History
This song was one of the most popular songs of 1969 worldwide, and in the United States it reached the number one position on both the Billboard Hot 100 (for six weeks in April and May) and the Billboard magazine Adult Contemporaries Chart. It also reached the top of the sales charts in Canada and elsewhere.
The recording won both the Grammy Award for Record of the Year and Best Pop Vocal Performance by a Group for the Grammy Awards of 1970, after being published on the album The Age of Aquarius by The 5th Dimension, and also being released as a seven-inch vinyl single record.
The lyrics of this song were based on the astrological belief that the world would soon be entering the "Age of Aquarius", an age of love, light, and humanity, unlike the current "Age of Pisces". This change was presumed to occur at the end of the 20th century; however, major astrologers differ extremely widely as to when. Their proposed dates range from 2062 (Dane Rudhyar), 2150 (Neil Mann), and 2595 (Hermann Haupt), to 2680 (Shephard Simpson).
"Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In" was ranked thirty-third on the 2004 AFI's 100 Years...100 Songs.
Read more about this topic: Aquarius/Let The Sunshine In
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“If usually the “present age” is no very long time, still, at our pleasure, or in the service of some such unity of meaning as the history of civilization, or the study of geology, may suggest, we may conceive the present as extending over many centuries, or over a hundred thousand years.”
—Josiah Royce (1855–1916)
“The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman.”
—Willa Cather (1876–1947)
“Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)