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Zager and Evans
In the Year 2525 (Exordium and Terminus)
Click
here to go straight to the words and video of this controversial song.
"In the Year 2525 (Exordium and Terminus)" is a hit song from 1969 by
the Lincoln, Nebraska duo Zager and Evans which reached number one on the
Billboard Hot 100 for the six weeks commencing July 12. The song was
controversial due to the disturbing predictions given for each selected
year.
The song opens with the words "In the year 2525, If man is
still alive, If woman can survive, They may find...". Subsequent verses
pick up the story at 1010-year intervals from 2525 to 6565. Futurisic
predictions are given for each selected year. In the year 3535, for example,
all of a person's actions, words and thoughts will be preprogrammed into a
daily pill.
The song has no chorus. Amid ominous-sounding orchestral
music, the final dated chronological verse is, "In the year 9595, I'm
kinda wonderin' if Man is gonna be alive. He's taken everything this old
Earth can give, and he ain't put back nothing, whoa-whoa...", making
specific the underlying environmental message of the song. The summary verse
concludes: "Now it's been 10,000 years, Man has cried a billion tears,
For what, he never knew. Now man's reign is through. But through eternal
night, The twinkling of starlight. So very far away, Maybe it's only
yesterday.", before the song effectively "starts over" with the first
verse again and then fades out, leaving open the possibility that "we went
through this before," and life is now at the start of another cycle.
The song describes a nightmarish vision of the future as man's
technological inventions gradually dehumanize him. It includes a colloquial
reference to the Second Coming (In the year 7510, if God's a' coming, He
ought to make it by then.), which echoed the zeitgeist of the Jesus
Movement. The song also references examples of technologies that were not
fully developed but were known to the public in 1969, such as robots, as
well as future technology that would come into existence long after being
predicted in the song, the science of test tube babies and genetic selection
by parents of their future children. Such a concept had been explored in a
few science fiction novels but had not yet been mentioned in the mainstream
media until "In The Year 2525" was released in 1969.
A One Hit
Wonder, Twice
It is not typical for a recording artist to have a number
one hit single and then never have another chart single for the rest of
their career. "In the Year 2525" gave Zager and Evans this status twice.
They were, and remain, the only act to do this in both the U.S. and UK
singles charts.
Other Trivia
The song appeared on the list of
songs deemed inappropriate by the Clear Channel media corporation following
the September 11, 2001 attacks.
The song was one of the 10 biggest
singles of the 1960s in the United States, although it didn't neatly fit
into any of the main categories of rock music. Upon release by RCA in 1969,
it quickly became a multi-million-seller.
The song was at the top of
the Billboard magazine Hot 100 charts when Neil Armstrong first walked on
the moon.
In the 1992 movie Alien 3, a prisoner is heard singing a
line or two of the song while scraping the inside of a ventilator shaft,
shortly before he is attacked by a juvenile Xenomorph and subsequently diced
by a large ventilation fan. The movie takes place a few hundred years after
the 20th century.
In 2007 Internet service provider Embarq used a
variation of this song in a commercial.
In the third season of the TV
series ALF, episode 17, Alf sits in front of a tape recorder making an
audiolog, saying "Captain's Log, Stardate 2525; man, I'm still alive!"
Source:
www.discogs.com
Some of these historical facts and trivia may seem "overextended" in some
areas but, hey, I tried to make a short synopsis and
sometimes that was hard to do. You will find that most of these artist(s),
bands, groups has a lot of history than you realize. You also keep finding
items to add or you had to leave data there because the next paragraph might
refer back to the previous, etc, etc...catch my drift?
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