When the news first broke that pop star Katy Perry will hop inside a Blue Origin rocket and blast off to outer space in a launch scheduled for April 14, NPR music editor Hazel Cills took to an internal NPR Music Slack channel.
"Quick name 20 artists who should get to go to space before Katy Perry," she challenged.
NPR staffers rose to the occasion, though one did point out that Perry isn't entirely lacking in astronautical bona fides, having, in 2010, released a song about having intimate relations with an alien. Still, it wasn't hard to come up with many musicians whose extra-terrestrial credentials are more convincing.
Here are 20 musicians whose space-themed work has forged new paths and opened enough astonishing dimensions in sound to earn them seats in starships, according to the opinions of music critic Ann Powers, video producer Nikki Birch, network response associate Tucker Ives, engineer Valentina Rodríguez Sánchez and myself. With apologies to David Bowie, Gustav Holst, Gil Scott-Heron and Sun Ra, the following list is limited to living musicians who could, theoretically, actually go to space.
Commencing countdown:
1. Marshall Allen
The heir to Sun Ra, who turned 100 last year, knows better than anyone else that "space is the place."
2. George Clinton
The cosmic commander of the P-Funk Mothership was inspired by Uhura in Star Trek, as he told Splice in 2020. Clinton said that while Parliament was recording its seminal album, Mothership Connection, "We weren't tied down to this planet for a minute."
3. Elton John
"Rocketman," the star's first major hit, was inspired by science fiction legend Ray Bradbury. It's been used as wake-up music for multiple crews on the Discovery and Atlantis space shuttles.
4. John Williams
Williams composed and conducted the scores to Star Wars and E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, which both won Academy Awards. Star Wars was named the greatest film score of all time by the American Film Institute in 2005.
5. Erykah Badu
The fearless queen of neo-soul dreams of living in a space shuttle, as she told NPR's Wild Card, and in other interviews, she's shared stories of her frustrated efforts to meet aliens.
6. Bilal
During the height of the pandemic, he live streamed his acclaimed 2020 experimental soul EP Voyage-19 (Badu appears on one of its tracks), lifting the spirits of thousands of housebound earthlings.
7. Peter Schilling
While David Bowie is no longer with us, the main character of his classic song "Space Oddity" found new life in Schilling's 1983 hit "Major Tom (Coming Home)."
8. Nick Rhodes
The founding keyboardist of Duran Duran is a space obsessive whose otherworldly musical project "Astronomia," with Wendy Bevan, spans four separate albums. "Through our sonic tapestries we explore limitless dimensions and transitions in the universe," he helpfully explained on the band's website.
9. Thundercat
A protege of Badu who draws from Afrofuturist traditions, the Grammy-winning musician's songs include "Lost in Space" and "Jameel's Space Ride."
10. Rush
After attending the 1981 launch of the space shuttle Columbia, the Canadian progressive rock trio was moved to write several songs. "Countdown" includes audio of real astronauts talking to ground control and has been used as a wake-up song for astronauts on missions.
11. Björk
The artist's affinity for universes other than ours are laid bare in "Earth Intruders," "Pluto" and "Cosmogony," as well as … well, pretty much everything about her.
12. Afrika Bambaataa
The revolutionary DJ and record producer helped lay the groundwork for later Black science fiction, robot cosplay and Afrofuturism. Put him on a shuttle to "Planet Rock."
13. Philip Glass
Space exploration figures prominently in several of the contemporary classical composer's operas, such as Einstein on the Beach, The Voyage and an obscure work based on a science fiction novel by Doris Lessing, The Making of the Representative for Planet 8.
14. Pink Floyd
Exceeding its own "space rock" label, the band's connections to worlds beyond include playing live on the BBC's broadcast of the first moon landing in 1969. Former guitarist and vocalist David Gilmour claimed that Soviet cosmonauts brought a Pink Floyd cassette to the Mir space station in the 1980s. And NASA used the band's song "Eclipse" to wake up a Mars rover in 2004.
15. Janelle Monáe
"I'm a huge space nerd," Monáe told Conan O'Brien while promoting the 2016 movie Hidden Figures, where she played pioneering NASA engineer Mary Jackson. The Afrofuturist singer, whose lyrics include "My spaceship leaves at 10:00" and "I'm an alien from outer space," told O'Brien her dream is to go to space. Someone send Janelle Monáe to space!
16. Kronos Quartet
Over more than five decades, musicians in this venerable contemporary classical group have paid homage to Sun Ra and incorporated space sounds recorded by NASA into their music. There's even a tune from a show in the Star Trek universe that pays homage to the group.
17. Bootsy Collins
His signature "Space Bass" is shaped like a star. So are his spectacles. And his stellar creative output ranges from such songs as "Stars Have No Names (They-Just-Shine)" to his work on Parliament's Mothership Connection and the experimental metal band Science Faxtion he helped found in 2007.
18. Grateful Dead
Surviving members Mickey Hart, Bob Weir and Bill Kreutzmann were nominated by an NPR staffer for the trippy fan favorite "Space," which appeared on the band's 1981 live album, Dead Set. But the band's tech team also designed monitor systems and headphones that were later adapted by NASA.
19. Brian Eno
Few musicians have applied themselves so diligently to imagining what space sounds like. A godfather of ambient music, Eno composed "New Space Music" as well as music for the 1989 documentary For All Mankind. "The individual electronic notes … descend like stars falling from a dark sky," astronomer Adam Frank wrote in an NPR review.
20. BTS
Why should the band's unearthly popularity be constrained to our planet? BTS's songs "Mikrokosmos" and "134340" (which refers to a lonely little asteroid) and the solo song "moonchild" by RM, a member of the group, were added to NASA's playlist for an eight-day mission to the moon on the Artemis 2 in 2024. Members of the South Korean band have also collaborated with Coldplay to create such space-themed hits as "My Universe" and "The Astronaut."
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