Five musicians we’d like to see sent to space
Music is a side of life built for fantasies, but sometimes reality is stranger than fiction. We all saw them, didn’t we? We all saw them in their nice blue space suits. We all saw them take a 14-minute ride into the great unknown on a ship bought and paid for by one of the world’s richest men. We all read about the shocking cost of the trip, both in terms of monetary value and environmental damage. It wasn’t just me, right?
It sure did feel like a particularly wonky fever dream, right? I mean, most of what Katy Perry does these days feels like that, I guess. She goes about life with all the unsettling inhumanity of an alien in disguise, desperately trying to work out how to appear human through context clues. But it feels churlish to criticise the individuals involved too much.
Let’s be real here, who among us would have turned down the opportunity to go to space? Not to mention how at least a couple of the people who stepped onto that ship did deserve to be there. Amand Nguyen is now the first woman of Vietnamese heritage to go to space. Aisha Bowe is a respected aerospace engineer; she had every right to be there. It’s pretty rad that they went right? Right?!
That’s just it, though; there are tons of other people who deserved to be there much more than Katy Perry, or Jeff Bezos’ missus or whoever else was on that cursed, depressing exercise in girlboss capitalism. Let’s have a look at five musicians who should have taken that trip up to the stars in their place, while always bearing in mind that, had he not already departed for the stars nearly a decade ago, David Bowie will always be number one on this list in our hearts.
Five musicians who should be sent to space:
Ash
Teenage musicians might seem dime-a-dozen these days but the vast majority of them are as authentically teenage as they are authentically dogs. They’re intensely cool, poised capital A-Artists who’ve spent their whole lives planning for how to come across on the world’s stage. The Downpatrick power trio burst onto the scene at 16, they were absolutely a bunch of teenage boys who loved two things. Rocking like absolutely maniacs and everything space!
Their debut single was called ‘Jack Names The Planets’. Their breakout hit was ‘Girl From Mars’. Their singles collection is called Intergalactic Sonic 7s, whose cover features the band drawn as a group of laser-toting space rebels straight out of Star Wars. A comparison of the band were very much going for as they love George Lucas’ lasting legacy so much, the first sound on their debut album, 1977, is that of an Imperial Tie Fighter flying towards the listener. Through sheer, unabashed enthusiasm, Ash more than deserve a place in the stars.
Brian May
For one thing, Queen’s curly-haired guitar wizard deserves a spot on the list because his band could get nerdy with the best of them. Not for nothing did the band soundtrack the 1980 space opera movie Flash Gordon or call the one album they made with Paul Rodgers up front The Cosmos Rocks. However, more than anyone else on this list, Brian May gets the nod because, for all he knows about the guitar, he knows a hell of a lot more about space.
The man is a genuine, bona-fide astrophysicist with the passion and the brains to match. In 1970, he began his PhD, studying the particulars of interplanetary dust, but had to pack it in when life in Queen got too busy in 1974. He finished the degree three decades later, submitting his thesis in 2007 and has worked in the sector of intergalactic research ever since. There’s an argument to be made that of all the people on this list, no-one would get as much out of the trip as he would.
Janelle Monae
The mercurial genius behind Dirty Computer is one of the most prominent figures in modern Afrofuturism. The music Monae has made legitimately puts her in the conversation for one of the most compelling science-fiction story-tellers in the world at the moment, all the way back to her breakout album The ArchAndroid. Yet the real reason she deserves a place on our ship comes from her acting career.
Monae was one of the three leads of the 2016 biographical drama film Hidden Figures. She played Mary Jackson, one of three African-American mathematicians who worked for NASA and were instrumental in the space race of the 1960s. For helping to bring those figures to the light, Monae more than deserves to head into space. After all, as she said in an interview with Conan O’Brien promoting the film, it has always been her dream to go!
Björk
On the surface, one could justify this by simply saying, “look at her!” and its true, there are few Earthlings more otherworldly than the woman born Björk Guðmundsdóttir. Just look at the music videos for the likes of ‘All Is Full Of Love’, ‘Crystalline’ and, y’know, ‘Moon’. However, the reason I have her on my list is not only because she’s someone who looks up at the night sky, but down at Earth too.
Her music is a celebration of our planet in all its beauty and chaos. Going to Space to be closer to the stars is all well and good but I think someone like Björk would, more than anyone else, appreciate the chance to view her beloved planet on the biggest scale possible. Which, ironically enough, renders it smaller than anyone else could ever perceive it to be.
George Clinton
We’re taking musicians into space, one should be tried at The Hague if you consider for a moment not bringing along the godfather of funk. The man who released an album called Mothership Connection with Parliament. Who would open the concerts supporting that album by touching down onstage in a literal flying saucer. Who opened the door for Afrofuturism in pop music, a practise that the likes of Outkast, Lil Nas X and the aforementioned Janelle Monae would be watching closely.
Above all else, this was a guy who used space and science fiction to imagine a world filled with possibilities. A world, and beyond, that was achievable by collective action, collective understanding and collective love. What we could do when liberated from oppression. The truly painful part of the Blue Origin mission wasn’t how cringe it was. It was the promise that space was a concept being gatekept as the exclusive domain of the 1%.
As it stands, the only way that anyone remotely normal can be a part of the very future of this planet was with the permission of billionaires. They have the resources to make it open to anyone, to people like those on this list and beyond. If the only way they’ll give us the future we deserve is by taking it from them, then that’s a bed they made.
