Some Funky Cosmonaut
Consider the final verse of Neil Young’s “After the Gold Rush,” in which mankind trundles onto “silver spaceships” and disembarks for a location more hospitable to human life than planet Earth:
Flying Mother Nature’s silver seed to a new home in the Sun
The Sun? Really? Not the Moon, or Mars, or even another galaxy? Are you not aware, Neil Young, that the temperature on the Sun is, like, ten thousand degrees?
So either Neil is a really crap science-fiction writer or the song is actually a horror story about a doomed mission of crying children vaporizing en route to the Sun. With a flugelhorn solo.
posted 18 January 2011 in Tasty Bits and tagged Neil Young, Unlikely Lyrics. 3 comments
January 19th, 2011 at 9:06 am
I think I can defend Neil a little bit here: We often describe ourselves as “in the sun” when we are on the beach or something, and basking in the sun’s rays. So it’s possible that he means someplace like Venus, where they can still enjoy, as the Beach Boys put it, the warmth of the sun.
January 20th, 2011 at 3:05 pm
Englebert Humperdinck sang “Thanks for taking me on a one-way trip to the sun” on “After the Loving”. A hit single! I mean, one-way, even?
January 20th, 2011 at 6:07 pm
To be fair to Engelbert, if you actually did go to the sun, you probably wouldn’t need a round-trip ticket.