"20th Century Boy" is a song by T. Rex, written by Marc Bolan. It was released as a single in 1973 and reached #3 in the UK Singles Chart. The song did not feature on an original studio album but was included as a bonus track on a reissue of 1973 album Tanx.
It later returned to the UK Top 20 in 1991, fourteen years after Bolan's death, when it was used in a Chris Hartwill-directed commercial for Levi's starring Brad Pitt. A slightly different segment of the song, with the addition of a harp, was used in a Jameson Irish Whiskey television advertisement. It plays a key role on the science fiction-mystery manga 20th Century Boys.
This song appears in the music video games Rocksmith, Guitar Hero 5 and Rock Band 3 and in the movies Get Him to the Greek, Lords of Dogtown, The Truman Show and Somewhere.
Read more about 20th Century Boy: Track Listing, Other Versions, Stage Musical
Famous quotes containing the words century and/or boy:
“Just as the French of the nineteenth century invested their surplus capital in a railway-system in the belief that they would make money by it in this life, in the thirteenth they trusted their money to the Queen of Heaven because of their belief in her power to repay it with interest in the life to come.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)
“Certainly the effort to remain unchanged, young, when the body gives so impressive a signal of change as the menopause, is gallant; but it is a stupid, self-sacrificial gallantry, better befitting a boy of twenty than a woman of forty-five or fifty. Let the athletes die young and laurel-crowned. Let the soldiers earn the Purple Hearts. Let women die old, white-crowned, with human hearts.”
—Ursula K. Le Guin (b. 1929)