Spirit of the Age

The lyrics present a future that has solved some problems with technology but lost something human in the process. The speaker returns to Earth hoping to find a woman preserved in suspended animation, but she was not frozen and is now long dead. The mood then shifts from personal regret to satire: the speaker is a clone in a world where people seem interchangeable. The repeated phrase “the spirit of the age” sounds like a shrug at this strange, impersonal society.

Several images make that society vivid. Being “deep frozen” suggests preserving a body so someone can live again in the future, but it also points to the speaker’s wish to keep the woman exactly as he remembers her. The “android replica” is a machine substitute for a person, yet it behaves unpredictably, even calling out another person’s name. Later, the clone’s “test tube brother” and the shared poem suggest mass production: even thoughts and words may be duplicated. The “battery hen,” kept in a cage for efficient egg production, becomes an image of restricted, unnatural life.

The song’s humor is deliberately uneasy. The speaker complains about losing the woman, but the detail that she was “underage” when he left makes his longing troubling rather than purely romantic. Likewise, his claim that clones have “no flaws” may be ironic: sameness removes individuality, not imperfection. The lyrics leave open whether technology itself is the problem or whether people’s choices make it dehumanizing.