The Time Traveler's Almanac (140 page)

Psychedelia crossed over with folk as the ’60s oozed into the ’70s, softening the sharper edges of such transcendental sounds. Accordingly, folk artists picked up on time travel. In 1969, the duo of Zager and Evans had a fluke hit with the eerie single “In the Year 2525,” which skips like a stone across a still pond, revealing various dystopian scenarios between 2525 and the mind-numbingly distant 9595. It’s nowhere near as far-off as the year 802,701, which is where the Time Traveler of Wells’s
The Time Machine
finds himself. But the song is clearly inspired by Wells, pessimism and all. Less famously but more potently, English folkie Mick Softley released a song called “Time Machine” in 1970. “Who were you in 2000 B.C.?” Softley asks before demanding, “Who will you be in 5000 A.D.?” By grafting the more traditional sounds of folk music to the science-fictional possibilities of time travel, these artists became the first to traffic openly in temporal paradox and anachronism – elements that would surface more frequently as music pushed further into the future.

Progressive rock, as its name implies, sought to probe tomorrow with a restlessness that bordered on vengeance. Hard rock rose to satisfy the demands of the masses – Grand Funk Railroad’s 1969 song “Time Machine” is an ode to sex with groupies, nothing deeper – but progressive rock took that heaviness to a cerebral extreme. Rejecting the short, crude, simple formula of the conventional pop-rock song, the genre of “prog” – as it became both affectionately and derogatorily known – infused jazz and classical structures into rock. Not only did this allow prog musicians to distend and distort the skin of popular music to a previously unimaginable degree, it encouraged the tackling of headier subject matter such as time travel. With twenty-minute-plus songs that routinely took up entire sides of LPs, prog bands dabbled routinely in science fiction and fantasy. Despite the stereotype, though, prog’s conceptual palette was much broader, and time travel didn’t factor significantly into it – at least not literally. Rather than
singing
about journeys to the future, prog artists tended to act like they were already there.

Curiously, time travel as a lyrical theme is most prominent in the early ’70s in the overlap of prog and hard rock. Uriah Heep and Hawkwind were two British bands who could only marginally be considered prog; in fact, they had more in common with the emerging sound of heavy metal. Yet in 1972, each band immortalized itself in the annals of time-travel music: Uriah Heep with “Traveller in Time” and Hawkwind with “Silver Machine.” (Three years later, Hawkwind would release an album titled
Warrior on the Edge of Time,
based on the books of science-fiction/fantasy author Michael Moorcock and his time-bending Eternal Champion.) More startlingly, the German jazz-rock outfit Dzyan – associated with the movement known as Krautrock, which would birth the futuristic group Kraftwerk – released an instrumental record in 1973 titled
Time Machine.
Free of vocals or lyrics, it instead uses intricate, radically shifting tempos and time signatures as metaphors for time travel.

Some of the strains of progressivism reached the mainstream in the ’70s – and many of those bands are now considered staples of classic rock. Many such acts managed to smuggle an incredible amount of weirdness onto the airwaves, though. Time travel included. Although the lyrics of Steely Dan’s 1974 hit “Pretzel Logic” are as arch and abstruse as most of their work, songwriter Donald Fagen revealed years later that the song was, in its own cryptic way, about time travel. In 1975, two of classic rock’s biggest bands, Led Zeppelin and Queen, touched on the time-travel theme: Zeppelin’s “Kashmir” contains the mysticism-laden lines, “I am a traveler of both time and space,” while Queen’s “’39” – sung by guitarist and future Ph.D. in astrophysics Brian May – relates the tale of space explorers who, much to their alarm, return to Earth a century after they depart due to Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity. Also in 1975, a scrappy, lurid stage production called
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
made it to the big screen. With it came its indelibly glammed-up theme song, “Time Warp.” Although neither the film nor the song deal explicitly with time travel, their grab-bag pastiche of eras and aesthetics took the free-for-all anachronism of the decade and spun it into a catchy, danceable, cult-worthy anthem.

Things got grimmer in the ’80s. The imminent approach of the year 1984 was an almost oppressive reminder that Orwell’s dystopic predictions half a century earlier had been specious in some ways, prescient in others. The future had arrived, and it was both more boring and more chilling than predicted. Brian Eno, former keyboardist of the temporally unhinged band Roxy Music, got a jump on the ’80s with 1977 album
Before and After Science.
As if its title was enough of an indication that Eno viewed time from multiple angles at once, many of the album’s songs brush on time travel – including “Here He Comes,”in which Eno sings of “the boy who tried to vanish to the future or the past.”

