There are not that many pop songs about science, so I find it remarkable that two of my favorites address the topic in such a similar way. Donald Fagen’s “I.G.Y.” and Aimee Mann’s “Fifty Years After the Fair” talk about science not from a technical perspective, but from a societal one. They’re about science as a proxy for hope and progress, science as a vision of a better future. And they’re about what happens when that vision breaks down.
Fagen’s song title refers to the International Geophysical Year, a real series of scientific collaborations that took place from 1957-58. It’s perfectly at home on The Nightfly, a loose concept album that describes the world from the perspective of a boy growing up in New York City during the 1950s. “I.G.Y.” opens with otherworldly synths, followed by a disco beat and an ascending sax riff. It sounds clean and modern, the kind of thing you might hear in the waiting room of a spaceship. The sonic atmosphere supports the song’s conceit, a vivid, 1950s imagining of the kind of future that will be made possible by the miracle of science. Fagen paints this picture so well, offering up a world of “graphite and glitter,” a “wheel in space,” and “Spandex jackets, one for everyone.” There’s an outlandish beauty to these images, and it’s possible to be seduced by them sincerely, in the way that young Fagen presumably would have been.
Of course there’s a layer of irony too, all the more subtle because “I.G.Y.” makes no reference to it all. The incongruity comes from the listener’s own knowledge that the world portrayed in this song is not our present reality. While “I.G.Y” estimates that “By ’76, we’ll be A-OK,” the song was released in 1982, thereby eliminating any hope that these goals would be met. The irony is reinforced by the cheesily idealistic refrain “What a beautiful world this will be/What a glorious time to be free,” which evokes clueless optimism and post-war patriotism. What modern listener would ever think, let alone say such things out loud?
Using a similar approach but with more layers, Mann’s “Fifty Years After the Fair” addresses another iconic scientific and cultural event, the 1939 New York World’s Fair. With this song, Mann first reflects on the hope of a generation who created exhibits like “Tomorrow Town” and dreamt of technicolor dishwashers and robot dogs.1 She celebrates the spectacle of the fair, with its famous buildings, the Trylon and Perisphere: “That for me was the finest of scenes/The perfect world across the River in Queens.” Reflecting this imagery, “Fifty Years” features a bright melody and a ringing, climbing 12-string guitar riff courtesy of Roger McGuinn.
But, as in most of Mann’s songs, these lovely sounds soon give way to a darker set of lyrics. Unlike “I.G.Y.,” “Fifty Years” explicitly jumps between past and future perspectives. Mann sings, “But it does no good to compare/‘Cause nothing ever measures up.” And what could measure up to a generation who “conceived of a future with no hope in sight”? She’s mourning not necessarily a failure of execution (we do have robot dogs after all), but the death of a worldview. It’s not only that this generation had such high hopes, it’s that they had these hopes despite living through the Great Depression and seeing the start of a second World War. Rather than romanticizing the past, Mann just feels a bitter disappointment: “It hurts to even think of those days/The damage we do by the hopes that we raise.”
“I.G.Y.” and “Fifty Years After the Fair” both use real historical scientific events to contrast the hope of the early 20th Century with modern-day disappointment. Fagen’s song is ironic, but it can’t help but get a little caught up in its own fantasies, perhaps reminding us that there is still value to imagining that we could one day be eternally free and eternally young. We might not create a Utopia, but if we achieve even some of our goals, it’s a small victory. Mann’s disillusionment is much harsher. Should we never have hope, because we will only do too much damage when our dreams fail to deliver? I don’t believe that as a rule, but this song plays to the part of me that is at times depressed and discouraged.
Like most things in life, hope is not binary. We can feel its pull even as we realize that it’s preposterous or misplaced or overambitious. “I.G.Y.” and “Fifty Years” fall somewhere on that continuum between hope and despair — and never in the same place each time I hear them. They illustrate the messy mix of hope, longing, nostalgia, excitement, and sadness that’s always present in the world in fluid proportions.
- Googling this song, I found a 1989 New York Times article titled “Fifty Years After the Fair.” It offers a colorful description of the event and seems a likely catalyst for Mann’s song, which was released in 1993.