12-14-18
The groundbreaking “Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space” comes from the album of the same name, released in June 1997. The song’s title comes from the novel Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaarder:
Only philosophers embark on this perilous expedition to the outermost reaches of language and existence. Some of them fall off, but others cling on desperately and yell at the people nestling deep in the snug softness, stuffing themselves with delicious food and drink. ‘Ladies and Gentlemen,’ they yell, ‘we are floating in space!’ But none of the people down there care.
Some people live an ordinary life — go to work, mow the lawn, take the bins out, look after the kids. And they’re perfectly happy. But what the song’s title, intro, and the original quote are getting at is that if you stop to think for a moment, everything about life is mind-bogglingly absurd. We are sentient bundles of meat, driving around in vehicles fuelled by long-dead animals and plants, existing on a massive chunk of rock and iron, floating around a nuclear fusion reactor in a physically-unknowable universe that contains more stars than all the grains of sand you could ever collect, and all of that could just be a minuscule ripple in a higher-dimension existence we could never hope to even begin to comprehend, like an ant crawling on the side of the Empire State Building.
We can barely comprehend the inside of our own minds, let alone everything else that is out there. And so no one can be blamed for pretending like none of that exists. But it does, somewhere out there…
Lifted from Elvis’s “Can’t Help Falling In Love”, where it referenced a famous line from Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Criticism:
No Place so Sacred from such Fops is barr’d,
Nor is Paul’s Church more safe than Paul’s Church-yard:
Nay, fly to Altars; there they’ll talk you dead;
For Fools rush in where Angels fear to tread.
As the song reaches its epic climax, Pierce arrives at an existential conclusion. Drawing from the philosophical truth that the past & the future are merely concepts, he notes: all we’ll ever truly have is the present moment, or ‘Today’.
Despite this realisation, he admits to his uncertainty as to what the future holds.
Lyrics:
[Intro]
(Ladies and gentlemen, we’re floating in space)
[Verse 1]
All I want in life’s a little bit of love to take the pain away
Getting strong today
A giant step each day
[Verse 2]
Wise men say
Only fools rush in
Only fools rush in
But I
I can’t help
I can’t help falling
Falling in love with you
[Verse 3]
I will love you ’til I die
And I will love you all the time
So please put your sweet hand in mine
And float in space and drift in time
All the time until I die
We’ll float in space, just you and I
[Verse 4]
Baby, I love you today
I guess that’s what you want
And I don’t know where we are all going
Life don’t get stranger than this
It is what it is
And I don’t know where we are all going to
Everything happens today
And we’re out here in space
And I don’t know where we are all going
Baby, I love you today
I guess that’s what you want
And I don’t know where we are all going to