Bassist Colin Moulding of XTC once described his eccentric recording "What in the World??..." as being "Telstar" and "In the Year 2525" rolled into one. (I do not have the source available to me so you'll just have to take my word for it) Though a fun bit of space rock psychedelia, there was no way that his lone contribution to The Dukes of Stratosphear's mini album 25 O'Clock could have possibly lived up to the former. "Telstar" is a peerless pop masterpiece, end of discussion. The latter, however, left plenty of room to be improved upon.
We'll get to Zager and Evans' curious choice of music in a bit but let's begin with the lyrics to their only hit: they are (to put it kindly) dog shit. Rhymes are telegraphed, metre goes out the window at times and consistency be damned! My friend Adian over at Irish Number Ones takes them to task for straying from the path of charting every hundred and ten years — 2525, 3535, 4545, 5555 and 6565 — by making an out-of-nowhere jump to 7510 and 8510. ("Come on Zager and Evans, commit to the bit!") While he is indeed correct that this is jarring, I feel that it would have been preferable had they been far looser with the years they were looking towards. Here are a few that I have in mind:
In the year 3691, you ain't gonna be having any fun
In the year 4722, there won't be shit for you to do
In the year 5198, famine will make us all underweight
In the year 6417, the land is brown and no more green
Yeah, not my best effort on the parody front (but, honestly, are they any worse than what Zager and Evans came up with?). This is one of the reasons why XTC/The Dukes' "What in the World??..." is such a gas. Moulding has fun delivering lines that affectionately acknowledge acid rock while also sending it up. (If anyone ever did psychedelic pop while not on chemicals it was him) Lines like "2032, housewives Shocking Blue" (yes, I know it's meant to be "shock in blue" but I prefer to think Moulding was name-dropping a certain Dutch group who will be coming up here fairly soon) or "2033, cannabis in tea" (you know, we're getting very close to discovering if this shit's going to happen or not) are just messing with us — and messing with bloody Zager and Evans and their clumsy lyrics.
Now to the music. Not very futuristic, is it? Once again, I turn to Aidan whose comment on the matter ("The ranchera guitar strum and trumpet blare suggest that, come Armageddon, all that will survive are cockroaches and mariachi bands") is genuinely funny and hints that a coming space age of holograms, food in pill form and traveling at light speed won't matter to those of us who'll be trying to get through the dystopia Zager and Evan foresee. In a timeline not unlike that of the 2017 motion picture Logan, it's perfectly reasonable to expect little to entertain us beyond mariachi bands as we numb ourselves on homemade moonshine and crave even the cheapest, dirtiest sex.
"In the Year 2525" is the sort of thing I'm grateful exists, only with the caveat that I'd be happy not to have to ever listen to it again. Zager and Evans are to be commended for imagining such a bleak future, especially at the same time that the Apollo 11 mission to the Moon had entranced people around the world. I appreciate the effort but I am far less respectful of the results. It didn't have to be "Telstar" — it didn't even have to be "What in the World??..." for God's sake — but a coming hellscape of environmental collapse, food shortages, extinction events and government mind control deserved much better. Fortunately, we'd be getting classic albums like Marvin Gaye's What's Going On and The Beach Boys' Surf's Up before long. They weren't going to be predicting humanity's destruction but at least they would make environmentalism into a viable subject matter for strong pop.
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