Each week, Frequency Rotation spotlights a song with a science fiction or fantasy theme. Genre, musical quality, and overall seriousness may vary.

It’s no secret that the Doctor Who theme song has had a massive influence on electronic music over the past five decades. Not only has Ron Grainer’s and Delia Derbyshire’s original 1963 version been reinterpreted numerous times for the show itself, various electronic acts have have sampled, remixed, or otherwise paid homage to one of the most epic and recognizable pieces of science-fiction-related music of all time.

This summer, Doctor Who paid it back. Matt Smith, the Eleventh and current Doctor, appeared onstage with legendary electronica duo Orbital at England’s Glastonbury Festival in June to perform a triumphant version of “Doctor Who” (first covered on their 2001 album, The Altogether). Orbital’s Phil and Paul Hartnoll are no strangers to SF; everything from Star Trek: The Next Generation to Beneath the Planet of the Apes to Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds has popped up in their work, and they provided the soundtrack to the film Event Horizon. (Even more interesting: Orbital’s 2004 song “You Lot” samples Christopher Eccleston’s dialogue from Russell T. Davies’ The Second Coming, before Eccleston and Davies worked together on the 2005 Doctor Who revival.) Regardless of how you feel about electronic music—or Matt Smith—it’s hard not to feel pumped watching a few thousand festivalgoers lose their collective shit over Doctor Who.

Jason Heller writes for The A.V. Club, plays in some bands, and wants “Doctorin’ the TARDIS” played at his funeral.

Each week, Frequency Rotation spotlights a different song with a science fiction or fantasy theme. Genre, musical quality, and overall seriousness may vary.

I’m speaking from personal experience here, so trust me: Most punks are geeks. Granted, punk rock—in all its manifestations over the past four decades—is best known for being crude and stupid. Certainly no one would accuse the punk band Spizzenergi of being otherwise. And yet, the quirky English outfit made its admittedly subatomic mark on music history in 1979 with “Where’s Captain Kirk?”—a song that, while cruder and stupider than most, wasn’t shy about flaunting its obsession with one of the icons of high geekitude.

[To boldly go...]

Each week, Frequency Rotation spotlights a different song with a science fiction or fantasy theme. Genre, musical quality, and overall seriousness may vary.

Fairies, elves, dwarves, halflings, hobbits, goblins, gargoyles, ogres, orcs, hell, even trolls: All seem to have a better public image than the lowly gnome. For every noble portrayal of the mythic race in fantasy literature (e.g. Tolkien), there are negative or ambivalent ones (e.g. Rowling). Not to sound racist or anything, but gnomes just ain’t sexy.

So why did one of the sexiest rock stars of all time—David Bowie—write a trippy, goofy, far from flattering novelty song called “The Laughing Gnome”? Explanation #1: He was 19 years old at the time, not yet famous, and desperate to do anything that might grab some attention. Explanation #2: It was the ’60s.

[Read more]

Each week, Frequency Rotation spotlights a different song with a science fiction or fantasy theme. Genre, musical quality, and overall seriousness may vary.

Heard any good Buzz Aldrin jokes lately? No? Okay, maybe there aren’t any. Maybe there shouldn’t be. Aldrin’s media blitz over the past couple years has left an aftertaste of indignity in the mouths of some (i.e. anyone who thinks Apollo astronauts shouldn’t be reduced to hawking their autobiographies and acting like clowns on TV). Seriously, how does a man who WALKED ON THE FRIGGIN’ MOON get reduced to mugging it up on The Price is Right, Dancing with the Stars, and 30 Rock? (We’ll mercifully restrain ourselves from mentioning his 2009 rap song, “The Rocket Experience.” Oops.). Chalk it up to a lousy agent, if you must. Or the fact that Aldrin may simply be turning into a wacky grandpa. Hey, even astronauts get old. Not that it should come as a surprise. Way back in 1997, Mary Timony and her indie-rock band Helium had pondered the issue in their gorgeous, haunting song, “Aging Astronauts.”

[Read more]

Each week, Frequency Rotation spotlights a different song with a science fiction or fantasy theme. Genre, musical quality, and overall seriousness may vary.

