As long as it started cold without warning and was loud, I’d pick Chop Suey, which starts with a sudden “WAKEUP!”
I used to have a cassette player alarm clock, where I could set an alarm for either a beep or to automatically start to play a cassette. Unfortunately, I could hear the cassette start before the music started. I tried to play “Wake Up, It’s 1984” by Oingo Boingo as my wake up music, since it also starts with a sudden “WAKE UP!”, but hearing the tape spool up before the song started was anticlimactic.
I have always liked Powerhouse, it shows up in a lot of cartoons.
And, if you’re a Rush fan, in “La Villa Strangiato”.
Backwater by Meat Puppets
It’s the first time I’ve ever heard either the first or final third of the piece, which I suspect is true of most other people.
Sunshine is the name of (what used to be) a working-class suburb here (originally, home to the Sunshine Harvester factory complex). And there was a version of that song, “Walking through Sunshine” about walking through Sunshine in my trackie dacks and ugg boots.
Part of the sound of my youth. Lost in time. Like tears in rain.
If they were much older astronauts, Nat “King” Cole’s Get Out And Get Under The Moon would work.
Search your memory banks; that piece of music was used quite a bit in the Roadrunner cartoons (and maybe whenever Tasmanian Devil showed up.)
Or Lake of Fire, which mentions howling at the moon.
The middle third was used in a LOT of Warner Bros. cartoons, and at least one episode of The Simpsons:
Here’s a compilation clip that uses the first and third parts:
For most of last year my alarm clock wake up song was LCD Soundsystem’s Dance Yrself Clean. Originally it just popped up at random one morning on my Spotify playlist but it is the perfect wake up song. It quietly taps along and then, when you really should be getting up, really unwinds.
My first thought was “Stigmata” by Ministry. A song like that would wake me up, wake my crewmates up and also show any Klingons that might be on the ship that we are not to be messed with.
They later went on to win the Eurovision Song Contest for the UK, with a song that might have been appropriate for this mission (nuts to them as might think it too woke or something daft like that)