Eno – along with his most notable collaborator in the ’70s, David Bowie – was an architect of ’80s new wave. One of his many disciples was the band The Human League. Driven by synthesizers, robotic vocals, and the cryogenically frozen remnants of prog, The Human League wrote “Almost Medieval” – a 1979 song obsessed with century-hopping and jumbled timelines – before morphing into a romantic, soft-pop band as the ’80s progressed. New wave was an amalgam of the punk, glam, and art-rock movements of the ’70s, so it only makes sense that the ’80s bands most conversant with time travel were comprised of actual ’70s holdovers. In 1980, former Hawkwind frontman Nik Turner led his punk-fueled freakout ensemble Inner City Unit through a frenzied song titled “Watching the Grass Grow”, which opens with the shrieked lines, “We are the survivors / The eternal survivors / Androgynous energies / Traveling through time!” A year later, the iconic Krautrock group Kraftwerk reached the zenith of its android-encased electronica. Their 1981 song “Computer World” mentions “time, travel, communication, entertainment” as four of the vectors of existence that will be precisely regulated in its cybernetic vision of the future. The fact that “time” and “travel” are mentioned in the same breath seems like no coincidence.

Another band that came of age in the ’70s was Electric Light Orchestra. Led by mastermind Jeff Lynne, ELO became one of the ’80s most accomplished proponents of time-travel music. In fact, the band’s 1981 album
Time
is the first major concept album devoted entirely to time travel. The basic premise: A man from the 1980s is catapulted to the year 2095, where he’s confronted by the dichotomy between technological advancement and ages-old heartache. “Though you ride on the wheels of tomorrow,” Lynne sings poignantly on the Time song “21st Century Man”, “You still wander the fields of your sorrow.”

After 1984 came and passed, the future seemed not so terrifying. That milestone had passed without major incident; it was time to start looking fondly backward – or at least recalibrating our sensibilities so that we realized, once and for all, that we were now living in the world of tomorrow. Cue
Back to the Future.
The 1985 film not only gave the musty old time machine a spiffy chrome finish, it produced one of the most recognizable time-travel songs of all time: the equally shiny “Back in Time” by Huey Lewis and the News, who, oxymoronically, played an entirely retroactive kind of old-school, meat-and-potatoes pop rock.

Catchy, cozy, and utterly unchallenging on a musical level, “Back in Time” ushered in a decade of music – the mid-’80s to the mid-’90s – that was relatively quiet in regard to time travel. The exception was heavy metal. Unafraid to keep the dread of the future and the wonder of the past alive, metal masterpieces like Fates Warning’s 1985 song “Traveler in Time”, Iron Maiden’s 1986 album
Somewhere in Time,
and Blue Öyster Cult’s 1988 album
Imaginos
reimagined time travel in harder, darker ways. In particular,
Somewhere in Time
has stood the test of time. Lean, menacing, and yet subliminally progressive, the album’s loose concept covers everything from memory to history to destiny – all aspects of the mercurial commodity of time.

Perhaps because they were starting to feel the march of time themselves, many rock veterans worked time travel into their music from the late ’80s through the late ’90s. While alternative rockers like Nirvana to Beck became fixated on irony and emotional expressionism rather than high concept, prog legend Rick Wakeman and metal stalwarts Black Sabbath kept time travel on life support – the former with his 1988 album
Time Machine,
the latter with their 1992 song “Time Machine”. (That formula would repeat itself in 1999, when prog legend Alan Parsons released his album
The Time Machine
and metal stalwarts Saxon unleashed their song “Are We Travellers in Time.”) Still, it was clear by the mid-’90s that that time-travel music had hit a slump.

Then came Dr. Octagon. One of many alter egos assumed by the rapper Kool Keith, Dr. Octagon is both the creator and the main character of his 1996 album
Dr. Octagonecologyst.
Not only is it one of the most vital and enduring hip-hop albums of the ’90s, it almost singlehandedly revived the concept of time travel in popular music. In a scrambled conglomeration of genres and storylines, the album follows the twisted trajectory of its time-traveling, extraterrestrial doctor. Fans of
Doctor Who
might notice some basic similarities, but The Doctor is only one of many time-warping, science-fiction archetypes Dr. Octagon weaves into his dizzying mosaic of beats, rhymes, and spacetime.

