"In the Year 2525" (on the radio in 1969) foretold life in 2025

Back in the day, artists of all kinds variously apprehended this inhuman moment, which we can best survive by hearing them, and heeding them, again

Let’s mark the start of 2025 with this somber song by the Nebraskan duo Zager & Evans, which topped the charts for six weeks in 1969:

“In the Year 2525 (Exordium & Terminus)”

Song by Zager & Evans

In the year 2525
If man is still alive
If woman can survive
They may find

In the year 3535
Ain't gonna need to tell the truth, tell no lies
Everything you think, do, and say
Is in the pill you took today

In the year 4545
Ain't gonna need your teeth; won't need your eyes
You won't find a thing to chew
Nobody's gonna look at you

In the year 5555
Your arms are hanging limp at your sides
Your legs got nothing to do
Some machine's doing that for you

In the year 6565
Ain't gonna need no husband; won't need no wife
You'll pick your son, pick your daughter, too
From the bottom of a long glass tube

In the year 7510
If God's a-comin', he oughta make it by then
Maybe he'll look around Himself and say
Guess it's time for the Judgment day

In the year 8510
God is gonna shake His mighty head
He'll either say, "I'm pleased where man has been"
Or tear it down and start again

In the year 9595
I'm kinda wonderin' if man is gonna be alive
He's taken everything this old Earth can give
And he ain't put back nothin'

Now it's been ten thousand years
Man has cried a billion tears
For what he never knew
Now, man's reign is through

But through eternal night
The twinkling of starlight
So very far away
Maybe, it's only yesterday

In the year 2525
If man is still alive
If woman can survive
They may thrive

In the year 3535
Ain't gonna need to tell the truth...

Video using Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) to illustrate the song’s vision:

A “live” performance from 1969:

Of course, this blast from the past necessarily tells us more about its moment than it possibly could about the present that it roughly predicted. For one thing, it helps remind us that “the Sixties” was a more complex and anguished era than the cliché version that’s been foisted on us by the media, as in, say, Forrest Gump— surely the most cloying of the many propaganda eyesores featuring the CIA’s Tom Hanks—and The Trial of the Chicago Seven, Aaron Sorkin’s apolitical cartoon version of that episode, featuring Mossad’s Sacha Baron Cohen. (The Trial is, among other things, an insult to the memory of Fred Hampton, whose true radicalism, and whose consequent betrayal and murder, are dramatized with startling honesty by Shaka King in Judas and the Black Messiah.) “The Sixties” as routinely oversimplified by Hollywood, the media in general and most of academia—or, rather, by the federal agencies that feed those institutions—tends to be a trite and wholly unconvincing tapestry of retro images: “peaceniks” chanting, giant Afros, hippies sucking weed, go-go girls serenely bopping in gold cages, LBJ and Nixon and Mayor Daley’s feral cops, and so on.

That vision of the period is laughable to anybody who was there at the time, with open eyes. Being there, and living through it, was to see, and feel, the warring impulses that made the period both frightening and—for some of us—exhilarating. On the one hand, it was a moment of great fear, the noblest spirits openly gunned down, or otherwise dispatched, to preserve the state-and-corporate status quo, and to warn off other dissidents. Thus the deaths of JFK, Malcolm, Medgar Evers, MLK, Jr., Bobby Kennedy—and, among others, Fred Hampton, Walter Reuther, Thomas Merton, Patrice Lumumba, Dag Hammarskjold—along with the persistent specter of the Bomb, as well as the class and racial fractures in America, and, of course, the ongoing massacre in Vietnam—cast a shadow over daily life, though one that few allowed themselves to see, and that even fewer would discuss; so the general unease came out obliquely, and/or metaphorically, through the music. While almost no one talked about it openly—David Crosby mentioned JFK/Dallas on stage during a Byrds concert, for which edginess his bandmates ousted him—many sang their sense of the ongoing slo-mo apocalypse. Such was “In the Year 2525,” and other prophecies, tirades and elegies.

Note who introduced Barry McGuire’s performance on TV’s “Hullabaloo” (1965):

The Temptations quote McGuire’s title in this hit from 1970:

Dion’s “Abraham, Martin & John” (1968):

A grief-stricken cover by Moms Mabley, on Merv Griffin’s TV show (!) in 1969:

Just one of the many bitter anthems penned back then by Bob Dylan (performed in 1984 at Wembley Stadium):

Tuli Kupferberg’s “CIA Man,” from “The Fugs’ First Album” (1965):

“Make me wanna holler, the way they do my life”: Marvin Gaye, 1971:

Simon & Garfunkel’s first hit (1965), said (by Garfunkel) to be a veiled lament over the “silence” on JFK’s murder:

An exquisite rendering by the duo at Madison Square Garden in 2009:

Jim Morrison’s haunting expression of despair, performed at the Hollywood Bowl in 1968:

And, finally, Jimi Hendrix’s masterful reinterpretation of the National Anthem, at Woodstock in 1969:

Jimi discusses the controversy over that performance with Dick Cavett:

So many are such darker numbers from that bloody era that I couldn’t possibly include them all in this mere post; nor would I want to try, since they alone convey a misimpression of the Sixties as musically fixated on the horrors back then, foreign and domestic. On the one hand, most songs playing on the radio were not political or critical at all; and—more importantly—that marked strain of protest in the music of that epoch was clearly counter-balanced by a joyous pastoral celebration of love, dance, nature, music, and/or just being alive.

In short, that decade is really no more notable for its shaggy dissidence than it is for its aspiration to happiness (the real thing, not just getting high).

The Rascals on Ed Sullivan:

Chicago in concert:

Sly and the Family Stone on Ed Sullivan:

George Harrison playing “Here Comes the Sun” (or part of it) in concert:

“59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy),” performed by Simon & Garfunkel on “The Smothers Comedy Brothers Hour”:

Wilson Pickett performing “Land of 1,000 Dances” in concert:

Cream performing (or lip-syncing) “I Feel Free” on British TV in 1967:

Janis Joplin’s sublime “Summertime,” in concert, 1969:

I could go on—I’d like to!—but time is fleeting, and you may not enjoy all this as much as I do; so let me conclude with a few points that may help us grasp how radically “our” world and the media have changed over these last 60 years, this world ceasing to be ours, and the media having been transformed completely into an incessant all-pervasive toxic bummer.