With today marking the anniversary of the creation of NASA and July 20th the anniversary of Neil Armstrong becoming the first man to walk on the surface of the moon, I was prompted to take a look at a small group of words associated with space travel (namely, variants of Apollo, astronaut, moon, rocketship, and spaceship) in pop music. Among other things, I wanted to see if there might have been a higher use of the terms during the 1960s, as the United States engaged in its space race with the U.S.S.R., by examining their occurrence in songs on the Billboard year-end Top Ten charts (1951-2016). And I wanted to add to my previous post on planets toward a fuller account of space imagery in pop music.

The search revealed no occurrences of either Apollo or astronaut in the collection, and spaceship and rocketship occurred in only one song apiece (respectively, 2009's "Boom Boom Pow" and 2016's "Stressed Out").

The search for variants of moon in the collection fared much better, however, with 74 hits in a total of 34 songs. The results range from the bare form to compounds such as moonlight and moonbeam, as illustrated in table 1.

As shown, the bare form of moon appeared in the greatest number of songs and the most overall, while compounds and other variant forms appear fewer times. While some of these words, namely mooned, moonshine, and moonwalking, have an indirect link with the moon itself, their occurrence in the collection was seldom enough that they were left in the analysis by decade, as illustrated in table 2.

As the table shows, moon variants actually appear most frequently in the 1950s, followed by the 1990s, and are least frequently used in the 1980s, followed by the 2000s and the 1960s. In other words, moon appears in songs more often in the decade leading up to the decade of the initial moon landing than it does in the decade of the landing itself. One has to wonder about this outcome: Could it be that the moon was such a focal point in other forms of media in the 1960s that it was virtually ignored, or even avoided, by pop musicians at the time because it might be considered too cliche by audiences? Or perhaps the moon was simply disregarded in favor of lyrics about the Vietnam War, the civil rights struggle in America, and other concerns of the time. Answering such questions will require more analysis of the lexical inventory of the collection. In the meantime, enjoy a "moon song" from each decade:

And a few of my favorite space travel songs not appearing in the collection: