Ground Control to Major Tom (Coming Home) [Music]

Consider this the first post of the non-LOST summer blogging season.

To get my feet wet to real posts, I’m going to sidestep the following major topics for now:

• Ron Paul’s son, apparently named after Ayn Rand, wins a primary, Arlen Specter loses
• Democrats came up with some sort of climate bill, which, surprise, mega-environmentalists dislike
• BP’s Big Oil Mess is creeping up on Florida, threatening seniors who enjoy wading
• The Supreme Court decides life without parole is too strict for minors
• Some racist white chick believes the Miss USA winner is connected to Hezbollah, because she’s Muslim American
• The Thai army has forcibly entered a protester camp in the government’s continuing struggle with the tragically named “Redshirts”

No, instead I’m going to talk about Lincoln cars and David Bowie songs.

Source.

Okay, so you know how when you first heard the Goldfinger version of “99 Red Balloons,” you couldn’t help but feel like you’ve heard the song before?

I had that same feeling when this Lincoln MKZ commercial came on:

The song in the video is “Major Tom (Coming Home),” a cover by Shiny Toy Guns. I didn’t know this until I was at Jack the Ripper’s Final Festivity and was coerced into downloading it by ChinChin. As soon as I played it, I realized I’d heard it before and it wasn’t long after that Lincoln commercial came on, probably during Lost or something.

This version of the song has become so synonymous with the car that the “official music video” features the car’s name in the background.

Okay, so Shiny Toy Guns isn’t afraid of a little selling out.

First sidenote, car commercials, along with Apple commercials, always have the catchiest songs. It’s a direct correlation with how expensive and generally douchey the product is, I suppose.

But the song had sounded familiar from the very beginning, so when I dug a little deeper, I found out that “Major Tom” is actually an 80’s song by Peter Schilling. Like all good 80’s songs, it was originally in German.

The song is about an astronaut named Major Tom on a mission to space. In the English version of the song (and thus the Shiny Toy Guns version), Tom’s ship malfunctions in space, resulting in communication being lost. Then something mysterious, perhaps literal, perhaps metaphorical, happens to Major Tom as he “comes home.”

But, of course, the song was changed up for the English version from the German lyrics. In that version, there’s a couple of interesting deviations. For one, it isn’t Ground Control with the reservations about the mission, it’s the crew – it’s Ground Control who forces them to go along with the mission anyway. In the German version, Tom has the same crisis of purpose on his mission, but one line (woll’n Sie das Projekt denn so zerstören?) makes it clear that the accident was no malfunction – it was sabotage on Tom’s part. In both versions, Tom seems to experience some sort of environment, but in the German version it ends on the ominous line “I become cold” more heavily implying some type of death.

The pregnancy of meaning in what seems like a fun 80’s song makes more sense when you consider that the Major Tom character was created by David Bowie.

Ever since his debut in Bowie’s 1969 hit “Space Oddity,” Major Tom has cameoed in enough songs to earn him a Wikipedia entry (making him more notable than the word Malamanteau, according to Wikipedia editors).

“Space Oddity,” which was Bowie’s breakthrough hit in the UK, is pretty much the same story as Schilling’s song. Tom goes to space and is affected by the mysteries of space, eventually disappearing with a message for his wife. Bowie followed up with Major Tom in “Ashes to Ashes” and “Hallo Spaceboy.”

So that’s your first blog post in months about something not dealing with the Island. Why write about covers of songs from the 80’s that appear Lincoln car commercials? Can’t really say. It was on my mind and it’s too late to tackle the national and political issues of the day.

But while we’re on the topic, can’t we reflect on the story of Major Tom? Here was a man thrust out of his element by an outside force, despite warnings to the contrary. When he went out into space, he found perspective, making his current mission seem, frankly, unimportant. He changes courses, losing communication with his past, becoming something else, quite possibly dying.

Recently I’ve been thinking that, while we could all use more perspective, too much of it might be dangerous. That’s the first lesson I take away from it.

The second is….

Advertisers will strip cool songs of all their meaning and attach them to slick product-pushing.

That cover of “Space Oddity” is by Cat Power and if the Internet is to be believed, she never recorded a full version. She only recorded a “fragment” for the Lincoln MKZ commercial.

Doch was nützen die am Ende, indeed.

Reviews on the penultimate episodes of Lost as well as a metric ton of Lost retrospectives on the horizon. And once I get back to Blacksburg, I’ll hopefully be tweaking the blog’s theme to focus on local topics. Until then, happy space exploring.