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2. The Flaming Lips — "What is the Light"
Album: The Soft Bulletin
Key Lyric: “Looking into space, it surrounds you / Love is the place that you're drawn to”
You might be tempted at first to dismiss this song as some typical Flaming Lips acid trip hippy bullshit about seeing a person surrounded by an aura of love as they hurtle through space, and you would be right. But honestly, is there anything realer than that? We're all just out here looking for an epic sing-along chorus about how love grounds us in the midst of the vast, unknowable expanse of the universe, and we can't get cynical about the fact that such a song exists. No, we need to accept the solar flares (chemically derived or otherwise) radiating off the body of our lover and get pulled into his or her gravitational field.
3. Lloyd ft. Danah Lewis — “Love Spaceship”
Album: Lessons In Love 2.0
Key Lyric: “I wanna take you to the moon / 'Cause you're my shining star / My spaceship goes zoom / We don't need no car”
A lot of singers will try to get you to hop into their spacecraft of choice, but, if you're not discerning, you may find yourself in the back of a Chevy Astro wondering where you went wrong. One way to make sure you're getting the real astronaut treatment is if the singer sounds like someone who's an expert physicist. By that metric, it's safe to assume a guy named Lloyd knows a thing or two about calculating g-force. So trust him as you pilot your Space Shuttle Discovery to your partner's International Space Station. Those swirling synths won't do you wrong, and, in true Space Shuttle fashion, they are totally reusable.
4. Jamiroquai — "Cosmic Girl"
Album: Travelling Without Moving
Key Lyric: “I'm scanning all my radars/Well she said she's from a quasar/Forty thousand million light years away/It's a distant solar system/I tried to phone but they don't list 'em/So I asked her for a number all the same”
British acid jazz space cowboys Jamiroquai are no strangers to sci-fi scenarios, which is why they make perfect ambassadors to life on other planets, especially on this interplanetary disco track. If there isn't a full time broadcast from SETI blasting this song's radio waves into deep space, extraterrestrial life can be forgiven for ignoring us. If there is such a broadcast, however, we can safely assume that lovers from other galaxies are loading themselves wholesale onto their spaceships to come capture our hearts and send them floating into a zero gravity dancefloor where the only disco ball is an endless array of actual stars. Just don't ask them for their number when they leave: technology may have improved since 1996, but calls to another galaxy definitely don't qualify for unlimited night and weekend minutes.
5. Frank Ocean — "Rocket Love"
Album: The Lonny Breaux Tape (unofficial)
Key Lyric: “How you breathing up here with nothing on?”
Frank Ocean thinks through everything he does pretty thoroughly, his strict quality control is why you'll only find this song as part of his unofficial demo collection The Lonny Breaux Tape. So, presumably he's looked into the logistics behind the line “You look good in your space sui t/ I can't keep my hands off you.” As any astronaut worth his or her space ice cream knows, getting into your fellow spacewalker's Lower Torso Assembly is no laughing matter (for aspiring spacegoers, NASA has an excellent clickable guide to help you follow along). First of all, you have to make sure you don't untether your lover's D-rings in a fit of passion, sending him or her off into space. And with your arms under 14 layers of cloth, you may feel like you're fighting with pillows instead of falling contentedly into them. But if you're really set on trading sips from your lover's In-Suit Drink Bag, you'll probably find that your EVA gloves do the trick—what's more sensual than heaters on your fingers to keep things hot in the cold depths of space?
6. Solange ft. Bilal — "Cosmic Journey"
Album: Sol-Angel and the Hadley St. Dreams
Key Lyric: “Can we lay in this space until forever? / 'Til the moments around us all are still”
When you watch a documentary about space, there's usually some kind of pensive synth track playing softly in the background to drive home the moments of infinite distance and to help draw out the dramatic pauses. Presumably actual space sounds like this too. Solange's song uses instrumentation that nails that vibe so perfectly in its first half that you'll be forgiven for assuming you've walked into a mystical sex planetarium. If Carl Sagan were a female R&B singer making laid back sex jams, this is the song he would make. And in case you're thinking “Wait, but planetarium sex is not the same as actual space sex!” an understandable qualm, consider the dramatic blast-off sequence closing out the track. The song begins gazing into space; it climaxes by actually making its titular trip.
7. The-Dream ft. Kanye West — "Walkin' on the Moon"
Album: Love vs. Money
Key Lyric: “I'll circle the stars and bring you one back / I'll walk through the sun for you / 'Cause there's something you do / That's got me walkin' on the moon”
Humans spent millennia wondering what it would be like to reach the moon, but even today, with that milestone (lightyearstone?) achieved, most of us will only ever know what it's like from watching video of Neil Armstrong one-small-stepping his way onto the lunar surface. Or, of course, by small-stepping-in-the-name-of-love to this song by The-Dream, which transports you (and your lover) to that distant satellite of ours. The synths twinkle like surrounding stars, the drums pulse like an erstwhile astronaut jumping over moon craters and the lyrics reassure like a flag planted in moon dust. Then Kanye, still on his space journey from the Graduation cover, shows up to remind us that the moon is, like, the most exclusive club that exists, so we better enjoy it and stop standing around and texting, especially if we're trying to make love in said club.
