In his mind, it had little to do with the American space program. Bowie had written the song after being inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey. On J– only 5 days before Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Buzz Aldrin set out on their journey to the Moon – a relatively unknown British musician named David Bowie released a single titled "Space Oddity. One of the songs we most associate with Apollo 11 is equally dark, though a bit less dystopian. charts on the day of the Apollo 11 landing was one-hit-wonder Zager and Evans’ "In the Year 2525," a song that imagines humanity at a crossroads leading to either immediate self-inflicted extinction or a technologically automated and medically sedated future that ends with the depletion of the Earth’s resources and the death of humanity – a pretty bleak forecast either way. A strong dystopian theme can be traced in the popular culture of the time. Just as Woodstock occurred in the afterglow of the success of Apollo 11, the popular music of the day provided a soundtrack that will be forever associated with the first Moon landing.Īstronaut Buzz Aldrin walks on the surface of the Moon during the Apollo 11 mission.Ī lot of the popular music from the late 1960s reflected political disillusion, a critical response to the Vietnam War, and an overwhelming sense of pessimism for the future. And yet each existed as a cultural backdrop to the other. The archetypes of the astronaut and the hippie seem incongruous. On their surface, these events seem to have little to do with one another. Less than a month after astronauts walked on the Moon for the first time, the music festival that we’ve come to know as Woodstock brought nearly half-a-million people together in upstate New York for a three-day concert featuring the music of the ascendant counterculture. The summer of 1969 was a great time for spaceflight and also for music.
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