Elon Musk’s mark on culture and industry is secure: He has already forever disrupted the online-payment and alternative energy industries, and now he’s turning his attention to mass-transit and space colonization. But no icon is complete without a theme song.
Stepping in to fill that gap is The Rentals frontman Matt Sharp, who rose to fame as the bassist for the nerd-rock band Weezer, with just the mournful ode to befit Musk, an inventor and industrialist often seen as a world apart from the rest of us, Wired reports. The song, “Elon Musk is Making Me Sad”, laments the loss of a childhood friend as the inventor, innovator, and investor climbs to ever-greater heights. Meanwhile the narrator, presumably Sharp, who used a Commodore VIC-20 — a computer Musk famously received at the age of 10 and used to program his first computer game at the age of 12 — to “make fake I.D.’s and buy beer in junior high” feels left behind.
The song ends with an uplifting entreaty to be invited aboard Musk’s spaceship:
Oh, Elon! Let me be the first one, of your new civilization to be saved
Yes! I’ll try, Love! I swear to you I can thrive, Love!
This time I’ll keep my stride up and keep pace
Only you can change my Q-score! Make me the first one out of that door
First boots out on the Martian Floor to proclaim—
Oh, that Elon! Sent me all the way, Son, a hundred thirty-nine million miles away!
Sharp’s ode to an imagined childhood rivalry is hardly the first tribute song written for Musk, though others have been a bit more adoring. Raptor Command, a “power metal” project whose mission is “to raise awareness of and promote Elon Musk’s futurist ideas and visions for the future of humanity”, according to its website, released one single in April 2016 titled “Elon: Champion for Humanity” that portrays the business magnate inventor as a star-striding galactic pioneer.
Writer Heather Anne Campbell of “Who’s Line?” penned a cheery biographical sing-a-long that casts Musk’s success as revenge over childhood bullies:
Little boy thrown down a flight of stairs,
Knows that life is hopelessly unfair.
But he’ll make money, they’ll remember his name,
They’ll all remember Elon Musk when he gets revenge.
Listen to the Rentals’ melancholy ode to Musk here:
