NASA is on your side

Oh actually, I've forgotten the essential part of this song. At the beginning of the song, the narrator says he awakes in the future. This is in the present tense.

Yet he uses a past pluperfect tense to say "I had turned to stone with fear, laid on petrified trees" meaning he's explaining why he woke up in the future. He had been unconscious (physically or of time at least) for some time. The Earth is personified as being scared: "laid on petrified trees" , early in the song to show that it's going under some sort of oppression. It's at the mercy of something/someone, and it's scared of it's fate.

In fact this whole verse uses the present to explain what's happening now, but what happened in the past before he blacked out (or whatever he did to lose track of time) is in the past tense. Notice: "In a high school massacre I'm fossilized and clear, the teenage terrorists freeze" is in the present tense, so he's describing what he sees, perhaps this is a large group of school kids lying dead, or perhaps scared, just like the earth is at what has been happening, but they are described as "teenage terrorists" so perhaps they are the ones that have caused the destruction, details of which aren't clear yet. In the past tense is: "We began dismantling the stadia and schools, singing save our simian souls!" meaning the narrator had destroyed stadiums and schools in the past. "Simian" means ape-like or of primate origin, so the idea that the narrator dislikes the way humans are becoming less natural beings, as we were designed, trying to become different to what we are originally. Then there are images of bullets hanging static in the air, suggesting the narrator isn't in running time, but time is static. Also the bullets are warm and polished so we can tell they've just been shot. It's striking however that it is raining: "droplets glittering home."

References to fossil fuels and steel production are used throughout the song: "you're the crudest oil" "they're gonna dig a coal-face out of you" "Isambard I'm all steel" (I think Isambard was a famous british engineer involved in the production of steel) "pushing flame scorched limos to the oil rig." "mother all about the coal and the lava and the gas that we are" "digging me up to fuel rockets and risk" So we can now understand that the song is about the way humans consume fossil fuels. It's set in the future, so the song-writer is basically saying the world will be a wasteland in the future, because of the way we greedily consume the Earth's resources now.

But the most difficult part of the song is why "NASA is on your side." It's difficult to understand who "you" is. At the moment I think it's the human race. I think NASA is on our side, as it's going to rescue us and take us away from the Earth when we have destroyed it because of our greed.

The last verse is very striking as it says children climbed over fridges to see the death of the sun. I don't think these were physical fridges, but figuratively, they were climbing over things on the Earth when all it's resources and fuel had been milked. The narrator laughs when people said the Sun was a "treasure in the sky" which is very difficult to understand. I think it might mean that in the future they won't need the Sun. Humans will leave the Earth and won't need the Sun as they will have been rescued by NASA. They would actually enjoy the new life somewhere else. It's an interesting, imaginative idea if that is the real meaning, but this is very ambiguous, and is open to various interpretations, which is why I like this song.