Inspired by that madcap genius, hip-hop crew Arsonists weighed in with their clock-spinning 1999 song “Rhyme Time Travel.” As if to offset those teeming expressions of lyrical acumen, the long-standing experimental project Coil recorded their 1998 album
Time Machines.
According to Coil’s leader, the late John Balance, the vocal-free, minimalist, electronic tones that make up the album might sound hypnotic, but they’re actually intended to induce a mental state that would facilitate time travel. With the help of choice hallucinogens, of course.

As with 1984, the year 2000 defused much of the mystique surrounding a chronological milestone. If 1984 marked the end of yesterday, 2000 truly marked the start of tomorrow. Following the comical-in-hindsight panic that occurred during the buildup to Y2K, though, the twenty-first century wasn’t as terrifying as everyone thought it might be. (The fact that the year 2000 was technically part of the twentieth century didn’t seem to bother anyone.) Then the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, cast a new kind of shadow across the future. Music grew either grim or escapist – but few musicians were thinking of time travel as thematic vessel for those impulses.

Leave it to the cheerful, acid-damaged indie rockers The Flaming Lips to breathe new life into time-travel music. With the post-9/11 clouds beginning to part slightly, there was a sliver of sunlight for The Lips’ 2006 song “Time Travel … Yes!!” to flourish. Released in no less than three different versions that year, the song features guest singer Steve Burns, former host of the children’s show
Blue’s Clues.
Accordingly, the song is breezily innocent in its celebration of skipping through time.

The rise of geek rock in the new millennium was certainly inspired in part by the science-fiction whimsy of The Flaming Lips. But it was Barenaked Ladies that formed a cornerstone of that foundation. The Canadian pop band’s 1998 song “It’s All Been Done” is one of the more imaginative examples of time-travel music: the witty tale of two lovers who cross each other’s paths throughout time, only to wind up disenchanted. Geek rock’s rap-centric cousin, nerdcore, also came into prominence in the ’00s. And the subgenre’s prime mover, MC Lars, naturally dabbled in time travel; the title of his 2006 song “If I Had a Time Machine, That Would Be Fresh” pretty much says it all.

But the most unique, involved, and innovative of all twenty-first-century musical time travelers is the avant-R&B artist Janelle Monáe. The backstory of her 2007 album
Metropolis: Suite I (The Chase)
is so elaborate, it might as well be the product of its own time-travel paradox. Actually, it sort of is: Like Dr. Octagon, Monáe obliterates the fourth wall in her interweaving of artist and character – to the point where she’s stated that the protagonist of her songs, the twenty-eighth-century android Cindi Mayweather, has traveled back in time to inspire Monae herself. She also draws sounds and/or inspiration from generations of Afrofuturists, from Sun Ra to Parliament Funkadelic to Grace Jones. To a far lesser degree, rapper T-Pain does the same with his 2007 song “Time Machine” – but what it lacks in complexity it makes up for in hooks, sweetness, and old-school nostalgia. And when rapper Dead Prez delivers Egyptological verses about hieroglyphics and the Eye of Horus in his 2012 song “Time Travel”, it completes the Afrofuturist circuit Sun Ra established over fifty years earlier.

And the circle keeps on spinning. Indie-pop collective The Apples in Stereo released its geeky, infectious concept album
Travellers in Space and Time
in 2010 – and it’s a direct descendent of ELO’s
Time
from thirty years prior. A profusion of pop artists of all levels of notoriety have kept the time-travel flame alive in the twenty-first century. Mega-successful pop singer Robyn released the single “Time Machine” in 2007, complete with frigid, futuristic beats. On a more modest scale, Never Shout Never and Blouse – both of whom released songs titled “Time Travel” in 2011 – have explored different sides of tomorrow-pop.

Metal bands are still in on the time-travel act as well, with brutal groups like Agoraphobic Nosebleed and High on Fire slicing through the time stream with 2009’s
Agorapocalypse
and 2012’s
De Vermis Mysteriis,
respectively. And then there’s Mastodon’s masterful, metallic epic
Crack the Skye.
The 2009 album posits the traversal of spacetime via astral projection, much as Sun Ra did; the result is a voyage through a wormhole, back to czarist Russia, and into the soul of Rasputin.