So Tracey and I have been playing a lot of SingStar.

No I can’t sing.

But the game is still a lot of fun and you get reminded of some pretty neat songs.  Another by-product of playing SingStar is that you begin to learn the lyrics to some of your favourite songs and then get to realise how batshit crazy some of them are!

Take for instance The Final Countdown by Europe that I think is showcased nowhere better than in the TV series Arrested Development:

But I found that when singing the song that the lyrics are… well… batshit crazy and very inaccurate.

The Final Countdown

We’re leaving together
But still it’s farewell
And maybe we’ll come back
To earth, who can tell?
I guess there is no one to blame
We’re leaving ground
Will things ever be the same again?

In fairness to this first part you can easily argue that they are being cryptic and that there is some special meaning in what they are saying, others might argue that English is not the first language of the writer, either way I’ve seen worse lines in a song, although in the grand scheme of things these are pretty wacky lyrics.

It’s the final countdown
The final countdown
Ohh

The chorus doesn’t really add anything to the wacky, but hang on to your seats as shit is about to get real.

We’re heading for Venus and still we stand tall
‘Cause maybe they’ve seen us and welcome us all, yea
With so many light years to go and things to be found
(To be found)
I’m sure that we’ll all miss her so

There is so much wrong in that part of the song that it feels like there are about a million WTF’s trying to fit through a WTF hole built for one.

So lets dissect this.

First off you don’t want to head to Venus, Venus is a pretty inhospitable place where the clouds are made up of sulfuric acid and the atmospheric pressure is 92 times that of the Earth.

So you would not be standing tall.

Now just say that the acid clouds, lack of breathable air and the pressure doesn’t get you, then you can also leave that scarf behind as temperatures on the planet were recorded at 500 °C.  Needless to say that anything living on the planet certainly wouldn’t be welcoming to us.

Secondly a light year is around one trillion kilometres and Venus is actually around 41 million kilometres away from Earth so even if you were going to take one light year (as opposed to ‘so many’) then it is most certainly the scenic route which would explain why there are so many things to be found.

From that point on they simply reiterate the point that it’s indeed the final countdown which personally I think is probably for the best.