a better future

Let's listen to something better 

But why is the affinity between rock and science fiction so strong? And what is the connection that both have with youth? 

"Life on Mars?” provides a clue. 

True, the lyric isn’t really science fiction. But the song scenario and its emotional tenor do evoke exactly the sort of longings and frustrations that fuel “the desire called utopia,” the poetic subtitle of Fredric Jameson’s s.f. study Archaeologies of the Future. 

Bowie’s own account of “Life on Mars?” is that it’s about “a sensitive young girl’s reaction to the media.... I think she finds herself disappointed with reality ... that although she's living in the doldrums of reality, she's being told that there's a far greater life somewhere, and she's bitterly disappointed that she doesn't have access to it."

Formulaic entertainment offers no relief (“the film is a saddening bore” -which I've always heard as "sagging bore" and prefer that mishearing). 

TV news presents a panorama of absurdity: “the workers have struck for fame.”

Humanity seems lemming-like  both in its futile workaday striving and its preferred forms of escape and relaxation: mere “ mice in their million hordes” swarming to Ibiza or the Norfolk Broads for the annual getaway from it all. 

So the question of the title - "Life on Mars?" - is at once an indictment of the sheer mundanity of life on Earth and a sighing entreaty: there must be more than this, an absolute elsewhere."

adapted via

Looking at the lyric, I never noticed before the sustained mouse imagery:

"the girl with the mousy hair"

"Mickey Mouse has grown up a cow"

"the mice in their million hordes"

from the album Glam