Has anyone else noticed this? A lot of songs about space travel, especially the ones in moderately slow tempo, have that acoustic-folk-guitar strumming sound.
First there was “2000 Light Years from Home” by the Stones, then Bowie’s “Space Oddity,” then Foreigner’s “Star Rider” (the last-named song being a vapid, pretentious load of dreck aimed at the potheads in their audience).
What is it about the acoustic guitar sound that arrangers associate with outer space?
Another example: the other day All Things Considered did a story on the 75th anniversary of Robert Goddard’s first rocket launch, and Goddard’s aspirations of space travel. The music they played afterward was the usual science-fiction soundtrack stuff, and sure enough there was the acoustic guitar strumming along with spacy synthesizers. Synthesizers seem an obvious choice for setting a futuristic mood, but why do you suppose they use a down-home folkie sound like acoustic guitar chords?
It may be that the musicians view space as a modern version of the old frontier days, with astronauts as cowboys or adventurers. The acoustic guitars would then give an appropriately folk-music-y feel to the song, which when combining with synthesizers would create a futuristic sound mixed with nostalgia.
Incidentally, there’s also '39 by Queen. One of the few songs about relativistic time dilation.
RealityChuck, I’m not familiar with two of the songs you cited, but “Twenty-First Century Schizoid Man” is not about space travel, it isn’t really even science fiction. It’s futuristic dystopia/social criticism. Actually, the line about “innocents raped with napalm fire” is very much about the real-life 60s when the song came out. Vietnam War protest.
So Fireball XL5 was a TV show . . . I don’t remember it, I was only 3 years old in 1962; my earliest memory is of the Cuban Missile Crisis. I found the theme song and listened to it, but that was not an acoustic guitar, it was an electric guitar.
I wrote my OP because it seems to be a kind of musical cliché to suggest “humans in outer space” with the acoustic guitar. Not all of the time, but some of the time. The musical clip on the Robert Goddard report on the radio just confirmed this. But the acoustic guitar only comes in when the song’s tempo is moderately slow. I think Sublight’s theory may be right. The guitar adds a humanistic touch to what is otherwise a hostile, forbidding environment.
No acoustic guitars in Pink Floyd’s “Interstellar Overdrive” and “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun.” Not to mention Black Sabath’s “Into the Void” and Metallica’s “Through the Never.” Or Rush’s “Countdown.” Or Hendrix’s “Third Stone From the Sun.”
My guess about the OP is that space travel songs were primarily a phenomenon of the psychedelic '60s, what with the build-up to the moon lauunches and such. And psychedelic 60’s music in general featured a lot of acoustic guitars.