As April 22 is Earth Day, we were going to put together a few songs celebrating the rock we live on (The Slits’ “Life on Planet Earth,” The Feelies’ “The Good Earth” and so on), until we saw Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. Now we’re thinking we’d better keep our ears open for another planet to inhabit.
1 Royal Trux, “Mercury” (Singles, Live, Unreleased, 1997) “I don’t know, but I know that it’s hotter than Earth is/I don’t know, but I know that it’s hotter in the day.” Even in July? We’ll pass.
2 Yo La Tengo, “Ultra-Powerful Short Wave Radio Picks Up Music From Venus” (Genius + Love = Yo La Tengo, 1996) “It might have been music from Venus that he listened to that night/But I think it was probably the static you hear when your radio’s not tuned in right.” Drat.
3 T. Rex, “The Ballrooms of Mars” (The Slider, 1972) “Your diamond hands will be stacked with roses and wind and cars ... We’ll dance our lives away in the ballrooms of Mars.” Now we’re getting somewhere. A contender.
4 The Presidents of the United States of America, “Jupiter” (Freaked Out and Small, 2000) “We lost contact with home base/On the dark side of this place/Please send more human race/To fill the empty space.” Not sounding particularly homey to us.
5 Stevie Wonder, “Saturn” (Songs in the Key of Life, 1976) “On Saturn people live to be 205/Going back to Saturn where the people smile/Don’t need cars ’cause we’ve learned to fly.” Ding ding ding! Sounds like we have a winner.
6 Alien Sex Fiend, “Drive My Rocket (Up Uranus)” (All Our Yesterdays, 1988) “Drive my rocket up Uranus, baby, till it hurts/Drive my rocket ship just a little farther.” Um, no.
7 Guided By Voices, “Over the Neptune” (Propeller, 1992) “And hey let’s throw the great party/Today and for the rest of our lives/The party’s just about to get started/So throw the switch, it’s rock and roll time.” Hmm ... back-up option in case those pesky Saturn rings mess with our spacecraft.
8 Dead Kennedys, “One-Way Ticket to Pluto” (Bedtime For Democracy, 1986) “Distinguished scientists, a pesky senator and monkey turds leaking from the lab/All brought to us play-by-play by Howard Cosell.” Bad news even if it were still considered a legit planet.