The release includes chanting free-jazz pieces like ‘Space Is The Place’ and ‘Interplanetary Music No.1’, as well as swinging ballads, ‘Enlightenment’ and ‘Sometimes I’m Happy’. The double LP compiles over seventy-five minutes of vocal performances and mind-expanding works by Ra and his Arkestra. However, like all of the genres that we’ve covered during “Mid-Century Kitsch Month,” there’s an element of danger in just going into this music blindly.Modern Harmonic has announced The Space Age Is Here To Stay, the very first collection of tracks from Sun Ra’s songbook.
That combination of talent, charm, and innovation always makes for the possibility of some truly special music. It’s here that space age pop provides its most enduring legacy, as it would prove to be a critical influence on later musical movements. The most brilliant of these innovators – namely Joe Meek and Raymond Scott – would ultimately take to building their own studios, in an effort to bring their visions to life. In order to create the sounds of unreachable locales, producers would have to challenge the still-conservative mentality of record labels and studios. There is a wide-eyed optimism to the best space age pop – one that makes it endearing over a half-century past its creation.Īnother critically important element of space age pop is found in its production. With that said, much of the music that they created is not without (often immense) charm. Consequently, rather than being “true believers” in the possibilities of the future, many were just opportunistic musicians and producers, capitalizing on the ephemeral appeal of a fad tied to a rapidly passing moment in time. In fact, many of those practitioners were the very same ones who were simultaneously cashing in on exotica. Like exotica, many of its top practitioners were trained in jazz or classical music. Musically speaking, “Space Age Pop” is a hard style to pin down. While the falsehoods perpetuated about the outer edges of the galaxy (and beyond) would do far less damage than the stereotypes spread by exotica, space age pop would provide a glimpse of the future that was short-sighted at best, and frighteningly ignorant at worst – particularly in the sense that the tools which promised to expand our perceptions of the universe would ultimately extend the reach of a global “nuclear shadow.”
Just as exotica had attempted to sell the “lure of the unknown” to eager, middle-class audiences, so too did “Space Age Pop” trade in the realm of worlds whose truths would be stretched, distorted, and misrepresented all in the name of promising an experience in listening. Film, literature, television, advertising, and fashion reflected this fascination. Everywhere one turned, they were bombarded with images of a future that had once seemed like science fiction, but that now felt so tantalizingly possible. At the center of this conflict of superpowers is the so-called “Space Race.” While the true origins of both nations’ thirst for space exploration were founded in purposes of both a defensive and offensive nature, the social, cultural, and economic implications of journeying beyond the Earth’s atmosphere created a level of excitement among the American people that is hard to imagine today. It’s the mid-twentieth century, and America is locked in an existential Cold War with the Soviet Union.
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