Why Nightwish’s “The Greatest Show on Earth” is also one of the greatest songs
“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones,” Richard Dawkins proclaims in the song.
TL;DR: Scroll down for sections with a line on the side, as well as the very end.
How is this song related to Option X and futurism? Well, music is one of the most influential mediums available to humanity. What this song does is incredible: it uses the power of poetry and music to portray the history of the universe, the story of life, our common human journey, and the scientific quest for knowledge. The result both educates and inspires. Our job, as we sit in the present thinking about the future, is to encourage each other, and the generations to come, to be thinkers and tinkerers. Music like this, is one way to do so.
A twenty-four-minute song might sound like a burdensome, time-wasting endeavor. And sure, given the three-minute formulaic norm that rules mainstream music, it certainly should be.
Now imagine a song that were to embody the entirety of existence, from the beginning of time and the universe, to humanity’s present-day realizations. That would mean encompassing billions of years and the plethora of events that occurred in that lengthy timespan. It would be an amendable feat and one of the greatest musical pieces ever written, were such a song to exist.
Well, it does.
And it’s “The Greatest Show on Earth” by Nightwish.
Putting it that way, twenty-four minutes is an instant compared to the billions of years it holds. The song itself, in a way, is akin to the speck of matter from which the universe sprung at the occurrence of the Big Bang.
Now, let’s create a sort of summary of the song to find how each successive part describes an era of the past.
From 0:00 to 1:30, there is a piano, flowing repetitively from one chord to the next. Since this is before the Big Bang, there is no time. So this section represents the mystery of what precedes the Big Bang. A creationist might interpret it as God’s stream of consciousness in preparation for setting the universe in motion. Regardless, it would have been too jolting to start the song with a bang. As the piano plays, a cello comes in to foreshadow the profundity of what’s to come. Together, the piano and cello paint a mood that is as worrisome as it is hopeful.
At 1:31 comes the Big Bang: the boom of an explosion, then one collision after another. At 1:56, the piano, still there, plays higher notes to intensify the listener’s anticipation. Great celestial bodies are forming. A distinct melody appears for the first time (bringing to mind musica universalis); it will recur throughout the song.
2:39 and the orchestration builds as the universe grows larger and more collisions form stars and planets. But then, everything dies down. At 2:56 there is a sense of uncertainty. What is happening and what will happen next? A quiet choir is introduced, treading lightly in the uncertainty. It then becomes clearer. This could be the voice of the universe, since humans do not yet exist, and effectively acts as the energy that permeates all that exists. At this notion, the music starts picking up again. There is a sense of purpose, but…for what? This remains unanswered.
Then comes a beautiful moment, a sort of reminder to the listener of what’s in store later in the song. At 4:28, there is a whisper, quiet yet very clear: “us, sleeping.” Indeed, life still sleeps, it has not yet come alive. The music lifts up a key, it anticipates that something profound is coming. Then it sighs into a meditative state.
Bagpipes come in at 5:01, and Richard Dawkins speaks:
After sleeping through a hundred million centuries
We have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life
Within decades we must close our eyes again
Isn’t it a noble and enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun
To work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it?
Immediately, the music grasps this sentiment, riveted by a new sense of purpose. After all, life is here at last! At 5:46, drums join a building orchestra.
The race of life begins.
And yet, concern finds its way back into the music. Evolution is tough. Many voices speak the following in unison:
The cosmic law of gravity
Pulled the newborns around a fire
A careless cold infinity in every vast direction
Lonely farer in the Goldilocks zone
She has a tale to tell
From the stellar nursery into a carbon feast
Enter LUCA
The tapestry of chemistry
There’s a writing in the garden
Leading us to the mother of all
This, then, becomes a story of Earth in its newly found endeavor to host these “newborns” of life. They find themselves in the warm “fire” of this planet as it flies through the “careless cold infinity” of space. In the “Goldilocks zone” of the solar system, Earth promises to tell a tale, the very tale that would feature life.
With this premise enters Luca. But who is Luca? It is an acronym for the “Last Universal Common Ancestor” and it is the parent of all living organisms on Earth today, including bacteria, ants, whales, and you & me. Please note: it is not the first life form. Instead, it is the one that succeeded in creating all of us. I can’t say how delighted I am that it got its moment of stardom in a symphonic rock song. If you’d like to learn more about Luca (a fascinating little creature that, without a doubt, left a legacy so large, I’m not quite sure how any one of us could rival it), here is a good place to start.
Mention of the “tapestry of chemistry” follows, since it is the chemical writing mechanism of DNA that, through the process of mutation, weaves life into ever more complex organisms, allowing evolution to run its program.
Then comes an important stanza in the song — it is the initial conception of meaning:
We are one
We are a universe
Forebears of what will be
Scions of the Devonian sea
Aeons pass
Writing the tale of us all
A day-to-day new opening
For the greatest show on Earth
This is the first time the song utters its own title, “the greatest show on earth,” (an allusion to Richard Dawkins’ masterpiece of the same name) and it comes perfectly timed when the voices proclaim: “enter life!” Evolution gallops on to create more and more life forms — some, our ancient ancestors.
