In the Year 2525 by Zager and Evans played non-stop in the background of my friend’s 12^th birthday party. Her next-oldest brother Peter, moved his portable record player onto the folding bridge table (setting aside the handwritten rules of play his mother had taped to its right side) and carried it out the back screen door placing it under a towering nominally-alive chestnut tree. 

Unlike tapes or CDs, the party’s theme song required a literal needle drop. I do not know whether it was chosen due to Peter’s limited record collection or an obsession he had with the song itself. Maybe the name Zager sounded appropriately dystopian to a guy with a growing collection of sci-fi pulp fiction magazines. Perhaps it was a reaction to his sister playing The Cowsills version of Hair first thing in the morning every day on his record player that was clearly label-markered with his name. Stamped it, licked it, called it. One might give up such childish statements along with games of marbles and kick-the-can, but feelings persist. The music provided a strange accompaniment to the day’s birthday games. Peter helmed the record needle for musical chairs, taking special care not to scratch the surface of the coveted 45. “Girls, look away now,” he yelled out in between needle drops. The game proved extra-challenging with its reliance on forcing the gently rusting lawn chairs into the shifting patchwork grass in the backyard shade. We fell onto the hard grass, popping up immediately, trying to brush the grass stains from our dresses.

Competing jugs of green and orange Kool-Aid were flanked by a tall pitcher of pink lemonade with ice. It was put there for the grownups but we helped ourselves anyways. The song filled me with such a sense of dread that I still remember the words today. It was sung in that folky sort of way of Chad and Jeremy and Peter, Paul and Mary whose songs held more meaning for the adults than the kids of the day. 

Cartoons were like that also. Most of their edgy political humour has aged badly. It feels impossible to ignore the blatant racism, misogyny and homophobia built into even the best-loved ones. Racialized propaganda was unavoidable for us. Snippets of racist songs about African cannibalism, odes dedicated to native genocide and the French-bashing misogynist Mademoiselle from Armentieres, all staples of Baden Powell’s girl guides, are hard-wired into my brain. When I am anxious or tired they pop up unbidden, like bits of ham-fisted movie refrains.

Suzanne and I don’t talk any more. We never had a big falling-out. A modicum of letters were exchanged every year. We cheered each other on at weddings and through shared birth announcements. When we lived an hour away, my husband and I visited with our youngest baby in tow. It takes becoming an adult to look back on childhood relationships and recognize that the unhealthy part of them was not a bug but a feature. Relationships don’t always age well. My father bumped into Suzanne during his travels, brought her up to speed on the details of my life and pressured me to call her. I resisted his interference secure in knowing that he never really understood our friendship.

A kid can suspend disbelief long enough to seriously consider the lyrics of In the Year 2525. Time is not an enforceable concept for a child. A thousand years is like time under a biblical god that passes in a day. The words hit hard despite the song’s baffling timeline. Being raised in the Roman Catholic church, I swam in the waters of dystopianism, accepting the gospel as well, gospel. In church, an aesthetic of violence and sentimentalism was everywhere. We considered ourselves to be of strong constitution. That song did me in though, despite it being silly on its face. 

Even if you accept its huge time-acceleration, the focus is skewed. The dystopianism begins with people rejecting food in favour of a mind-controlling pill in 3535. Jump to a thousand years hence, bodily form and literal appetite are anachronisms. In yet another millennial leap, bodiless people experience a kind of weltschmerz owing to the tedium of their non-corporeal existence that does not allow for food. In 5555 humanity finds itself stultifyingly bored continuing to lament its collective body-loss. Finally, in 6565, 4,000 years after the eponymous 2525 of the song’s refrain, non-corporeal humanity gazes eyelessly (and phallocentrically) down the shaft of an elongated test tube to mourn the death of sexual reproduction. The human body has disappeared four millennia hence, though apparently mutual muscle memory has withstood the test of time. 

In the blink of God’s eye, the first successful in vitro fertilization occurred 9 years after the song came out, with the birth of Louise Brown in 1978. The technology of test tube babies Zager and Evans came in with the haste of a foundling on a doorstep. Its development would prove more subtle, profound and socially accepted than they could have imagined. 

In 1969 the early effects of climate change and habitat loss were unacknowledged. Zager and Evans had the destruction of the planet pegged to 9595, a time frame so ludicrous it threatens to upend the song entirely.

After having studied philosophy, I refrain from using the expression existential crisis, reserving the adjective for a second world war movement that has come and gone. In any event, Zager and Evans were preoccupied with mortality and the promise of eternal life. Religion and science are the binary choices. The song is a polemic, asking its listeners to pick a side. They implored their listeners to come down on the side of God. The most famous lines from the song concern in vitro fertilization, emblematic of Christianity’s preoccupation with reproductive choice for women. The truly anxiety-inducing concept of the song, addressed in its nine-billionth year is the destruction of the planet. God puts everything back together in the song just in time to begin another verse.