Hip hop and science fiction have always had a flirtatious relationship. Way back in 1984, Afrikaa Bambaataa’s Time Zone—with a little help from the Sex Pistols/Public Image Ltd. frontman John Lydon—harrowingly outlined the apocalypse in the seminal single, “World Destruction.” Since then, everyone from Dr. Octagon to Deltron 3030 to current nerdcore rappers like MC Chris and MC Lars have slipped slivers of science fiction into their rhymes. But few hip hop artists have saturated their sound with SF, fantasy, comic books, and even mythology as lavishly as New York’s Cannibal Ox.

[Read more]

Each week, Frequency Rotation spotlights a different song with a science fiction or fantasy theme. Genre, musical quality, and overall seriousness may vary.

My ghoul-friend Jesse Bullington and I briefly dug up The Misfits for our undead playlist, “I Rocked with a Zombie.” But the infamous horror-punk group always pops back into my festering brain just as soon as the leaves turn brown, the wind blows cold, and Halloween comes howling at the door. Why? Well, besides the fact that The Misfits loved dressing up in terrifying costumes as much as their predecessors, Kiss, and their offspring, Gwar, the band wrote one of the most haunting (and succinctly titled) Halloween anthems of all time: “Halloween.”

[Read more]

Each week, Frequency Rotation digs up a different song with a science fiction or fantasy theme. Genre, musical quality, and overall seriousness may vary.

In honor of Steampunk Fortnight, I figured I’d pick a steampunk-themed song for this week’s installment of Frequency Rotation. Easy, right? After all, there are dozens of bands out there today hoisting the steampunk banner. But rather than pick a new song by a new artist, I wanted to go back a little further. How much further? 1968: the year of the great, often overlooked steampunk milestone, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

[Read more]

Each week, Frequency Rotation probes a different song with a science fiction or fantasy theme. Genre, musical quality, and overall seriousness may vary.

This Sunday, synthesizer icon Gary Numan will kick off a North American tour in support of the 30^th-anniversary reissue of The Pleasure Principle, the innovative album that contains his lone U.S. hit, the new-wave classic “Cars.” It’s hard to believe—especially for those of us who grew up in the 1980s—that Numan is still active and popular in the far-flung future he once so icily, nasally warned us about. Yet here he is; and strangely enough, his music sounds as futuristic and frigidly hypnotic as ever.

[Read more]

Each week, Frequency Rotation probes a different song with a science fiction or fantasy theme. Genre, musical quality, and overall seriousness may vary.

Say you want to write a song about Watchmen, Alan Moore’s and Dave Gibbons’ landmark graphic novel. Which of the book’s many superheroes would you sing about? The detached, godlike Dr. Manhattan? The morally complex (or is that totally amoral) Comedian? The grim, Nietzschean Rorscach? All of the above?

If you’re Franz Nicolay, solo artist and former keyboardist of The Hold Steady, you skip all of those obvious choices and head straight for one of Watchmen’s true underdogs: Hollis Mason, retired auto mechanic and the erstwhile masked adventurer once known as Nite Owl.

[Read more]

Each week, Frequency Rotation probes a different song with a science fiction or fantasy theme. Genre, musical quality, and overall seriousness may vary.

The fact that Kate Bush is a kind of a geek—albeit an impossibly cool and sexy geek—is common knowledge. Her music, after all, is suffused with the fantastic, and she’s contributed to the soundtracks to everything from Terry Gilliam’s Brazil to the big-screen adaptation of The Golden Compass. But when it comes to Bush’s science fiction side, it mostly boils down to one song: the frigid, depressing, microchip-obsessed “Deeper Understanding.”

[Read more]

Each week, Frequency Rotation probes a different song with a science fiction or fantasy theme. Genre, musical quality, and overall seriousness may vary.

Untold dozens of rock ’n’ roll bands have written songs about The Lord of the Rings. Led Zeppelin’s 1969 classic “Ramble On” is among the best known. But that same year, one of Zeppelin’s far, far, far, far, far less famous contemporaries—the Downliners Sect—took their own shot at immortalizing Tolkien in rock. Did they succeed? Is all that glitters gold?

[So you have chosen… rock]

Each week, Frequency Rotation probes a different song with a science fiction or fantasy theme. Genre, musical quality, and overall seriousness may vary.