8. David Bowie — "Space Oddity"
Album: Space Oddity
Key Lyric: “Though I'm past one hundred thousand miles / I'm feeling very still / And I think my spaceship knows which way to go / Tell my wife I love her very much / She knows”
David Bowie's epic saga of Major Tom and Ground Control, released within days of the first moon landing, is a definitive part of the space song canon. Some might debate the appropriateness of aligning celestial bodies to a song that ends with the hero floating into the lonely expanses of deep space, but Bowie's groundbreaking ballad not only captures the stunning, romantic beauty of its environment (“I'm floating in a most peculiar way / And the stars look very different today”), it also hinges on Major Tom's relationship with his wife. It's a love song for those in distant orbits. Plus, the irresistible climaxes of shouting out “can you hear me Major Tom” should offer some suitable bursts of rocket fuel as you blast off with your lover, or even a fantastic full-on roleplaying opportunity.
9. Prince — "Space"
Album: Come
Key Lyric:“I've had dreams of us cuddling on the Planet Mars/Then when I wake up I'm all covered in sex”
Implicitly, at least half of all Prince songs are about some intersection of sex and cosmic adventure—one imagines his recording studio looks something like the cover of his album Planet Earth– but this track from the generally ignored 1994 album Come made the connection explicit. Actually, 1989's “The Arms of Orion,” from the Batman soundtrack, first made the connection explicit, but “Space” is the neutron star to that song's red dwarf: substantially greater in intensity, heat and crackling energy. Prince's whispered repetition of the word “space” makes it sound intimate, like you're just gently getting pulled into a very large bed's gravitational field. When you're floating around in your lover's sky, as Prince imagines, you may experience a sensation of weightlessness coupled with a magnetic attraction and some light, pulsing funk synths. Don't say he didn't warn you.
10. Frank Sinatra — "Fly Me to the Moon"
Album: It Might As Well Be Swing
Key Lyric: "Fly me to the moon / Let me play among the stars / Let me see what spring is like / On Jupiter and Mars"
This is not only one of the most indelible love songs of all time, it also happens to be the definitive astronaut jam. Many songs idealize space, but this is Real Space Shit. Like, it's actually been played in space—a Certified Space Banger. You may think you've made some epic mixtapes for your crush, but they don't hold a candle to the one that Boeing engineer Al Bishop made for his friends on the Apollo X space mission, according to this fascinating blog post.
First recorded in 1954 by actress Kaye Ballard, it's been covered by numerous artists—the Marvin Gaye cover is great, too—but the most well-known and space-tested version is the Frank Sinatra and Count Basie one, arranged by Quincy Jones (check out this incredibly rad picture of Quincy Jones presenting John Glenn and Neil Armstrong with platinum records). It may have been written when flying to the moon was still a fantasy, but it came to represent the idea that even the loftiest aspirations might be within reach. So put it on that mixtape for your crush and shoot for the moon. Who knows? You may make the lunar landing you've always dreamed of.
11. Future — "Astronaut Chick"
Album: Pluto
Key Lyric: “We get higher than skyscrapers and past the moon / We got a special connection and we can light up a room / We some astronauts baby, no cartoon / We outta here / And we gon' never come to earth again”
If you've ever seen a picture of Earth from space, or actually seen Earth from space, you probably found it breathtaking: a feeling of endless possibility and wonder. It's not unlike the excited charge of being with someone you're obsessed with. Future's otherworldly, auto-tuned gurgle and lyrics about being amazed by his astronaut chick capture that emotion perfectly: “I wear my heart on my sleeve / you've got my heart in my stomach / without a doubt in mind I'm taking off and you're coming.” The two deepest things that exist are space and feelings, so a song that marries the two and their twin sense of infinite adventure with lines like “you're an astronaut baby / everything we do brand new” is as perfect as that delicate, infinitesimal blue planet we call home.
12. R. Kelly — "Sex Planet"
Album: Double Up
Key Lyric: “Shooting stars, a trip to Mars / I can get us there from where we are / So don't trip I got a giant rocket / Gliding through just hitting your pocket”
For some people, space inspires endless fascination—by some estimates, there are 30 billion trillion stars in the visible universe! For others, sex does—by some estimates, people love having sex! For R.Kelly, the Pied Piper of R&B, it's the combination of the two—and the endless number of sex euphemisms that interplanetary travel has to offer. In the solar system of space-themed sex songs, “Sex Planet” is the sun that keeps the rest in orbit. The density of sex puns is frankly out of this world. If you're not ready for lift-off from Cape Carnal Pleasure, you will be after Kells gives his countdown (which, in one of this song's many delightful twists, goes from R-minus rather than T-minus). Just as describing constellations can't really do the majesty of the night sky justice, there are no words for the sublime beauty of having a truly celestial voice coo the line “girl, I promise this will be painless / we'll take a trip to planet Uranus.” For anyone who's ever wondered if traveling through space would be majestic or terrifying, this is your answer: in the middle of darkness, just relax, and stick around for the meteor showers. Have a safe trip.
