Music, Automobiles, & Rocketships-Part Six

More Songs of Science Fiction

The video for "Cars" by Gary Numan (1979) is science-fictional. It has similarities to the video for "I Ran (So Far Away)" by A Flock of Seagulls (1982) (actually it's the other way around), which is also science-fictional and also fearful or paranoid. The Flock of Seagulls video is also shot inside of a enclosed place, like the inside of a spaceship. There are bright lights and mirrors. On the floor is silvery foil like the outside of the Lunar Excursion Module, or LEM. Haunting that space are silent, robot-like women similar to the robot-like men in the video for "Cars." These women look like they could be aliens from Space: 1999 or Doctor Who. Should we call them gynoids rather than androids? 

Other dystopian/futuristic/science-fictional videos:

• "I Wouldn't Want to Be Like You" by The Alan Parsons Project (1977), in which a faceless robot capable of transporting itself instantaneously through time and space menaces a man in an otherwise deserted futuristic cityscape, one that looks like the city in Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972). The song "I Wouldn't Want to Be Like You" is from the album I Robot, which drew from Isaac Asimov's robot stories. In the video from 1977, it is a robot--a science-fictional creation--that transports itself instantaneously. In The Ring, from 2002, a movie about a video, it is a horror-fictional creature that transports herself that way.

• "Running Up That Hill" by Kate Bush (1985), a video with an otherwise sad but romantic mood but that includes futuristic and dystopian architecture and imagery, in particular gray faceless masses of people who wear masks over their facelessness. These remind me of later Internet memes showing masses of gray-faced NPCs, which are, ultimately, dystopian because the people they represent--people who repeat mindlessly the things spoon-fed them by their masters--are in pursuit of a perfectly awful future for all of us.

• "We Are All Made of Stars" by Moby (2002), another science-fictional video made for a song that is supposed to be about hope and affirmation. The video is ironic in that these people who are supposedly "made of stars" (like Carl Sagan's "we are star stuff") are all so wretched, debased, corrupt, and depraved. A double irony is that the singer haunts the video, apparently unseen, while wearing a spacesuit. He is hermetically sealed inside, apparently so as to avoid exposure to the taint of these people. Is he an alien observer on earth?

• "Push It" by Garbage (1998), an extraordinary video filled with striking and memorable imagery. Like the video for "Breathe," it is a catalogue of horrors, but also of mysterious and surrealistic figures and events. The singer Shirley Manson looks like a goth girl in the video and has admitted to dark themes and inspirations in her music. In the video for "Push It," there are the Children of the Damned; a cemetery, a Gothic house, and other Gothic, weird, and decadent imagery; a robot man with a lightbulb head; two weird-alien women; a staticky figure who looks as if he exists between two worlds, partly in ours, partly in another, like Captain Kirk trapped in the Tholian web or like an image on a television "tuned to a dead channel." I have included it here as a science-fictional video, but it's also a horror- and weird-fictional video, a synthesis made possible, I suppose, by changes in pop culture from the 1970s to the end of the millennium. At the end of the video, the singer licks a mirror. At the end of the video for "We Are All Made of Stars," Corey Feldman licks a cellphone screen, the black mirror of the contemporary Narcissus.

By the way, the first manned moon landing happened 57 years ago tomorrow, and this summer will be Shirley Manson's birthday, so Happy Birthday to her! There are more mentions of the Apollo missions coming up.

To be continued . . .

Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley