19 September 1969
Exciting, isn’t it: we’re exactly 500 years from the year 2525! If I recall something I saw on TV once, everyone will be phenomenally beautiful, dressed in white spandex jumpsuits, and accompanied by droids quite similar to, but sufficiently distanced in copyright terms from, the droids in Star Wars. I think it was a documentary.
Zager and Evans’s song may fancy itself as dystopian sci-fi, but its dreadfully gauche and witless lyrics (“You won’t find a thing to chew / Nobody’s gonna look at you”) suggests Zager and/or Evans may only have skimmed a Newsweek article about dystopian sci-fi. The ranchera guitar strum and trumpet blare suggest that, come Armageddon, all that will survive are cockroaches and mariachi bands. Worst of all, they drag us into the tedium of that repetitive 2525-3535-4545 set-up but don’t have the nerve to see it all the way through, instead briefly switching it up to 7510 and 8510. Come on, Zager and Evans, commit to the bit!
Personally, I reject Zager and Evans’s prognostications and strongly believe in a much brighter future for us all, as foretold in scripture. I am, of course, referring to Busted’s ‘Year 3000’.
