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Comment by codeulike | Hacker News Reader

It's silly no?
When a rocket ship explodes

But everybody still wants to fly?

This lyric has always stuck in my head, because it doesn't make any sense. The approach that Prince is tacitly advocating here to safety standards in space exploration is far too conservative. You don't give up on the whole programme just because of one very bad accident. You investigate, fix, improve and move on.

Edit: I hope it was obvious that this was tongue in cheek, but thanks for the actually quite interesting responses

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I think it has to be viewed in the context of these two lines:

My sister killed her baby 'cause she couldn't afford to feed it / And we're sending people to the moon

He also references the Star Wars program later in the song.

I think, like a lot of good writing, he's doing multiple things:

1. Implying that the government does not care about certain people: homosexuals, the poor, the addicted, etc. but is willing to spend money on space flight and weapons.

2. Despite that, people persist, people still want to fly, and they want to make the world better as in the final lines of the song: Hurry before it's too late / Let's fall in love, get married, have a baby

Even more context: in 1970 Gil Scott-Heron released Whitey's on the Moon which is a description of the struggles of black Americans interleaved with the chorus "but whitey's on the moon" (another classic The Revolution Will Not be Televised was on the other side of the record). He was hugely influential in the early years of rap and hip-hop, so I've little doubt that Prince was at least partially inspired by him.

It became a rather common expression of the contrasts in Amerca.

> The approach that Prince is tacitly advocating here to safety standards in space exploration is far too conservative.

I think the first and most serious error here is the idea that, in these lines, Prince is advocating anything at all about safety standards in space exploration.

I think there's an argument for Prince as one of the greatest musicians of the 20th century. But he may not be at the top of the engineering philosophy game. I guess we all have our weaknesses.

I always took it in a different way. Prince is speaking to that human thing in all of us that wants to experience something greater than what we currently are. Prince's music is very spiritual. Humans have always wanted to fly and have always gotten in trouble, the story of Icarus is how old at this point?

IMHO Prince is one of the biggest musical geniuses to ever live. His songs are very multi-layered and insightful.

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