At 8:41, the voices utter, “the greatest show on earth,” a second time. The song then treats the listener to a beautiful orchestral composition to represent life as it strives for complexity.
A turn of perspective occurs at 9:11, when it is us, humans, who might be here to “care for the garden.” But it’s early to think this way, since we still face survival in a wild and vicious world amidst “every form most beautiful” — other life forms that wish to survive.
At 10:08, the music shifts to tribal drums, sounds of the wilderness, and dire violins to lead the accompaniment. Time seems to slow down. Fifty seconds later and we hear more growls, panting, and roars as we hold our breath amidst the perils of dangerous surroundings. Then, at 11:53, an electric guitar enters the scene along with awesome orchestration and electronic sounds to illustrate the ceaseless will to prevail.
The following is sung:
After a billion years, the show is still here
Not a single one of your fathers died young
The handy travelers out of Africa
Little Lucy of the Afar
It is no doubt incredible that all our mothers and fathers managed to survive long enough to bear the next generation, all in an uninterrupted chain from Luca. Handy travelers out of Africa, indeed! Then, of course, there is mention of Lucy, which we all likely remember from our high school history and anthropology classes. She is humanity’s common mother. Read more about her here.
Then comes this:
Gave birth to fantasy
To idolatry
To self-destructive weaponry
Enter the God of gaps
Deep within the past
Atavistic dread of the hunted
Enter Ionia, the cradle of thought
The architecture of understanding
The human lust to feel so exceptional
To rule the Earth
This whole song is a damned history lesson! Humanity employed fantasy to fill in its knowledge gaps (by explaining natural phenomena with the actions of a powerful creator). As Yuval Noah Harari explains in Sapiens, this is a natural product of heightened cognitive ability. Atavism, by the way, is the fear of returning to the ways of our ancestors and defines our central characteristic: we have an insatiable thirst for progress. Though there are often detours and failures, our track record shows that we certainly strive for progress.
Ionia is one of the most vital cradles of thought in human history. Our need to reign supreme over all other living beings and over each other is also the driving force behind our having built an ever-more sophisticated “architecture of understanding” in order to “rule the Earth.”
We then find a “hunger for shiny rocks,” gold and diamonds, and “giant mushroom clouds,” atomic bombs, as human knowledge and experimentation expands. Then, at 13:20, the songs amps itself up to proclaim:
Man, he took his time in the sun
Had a dream to understand
A single grain of sand
He gave birth to poetry
But one day’ll cease to be
Greet the last light of the library
This stanza, repeated three times, is the musical climax of the song. It is a boisterous ode to our fascination with the minute and subtle. Our ability to marvel at the details, and the grandours, of existence is what has allowed us to become exceptional.
After the second repetition of this stanza, at 13:46, the music dies down. The listener is given a moment to reflect. At 14:17, a harpsichord plays since, after all, this is the instrument that preceded the piano and served as the space in which some of the greatest classical pieces were composed (by Mozart, for example). At 14:22 there is the sound of a rocket or missile (again, scientific advancements) and then a famous classical piece we’ve all heard: an organ fugue that comprises the second movement of BWV 565 in D minor by J.S. Bach. We are then treated to a beautiful orchestral composition (not without an electric guitar!)
The same stanza comes in for a third time and, at 15:39, we face the shattering pinnacle of the song when, in both glory and desperation, a chorus sings:
We were here!
We were here!
We were here!
We were here!
This, my fellow humans, is our need to be remembered. To make a difference. To aid in the progress of humanity. To live a life worth living. To defy death.
And…at the thought of death, and the billions of years our ancestors have spent fighting it, the song destroys itself at the sound of rocks falling amidst rumbling thunder. Has our song, a tribute to an unlikely collective journey spanning eons, also died?
For a moment, it is quiet.
Then, at 16:52, a piano trickles tenderly, meandering through a meadow of violin voices, while a wind instrument blows a light breeze. At 18:08, Richard Dawkins, one of our greatest thinkers, walks into the scene:
We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones
Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born
The potential people who could have been here in my place
But who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Sahara
Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton
We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA
So massively exceeds the set of actual people
In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here
We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds
How dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state
From which the vast majority have never stirred?
Please, do yourself a favour, listen to this part here. The way Dawkins speaks will make you realize far more than reading the words on the page.
A moment of uneasy music follows the sentiment, allowing us to reflect. Then, at 19:26, there is the last exhalation of epic composition to embody the miracle of our ability to wonder at the plentiful phenomena around us.
At 20:38, there is a calm after the storm of thought. The ocean rushes somewhere in the distance. Dawkins speaks to us one last time at 21:32, quoting Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species:
There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers
Having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one
And that whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity
From so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been
And are being, evolved.
The song dissipates into ocean sounds — the place where life originated and ancient Luca made its home. A whale’s calls, birdsong, and other natural sounds can be heard.
And then…
It is silent. The very silence from which this song emerged, and from which the vast majority of songs never stirred.
A return to that prior state.
—
I highly recommend the entire album: Endless Forms Most Beautiful. Each song is enthralling in its complexity and subtlety. Nightwish truly deserves a big round of applause.
Please visit optionxbook.com to join the mailing list for my Sci-Fi manuscript’s imminent release!
—
