall as punishment for his crime), failed to chart.[citation needed]"

Now I'm only human, I admit I was intrigued. The big fat citation needed on there gave me pause for thought though - if I just wrote it as gospel and it turned out not to be true I'd just be propagating a big lie, albeit a tempting one.
I don't own the single in question, but I found someone on youtube who does, and in this instance, Wiki was right. Not being one I own it's ineligible for this blog, but I present it here for curiosity's sake:


Can't think why it didn't chart.