Alien invasion: why a galaxy of musicians are turning to space for inspiration

 

Alien invasion: why a galaxy of musicians are turning to space for inspiration

Influenced by everything from declassified UFO files to Elon Musk, the likes of Grimes, Doja Cat and Demi Lovato are taking off into another realm

Sick of the world and want to leave it? Us too! But join the queue: most pop stars are way ahead of you. Every musician, from Demi Lovato to Grimes, is heading into outer space for inspiration right now.

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Among those caught up in pop’s tractor beam is Doja Cat, whose Kiss Me More video saw the rapper and SZA as huge pink aliens who abduct an astronaut for a threesome then trap him in a jar. The video for the second single from album Planet Her, Need to Know, is similarly space-themed. It sees Doja as a sexy extra-terrestrial on the pull accompanied by Grimes, who recently got “beautiful alien scars” tattooed on her back, and has insisted that she’s moving to Mars when she turns 50 in order to set up a human colony – a plan backed by her SpaceX billionaire boyfriend Elon Musk.

Then there is pop-punk’s leading UFO expert Tom DeLonge, whose band Angels & Airwaves recently announced their new album by literally launching it into space, in a renewable hydrogen capsule. Robbie Williams – who is so convinced aliens exist he made a whole documentary about them with Jon Ronson – recently revealed he had written a song with Shaun Ryder after “bonding over UFOs”.

Demi Lovato went one better: the singer revealed they had meditated until they “made contact” with extraterrestrial beings. “I have witnessed the most incredibly profound sightings both in the sky as well as feet away from me,” they wrote on Instagram, adding: “If we were to get 1% of the population to meditate and make contact, we would force our governments to acknowledge the truth about extraterrestrial life among us.”

Even The Pop Star Previously Known As Cheryl Cole admitted to researching aliens during lockdown, claiming the book The Three Waves of Volunteers and the New Earth by Dolores Cannon – a UFO expert who claims the planet was populated by “volunteers” who arrived here from outer space - “changed her life”. What we’re saying is: not since the late-90s/early-00s space-themed music video trend (Michael and Janet Jackson’s Scream, Britney Spears’ Oops! … I Did It Again, Backstreet Boys’ Larger Than Life) have pop stars been so obsessed with matters cosmic.

It is understandable that musicians believe in extraterrestrial beings: after a year socialising over Zoom or from behind a mask, every interaction IRL feels like you need to relearn social skills after arriving from another planet. But astronaut Chris Hadfield, the only person ever to record an album in space (2015’s Space Sessions: Songs From a Tin Can) and who went viral for his performance of Space Oddity on the International Space Station in 2013, has another theory for the sci-fi pop boom: we’re in the middle of another space race.