Galactic Cowboys
Entry updated 16 January 2023. Tagged: Music.
US rock group who have returned repeatedly to sf themes in their music, often evoking motifs and venues found in sf Westerns. Their 1991 eponymous debut crashes and bashes through songs that use the Moon landing, including audio samples of Neil Armstrong, as a point of reference: particularly "Pump Up The Space Suit" and the ironically titled (given its raucously insistent heavy metal style) "Sea of Tranquillity". "Ranch on Mars" self-referentially celebrates the band as cosmic ranchers on Mars, and an identically titled but different song on the band's second album (Space in Your Face, 1993) asserts that "our future lies beyond this earth". The theme is continued in the group's fifth and most celebrated release, At the End of the Day (1998), which includes "Ranch on Mars Part II: Set Me Free", in which we learn that fire destroyed the group's earlier experiment in Martian colonization. [AR]
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