ZAGER AND EVANS – "In The Year 2525 (Exordium And Terminus)"

That link in Tom’s post is NSFW!

This is my favourite use of parentheses in a #1 single.

Good joke in the movie Alien cubed (set in the year 2179 according to Wiki): the first guy to get offed is singing this song just beforehand.

Seems more in keeping with the cheesy sci-fi stuff that was standard fare on tv around this time, than the moon landings. In fact this is so awful it could almost be read as a musical rendition of an Irwin Allen tv show -the dishonest mix of affectation, melodrama and dollops of portentous claptrap. If this cheap and nasty and empty concoction deserves to be a mere 4 marks off “Grapevine”, I’m an alien.

Having a big affection for ‘cheesy sci-fi’ I actually like this. For me a musical rendition of an Irwin Allen (or even a Gerry Anderson show) would not be a bad thing but judging by the responses so far I must be alone in these thoughts. I even like the font ! The only disappointment for me is that the punchline at the end is a little rushed. By punchline I mean the bit where man’s had it and ‘maybe it’s only yesterday’ and back to the beginning. Hopefully I haven’t got this wrong and it’s some sly reference to the Mccartney tune. It’s camp and it doesn’t know it and it’s all the better for it. I wouldn’t have any problem with it scoring at least an 8.

For god’s sake, couldn’t they have kept the years a little less outlandish? 9595, for Petes sake! Are we really to believe that it’s a millenium between the age when machines do your walking and arm movement for you, and the age when you can pick your children from a long glass tube?? Meanwhile, God “maybe” stops by in the year 7510 and considers the Rapture…but waits until the year 8510 to shake his mighty head or whatever? And it all just kind of stops dead with the year 9595, when we’re “kinda wonderin’ if man is gonna be alive”? It’s just so evident that they picked a bunch of years and randomly assigned them different spooky future things, then ran out of ideas so they filled up a few years with God being perturbed, phrased in different ways. One thing doesn’t lead to another and it all ends vaguely. All in all, totally lazy, which is fatal because the composition never does anything different – not even a “bad trip” futuristic breakdown with primitive synth noises or a theremin or something! If things are going to be this repetitious the lyrics need to be full of twists and clever surprises (see, I don’t know – Trapped In The Closet) and this isn’t cutting it at all. Bad.

When I first heard Seals and Crofts several years later, I thought Zager and Evans had made a comeback.

I wonder if the movie “2001” was an inspiration for this song. If so, I like to imagine Stanley Kubrick tapping his foot to this little number.

As for myself, it’s impossible to think of this song without immediately finding myself awash in memories of my Little League baseball team celebrating its championship, because “2525” was playing on the jukebox in the restaurant where we had our post-game party. That’s probably not a common response, though.

And I own both the Broadway and London Original Cast Recording albums of Hair – the latter featuring Alex Harvey, Ray Russell and various other improv mortgage-payers in the line-up!

Has nobody told you about the Club Poptimism Christmas Special then Pete? 😉

The Fifth Dimension’s Aquarius/Let The Sunshine In medley (number one in America in ’69, only number eleven here, tut tut) I frequently think is one of the greatest things ever.

Shame that the Cowsills never caught on in Britain because their individualistic rendition of the title song is quite perversely brilliant.

Edmundo Ros’s medley “Hare Krishna – Be In” trumps all.

But hey–I admit that I still like those showtunes from “Hair.”

I don’t quite appreciate what is supposed to happen in the titular year itself. At the beginning, they intone “In the year 2525, if man is still alive, if woman can survive, they may find…”

Then they go straight into “in the year 3535”, with its nightmarish vision of pharmaceutical-induced consciousness. The conditional clauses are left dangling. The song’s called In The Year 2525, but makes no mention of what “they may find”.

Dear All:

Good evening from Canada!!! I hope this finds you and yours well. As for me, I could complain…yadda, yadda, yadda.

Whilst you all are picking “2525” apart, I do agree with Mr. Ewing in the fact that song is a futurescope that is a crystal ball into our future–into the future of man. This song also carries a warning which we all should heed in these days of global warming. The song carries the line–“We’ve taken all this old Earth can give and never put back nothin’.”

If we don’t want bring around Earth’s early demise, we should put back all that we have taken.

Ind.

Covered by Laibach, Fields of Neph, and Visage, AND Ian Brown!

I picked up Zager & Evans’ album a few years back. From memory it was all bad novelty songs, as in sick bad: it’s hard to believe RCA sanctioned Mr Turnkey – a rapist’s suicidal confession – as the follow up to an international no.1. And Z&E set the lyric in August 1969, as if to indicate we’re already on the slippery slope signposted in their first single – no need to wait 1500 or so years for a vision of hell.

I’ll go with Waldo’s “strange and powerful dignity”, something it borrows from the similarly constructed Sound Of Silence, then magnifies.

Way to go on this essay, heepld a ton.

There’s something hypnotic to the static Spanish strum – but the lyrics sound laughable now. I wonder how much Bowie borrowed from this for ‘Five Years’ – although his apocalyptic lyric works better for being rooted in everyday life and being sung with a rising sense of hysteria

One of the stupidest songs to reach #1. And in the US, so forgotten that the one and only time I ever heard it on an oldies station it was something of an event, hearing a song I’d only seen the title of in those pre-YouTube days when you couldn’t just hop online to hear something.

I think I like it a tad more than Tom does, so I will opt for a 6/10 here.