 This video is brought to you by CuriosityStream. Go to curiositystream.com slash polyphonic to get 30 days of membership for free. On April 16th 1972, the Apollo 16 mission launched. It would become the second last Apollo mission to land on the moon, though nobody knew that at the time. At the time, it seemed a future in space was a foregone conclusion. It seemed that the moon was a stepping stone on the way to Mars and beyond. And that's reflected in a song released just two days before that penultimate Apollo mission. On April 14th 1972, Elton John released the single Rocketman, a song speculating on stardom, sci-fi, the human condition, and mankind's future in space. Let's take a closer look. To get to the earliest origins of Rocketman, we need to look back even further. Before Apollo 11 landed on the moon, before Yuri Gagarin's first spaceflight, even before the launch of Sputnik, the first satellite, the origins of Rocketman go all the way back to 1951 when even science fiction was still developing as a genre. That year, Ray Bradbury released a collection of short stories called The Illustrated Man. One of these stories was The Rocketman, a story about a space pilot. In the story, flying a rocket isn't too much of a rarity. It's just another profession, the profession of the narrator's father. That father tells his son of the realities of being a Rocketman. When you're in space, you yearn for home, but when you get back home, you yearn to be out in space again. Something about this story caught the eye of Bernie Topen, who wrote songs for Elton John. He was fascinated by the image of the astronaut as a mundane job. But Topen wasn't actually the first songwriter to be inspired by Bradbury's story. He has admitted that he took the concept from the psychedelic folk band Pearls Before Swine. Their song, also called Rocketman, was a much more faithful adaptation of Bradbury's story. Topen's take on the story changed the protagonist. Instead of focusing on the son like Pearls Before Swine, he focused on the Rocketman himself. He started to picture what it would be like to be an astronaut in this future. With this in his mind, he came up with the now iconic opening line of the song. Topen put that line in his back pocket and sat on it for a few months before developing the song in full. In the lyrics, you can see how Topen expands on the boring aspects of the job. This isn't what we picture astronauts as today, and it's definitely not what we picture them as in the 70s. Our main character isn't a scientist, he's just a man living from paycheck to paycheck. But the song is more than just the story, and that's because Topen and Elton John had a unique relationship. Topen would write all of his lyrics and then bring them to Elton John who would write the music. This is what gives Elton John's song such emotional power. The music is built around the world, it's built to play into the power of the story. Given the image of space, Elton John created a wide open arrangement. He also put emphasis on those opening lines which set the scene for the entire song. In fact, this is one of the only hits of Elton John's entire career that begins with singing right away, there's no piano phrasing before. When you get to the chorus, Elton John uses a choir of backup singers and ascending slide guitars to reflect the lyrics. It feels like you're soaring out into space, floating in the beauty of the universe. But in John's performance, he has a pained loneliness. He embodies the sorrow of the Rocket Man. This isn't just good storytelling, the life of the Rocket Man isn't just sci-fi, it also serves as a metaphor for the life of the rock star. In its own way, the stage is just as lonely as outer space. When you're on the road, it's a dozen different venues night after night, it all blurs together. Rocket Man even sings of burning his fuse out, familiar territory for any rock star with endless shows and endless parties. This song expresses a human side of Elton John. He's not the man people think he is. He's an idol that people look up to, but at the same time, he's just a person working his job. And just as the wonder of space can be lost on someone who's always flying, the wonder of performance can easily be forgotten in the day-to-day and mundane repetition. And that's one of the core messages of Rocket Man. It's all too easy to get caught up in the mundane and forget the fantastic around you. The other message of the song is of course one of loneliness. Filmmaker Majida Dean channeled this loneliness when creating the 2017 video for Rocket Man and created a whole new interpretation of the song. In that video, the Rocket Man isn't a performer or a space pilot, he's a refugee taking a perilous journey to a strange land and reflecting on those he left behind. And that's the power of Rocket Man. It's a wondrous sci-fi piece about the future, but it's also just about the everyday experiences of any human being. Everyone can find something to relate to in it. And that's why the song lasted through the 70s. It lasted through the end of one wave of space excitement, all the way to another. Now space is once again looking closer than ever. We have our eyes set on Mars and beyond. And maybe that means one day soon an astronaut will be stepping out the door and saying goodbye to their family for a long lonely flight. And they won't be able to stop themselves from thinking it's going to be a long, long time. If you want to see just how it is that we're going to be sending astronauts to Mars in the coming years, you should check out Mars The Journey on CuriosityStream. That documentary looks at the challenges we must overcome to get to and settle on Mars. If you like that, Packing for Mars looks at how scientists are working on technologies that will make it possible to live, work, and research on Mars once we're there. And that's just a start. CuriosityStream is the first subscription streaming service dedicated to helping us on our lifelong quest to learn, explore, and understand. They offer 2000 documentary titles on everything from physics to philosophy, from art to engineering, from the past to the future. You can try it out for yourself by going to curiositystream.com slash polyphonic and entering the coupon code polyphonic. By using that code, you'll get 30 days of membership for free and you'll show them that I sent you and support my channel. After that first month, CuriosityStream is just $2.99 a month. There's so much knowledge waiting for you, so please just give it a shot and remember to use the link in the description and the offer code polyphonic to let them know that I sent you.