How do you kill something that’s already dead? One singer-songwriter is doing his best to remind us.

[Read more]

You’re working at the lab, late one night, when you realize you were supposed to make a mixtape for that cute ghoul who’s taking you on a date when you get off in an hour. Uh oh.

[Time to assemble a zombie playlist]

Each week, Frequency Rotation probes a different song with a science fiction or fantasy theme. Genre, musical quality, and overall seriousness may vary.

When I was 6, I didn’t know who Stevie Nicks was. I didn’t even know the name of the song “Rhiannon,” one of the singer’s many hits with Fleetwood Mac. I also had no idea that her lyrics for “Rhiannon” were based on a Welsh myth handed down throughout the centuries in a collection of stories known as the Mabinogion—or that my own family, living in the sweaty armpit of Florida in the mid-’70s when “Rhiannon” came out, was of Welsh descent.

All I knew was this: My mom turned up the radio every time that song came on. And every time I heard it, it was magic.

[Read more]

Each week, Frequency Rotation probes a different song with a science fiction or fantasy theme. Genre, musical quality, and overall seriousness may vary.

Earlier this year I wrote a feature for Clarkesworld called “Moonage Daydream: The Rock Album as Science Fiction.” In it, I point out that rock ’n’ roll’s love affair with science fiction began when rock ’n’ roll as a mass movement did, in the early ’50s. Back then, of course, space travel fell strictly within the realm of science fiction. But in January of 1957—and with Moscow’s sudden, unexpected launch of Sputnik still nine months away—a gaggle of hillbillies assembled in Memphis to record a song that gleefully anticipated the coming Space Age. (Or at the very least, it gleefully anticipated that weekend’s trip to see a science-fiction double-bill down at the local drive-in.)

That two-minute blast of hootin’, hollerin’, hillbilly racket was titled, bluntly enough, “Flyin’ Saucers Rock ’n’ Roll.” The band was Billy Lee Riley and His Little Green Men. And among those Little Green Men was a young, maniacal, hotheaded piano player, a freckle-faced kid who was mere months away from being launched into an orbit of his own: Jerry Lee Lewis.

[Read more]

Each week, Frequency Rotation probes a different song with a speculative-fiction theme. Genre, musical quality, and overall seriousness may vary.

To a certain generation of science-fiction fans (myself quite zealously included), the 1980s big-screen version of Flash Gordon is a sacrosanct piece of pure, campy pulp. Much of that has to do with Queen’s soundtrack for the film—and in particular, its soaring, glorious lead track, “Flash’s Theme” (titled simply “Flash” when it was released that year as a single). So why celebrate a mutated, mutilated version of said song? Because it’s done by San Deigo noisecore legend The Locust. And if there’s one thing The Locust loves, it’s science fiction.

[Read more]

Each week, Frequency Rotation probes a different song with a speculative-fiction theme. Genre, musical quality, and overall seriousness may vary.

Some science-fiction-themed songs take a few paragraphs of background info and analysis to be truly appreciated and enjoyed. Others mostly speak for themselves. Loudly.

[Read more]

Coheed and Cambria, one of the biggest neo-progressive-rock bands around, gets a lot of credit for linking its entire oeuvre (five albums and counting) into one, long, science-fiction narrative—one that’s spilled over into a novel and even a series of comic books. But in a sense, the recently defunct and far less marketable post-metal band Isis did a similar thing. Only without the spaceships, energy beams, pop hooks, and big hair.

[Read more]

Each week, Frequency Rotation probes a different song with a speculative-fiction theme. Genre, musical quality, and overall seriousness may vary.

Ask any actor: Getting typecast sucks. But even the bitterest Star Trek cast member has to admit, albeit grudgingly, that being typecast as a science-fiction actor has at least a few perks. After all, a steady paycheck is a steady paycheck, even if it does entail taking more roles within the confines of SF—a genre many actors get stuck in by accident rather than out of any preexisting love for lasers and aliens. But actors aren’t the only ones who get typecast; it’s far less common, but singers can also slide down the slippery slope of SF, especially if they happen to be practicing thespians as well as chart-topping musicians. Case in point: the operatic, starship-loving superstar of stage, screen, and song, Sarah Brightman.

[Read more]