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Goodbye 20th Century Lyrics
“To help us get a glimpse into the future of this unfinished world of ours (…). The
greater and better world of tomorrow (…), whereby individual effort, the freedom
to think and the will to do have given birth to a generation of men who always
want new fields for greater accomplishment, and will always find new things for
all others to enjoy. Come, let’s travel into the future. What will we see?”
greater and better world of tomorrow (…), whereby individual effort, the freedom
to think and the will to do have given birth to a generation of men who always
want new fields for greater accomplishment, and will always find new things for
all others to enjoy. Come, let’s travel into the future. What will we see?”
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Every lyric site so far has this listed as instrumental, but I've love to know what the announcer is saying in the opening sample.
That sample, both the music and the words, sounds an awful lot--and I'm about 99% sure on this--like the original Futurama exhibit that GM did at the 1939 World's Fair. I can't quite find a perfect lyric for you, but reading about that exhibit should give you enough of an idea of where VNV was going with that particular sample. You don't need to know every word in order to understand what it means in the context of the song...or why the instrumental portion is so achingly mournful.
That sample, both the music and the words, sounds an awful lot--and I'm about 99% sure on this--like the original Futurama exhibit that GM did at the 1939 World's Fair. I can't quite find a perfect lyric for you, but reading about that exhibit should give you enough of an idea of where VNV was going with that particular sample. You don't need to know every word in order to understand what it means in the context of the song...or why the instrumental portion is so achingly mournful.
To make a long story very short, that sample, in my view, sums...
To make a long story very short, that sample, in my view, sums up the whole album: a vision of the future that never came to be. Futurama 1939 was about that far-off year of 1960...which is now over half a century behind us in 2011. We see 1960 as the distant past--I hesitate to call it "quaint" because I know there are older users of this site--but in 1939, it was a gloriously exciting future.
But that future--which could have been our present--never came to be. Whether or not that's a good thing is an open question, and it's the central question of the entire "Automatic" album.
https://archive.org/details/ToNewHor1940
Found it!
On that video, go up to the 8:00 mark. That's the full sample, right there.