You’d expect a song by David Byrne to be quirky but even by his own eccentric standards this one is… let’s say idiosyncratic.

Written back in 1984, Byrne’s vision of the future is set to music played by a New Orleans-style brass band, including James Brown’s legendary trombonist Fred Wesley and Earth, Wind & Fire members Garnett and Ray Brown.

The video matches it to film footage from Fritz Lang’s then-futuristic 1927 film Metropolis – 35 years on, most of his predictions  seem like a pretty accurate forecast of the world we live in today. 

Of course it helps that he paints alternative pictures of what might come to pass. Or, as one point-missing online commenter put it succinctly: “I don’t believe this song has very much meaning at all given that many of the lines contradict each other.”

It’s taken from Byrne’s album The Knee Plays, a collection of songs (though ‘song’ may not be the right word for all of them) salvaged from an aborted 12-hour avant-garde opera, The Civil Wars, in collaboration with the experimental theatre director Robert Wilson, previously best known for his Philip Glass opera Einstein On The Beach.

Byrne initially signed up to do the incidental music for the opera, which was due to be premiered at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, but when funding was lost it became a series of smaller productions known as The Knee Plays. The lyrics are well worth a look – choose your own irony.

In the future everyone will have the same haircut and the same clothes.
In the future everyone will be very fat from the starchy diet.
In the future everyone will be very thin from not having enough to eat.
In the future it will be next to impossible to tell girls from boys, even in bed.
In the future men will be “super masculine” and women will be “ultra-feminine”.
In the future half of us will be “mentally ill”.
In the future there will be no religion or spiritualism of any sort.
In the future the “psychic arts” will be put to practical use.
In the future we will not think that “nature” is beautiful.
In the future the weather will always be the same.
In the future no one will fight with anyone else.
In the future there will be an atomic war.
In the future water will be expensive.
In the future all material items will be free.
In the future everyone’s house will be like a little fortress.
In the future everyone’s house will be a total entertainment centre.
In the future everyone but the wealthy will be very happy.
In the future everyone but the wealthy will be very filthy.
In the future everyone but the wealthy will be very healthy.
In the future TV will be so good that the printed word will function as an artform only.
In the future people with boring jobs will take pills to relieve the boredom.
In the future that no one will live in cities.
In the future there will be mini-wars going on everywhere.
In the future everyone will think about love all the time.
In the future political and other decisions will be based completely on opinion polls.
In the future there will be machines which will produce a religious experience in the user.
In the future there will be groups of wild people, living in the wilderness.
In the future there will only be paper money which will be personalised.
In the future there will be a classless society.
In the future everyone will only get to go home once a year.
In the future everyone will stay home all the time.
In the future we will not have time for leisure activities.
In the future we will only “work” one day a week.
In the future our bodies will be shrivelled up but our brains will be bigger.
In the future there will be starving people everywhere.
In the future people will live in space.
In the future no one will be able to afford TV.
In the future the helpless will be killed.
In the future everyone will have their own style of way-out clothes
In the future we will make love to anything, anytime, anywhere
In the future there will be so much going on that no one will be able to keep track of it.