Brave New World Lyrics

This is the title track to Maiden's 2000 "reunion" album, in which former band members Bruce Dickinson and Adrian Smith returned to write new songs and perform music reminiscent of their "golden era". The song is based on the 1932 novel by Aldous Huxley about a futuristic, supposedly happy world where everyone is controlled by a totalitarian system that completely and utterly manipulates their feelings and movements. The title was a quote of William Shakespeare's last play, The Tempest from 1612: "How beauteous mankind is! O "Brave New World", that has such people in't!" Bruce Dickinson: "The Huxley thing was simply because I thought "Brave New World" was a cool title for the record, because it sets up this kind of enigma in your head. Like, 'What's it about?' But having hit on a title, I then went, 'Well, we'll write the song about the book,' and so I reread the book and I was pretty scared about how bang-on he was." The first line describes "Dying swans twisted wings, beauty not needed here." Bruce Dickinson: "I remember reading about the extinction of these beautiful cranes in Japan, where the crane's like a national symbol, and nobody cared. And they asked, 'Do you care about all these cranes dying, 'cause of pollution?' And they went, 'Well, we have pictures of them in the museums, we don't care whether they really exist - just as long as the pictures of them exist in some way.' This is fu**in Brave New World." Although there are no dying swans in "Brave New World," Aldous Huxley wrote a book in 1939 called After Many A Summer Dies The Swan, which in turn got its title from the Alfred Lord Tennyson poem Tithonus. Said Dickinson: "I don't recall there being any dying swans in Brave New World the book, but I wanted an image that represented the tragedy and sadness of what Brave New World had done. Dying swans, twisted wings, you know, the agony, the death. Brave New World doesn't want to see that. It has no use for either the life or the death. All it has use for is the image because in the book, if you want excitement you go to the viddies; it's Aldous Huxley's premonition of virtual reality and I'm taking that and throwing it out there for discussion." The album cover depicted Eddie's menacing face in the stormy clouds over a futuristic London. In the posters for the tour accompanying the album, Eddie's menacing face (now accompanied by long, claw-tipped hands) was now holding the Earth like a crystal ball.