Just wondering what you think of that oldie “In The Year 2525”, and what may have inspired this grim outlook for mankind? (And, some of it is already coming true!) Was it inspired by the bleak outlook during the era of the Vietnam War? Or, perhaps the Cold War in general? Or, was it sparked by the heightened awareness of the environment during the early 1970’s (when “ecology” even had a logo and a flag)?
It used to scare the hell out of me listening to it on oldies stations when I was in the car with my parents and little. Just…so creepy.
Now it’s kind of cheesy.
Reminds me of Brave New World in some ways, except people didn’t even have sons or daughters. I suppose the part about not needing a husband or a wife to have kids is true, but most people are still doing it the old fashioned way. I’m not sure most of the rest of it is true, though.
I was around then. Nothing to do with the Vietnam War. A lot to do with the Cold War.
All I know is that Zager & Evans are/were from Lincoln, Nebraska. Cornhuskers, represent!
I’ve always thought it was a rather stupid song, and not interesting musically or lyrically. It’s too self-important to be amusingly cheesy and not good enough to be worth talking about seriously. Did Zager & Evans do anything else of note?
I might not be remembering right – the 70’s were a blur for me (raising kids and working) – but I remember the song as fitting right in with other bleak, depressing, and scary stuff that was going on at about the same time. Edgar Cayce’s book predicting massive earthquakes and volcanic eruptions was a best seller. Also, a comet was coming or some planets were aligning (Jupiter Effect?) – that was gonna take care of whatever was left after Cayce’s quakes and volcanos. Viet Nam and the riots of the 60’s were still fresh in everyone’s minds. There was a gas shortage. Everybody was cranky.
The song just confirmed what many people were thinking. We’re all doomed.
Very blurry. It’s a 1969 song.
Yeah, I remember the song. I remember that an upperclassman used to sing it while putting the moves on us younger girls. (His idea was that let’s get it on…there may might not be a sexual tomorrow). I thought it was dumb then, & I still think it silly.
Hey, it was just a pop song.
Love, Phil
All I know is that it was co-opted into a theme song…
I love it. I like weird old songs that get me wondering, “Just what the hell were they thinking when they wrote that?” and “Did people take this seriously at all?” It’s sort of how I feel when I watch old movies, and find I’m paying more attention to the clothes of the actors than the plot.
It’s an oddly flavored bit of The Way Things Were Then.
And that means it was played over and over again all through the 70’s.
This song and that one about Timothy, was it a man or a donkey, that was eaten? Seasons in the Sun too, mopey dark songs with a catchy jingle that drove you crazy.
“In the Year 2525” comes up often in lists of the worst songs of all time; I’m surprised this thread hasn’t already devolved into mere statements of contempt for it.
I’m particularly fond of this post by RickJay in a thread titled “All Time Worst One Hit Wonders”:
A year and a half later I’m still waiting for the chance to drop the line “‘In the Year 2525’ isn’t just the worst song ever, it’s the worst ANYTHING ever” into a conversation IRL. Still makes me giggle, it does.
Wikipedia has just reminded me of the full song title, to wit In the Year 2525 (Exordium and Terminus).
However, I didn’t know this:
Here is the lyric for Mr. Turnkey. I can’t find a Z&E performance of the song on video.
I really like it. It’s catchy and weird and interesting.
In the Year 2525 is stupid, and cheesy, and creepy all at the same time. I guess the best thing you can say about it is that it tries to be creepy and it succeeds, so it achieves the desired effect.
As for the Zeitgeist that spawned the song, someone like Exapno could probably write a better exegesis on utopian versus dystopain visions of the future, but I perceive that there was a change between the mid and late 1960’s.
From roughly the end of the Korean War through the mid-1960’s, we had the Jetson’s-style future. It was a prosperous time, with a lot of consumer conveniences becoming common (air conditioning, clothes washers and dryers, colors TV’s), and the early days of the space program.
The one clowd on the horizon was the Cold War, and we had dark visions like On the Beach (1959) and Dr. Strangelove (1964). But there was a feeling that, if we avoided blowing ourselves up, we’d have a billion-volt all-electric Jetsons future with robots, picture phones, and a two-rocket garage.
Somewhere in the late 1960’s that all changed. People lost interest in the space program, there was concern about trashing the environment and overpopulation, and a general feeling (especially among young people) that consumer prosperity wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. Why get excited about a rocket when your car was Unsafe at Any Speed and was trashing the environment and enriching some square capitalist corporate greed-head?
Pretty soon your arms were hanging limp by your side, and you were picking your daughter from the bottom of a long black tube.
Those lyrics aren’t quite the way it was recorded. I have the 45. I think Zager and Evans, or at least whichever of them did the writing, had a very dark view of the world. The ‘B’ side of that 45 is a sad song about lost love.
Yeah, it’s the kind of thing an eight year old might find meaningful, which is about how old I was when I remember listening to it. When I got older, I found it manipulative and stupid. Okay, so there’s the idea of the future–why must it be inherently bad? And what is inherently bad about some of the things they mention?
Bingo.
Yeah, my take the first time I heard it in and the umpteen times since 1969 was that it blew chunks.
The biggest problem I have with the song is that they are WAY too conservative in how long they think it will take us to make these big discoveries. For instance:
We’re practically at that point now. Yes, we still need a man and a woman to fertilize an egg, but we can do many, many genetic test on it to determine it’s sex, any defects it may have, etc…
We are at the point now where you can, at the very least, have a child of the sex that you want, and even make sure that it doesn’t have any major genetic disorders, too.