It Rhymes with Doom: Bob Dylan’s Problems with the Space Program

Black Light Series #10 Flag for the Moon: Die N*****r, 1969 Faith Ringgold. Although difficult to see, the title phrase is spelled out in the flag, with “Die” used in the stars, and the N-word spelled out with the stripes.

The anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing on July 20 1969 had me thinking again about Bob Dylan’s 1983 album Infidels and specifically about the song “License to Kill” expressing Dylan’s distaste towards space exploration. There’s also a line about the moon in “Union Sundown” — “they used to grow food in Kansas / Now they grow it on the moon and eat it raw” — but that one seems more a disconnected throwaway line during Dylan’s tirade against globalization, used only so he’d have something to rhyme with “law” in the next stanza. But in “License to Kill” Dylan gets specific about the moon,

Oh, man has invented his doom,
First step was touching the moon.

Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin walks on the surface of the moon, 1969

A year after Infidel’s release, during one of his perennial Rolling Stone interviews, Dylan was asked:

There’s a lyric in License to Kill: “Man has invented his doom/First step was touching the moon.” Do you really believe that?
Yeah, I do. I have no idea why I wrote that line, but on some level, it’s like just a door into the unknown.

Isn’t man supposed to progress, to forge ahead?
Well…but not there. I mean, what’s the purpose of going to…