The Humanity of E.T.

You open my eyes
And I'm ready to go, lead me into the light

To be human is to look up to the heavens in wonder. To see, or at the very least imagine, some wacky shit up there, and then share these extra-terrestrial beings with our fellow homosapiens through art. The absolute pinnacle of this most human endeavour? Katy Perry’s “E.T.” (The single version, featuring Kanye West), released in 2011.

Why? What about the other great alien inspired artworks? The 10th century Japanese tale Taketori Monogatari? H.G Wells’ War of the Worlds? Ridley Scott’s Alien? Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa? I could go on about “E.T.” spending five weeks atop Billboard’s Hot 100 chart. For going 8x platinum in the US,  winning VMAs for Best Collaboration and Best Special Effects. For taking home the People’s Choice Award for Favourite Song (beating off the many other instant classics 2011 gave us, including “The Edge of Glory”, “Rolling in the Deep”, “Moves Like Jagger” and “Party Rock Anthem”). But I won’t. 

Instead, what sets “E.T.” apart is how well it serves the subliminal purpose of aliens in art: to be a blank canvas onto which humans can project elements of our nature which we feel deep down inside of ourselves, but are too afraid to realise. 

You may be familiar with the piece of Tumblr wisdom floating around the internet that the human mind cannot create a new face from scratch. Every face we see in a dream is one we have already seen somewhere in our waking life. Therefore, what makes us think that we can create a new highly intelligent life form from scratch? Every characteristic of aliens in art are ones we have already seen somewhere in humanity. As a species we love spinning yarns about our good characteristics. Think of our myriad brave, loyal, and/or conscientious heroes. Flaws and weaknesses are okay too, so long as they can be redeemed. 

But what about the uglier side of human nature? Unbridled depravity, lust and violence, and an unquenchable thirst for power? Traditionally we have projected these onto demons and monsters. Aliens are the natural extension for a modern society that has solved the mysteries of this planet, but still knows so little of the night sky.

“E.T.” communicates this theme beautifully and rawly. From the opening line, an alien Kanye West confesses: “I got a dirty mind/ I got filthy ways/ I’m tryna bathe my ape up in your Milky Way.” 

Admittedly, this is a ridiculous innuendo/plug of his favourite sneaker brand BAPE (the verse was penned pre-Yeezy). However, this hook effectively juxtaposes ideas of primitivity and animal instinct (Kanye’s ape) with alien, cosmic wonder (the Milky Way). We can start to see ourselves as the missing link between ape and alien, and realise we are more similar to both than we would like to admit.

Katy Perry mirrors this juxtaposition in her first verse, asking the alien: “Could you be the angel?/ Could you be the devil?” 

At first listening, these lines seem like a simple metaphor for the alien being good and bad. Perhaps they are the same lover Perry sang about on 2008’s “Hot n Cold”? However, I don’t believe that Perry is trying to highlight the differences between angels and the devil. Rather, she is trying to draw attention to what they have in common. Both angels and the devil possess terrible power. Between them, they can enslave, inflict excruciating pain, impart powerful knowledge, and take us to and from other worlds. This is a neat summary of the modern conception of Aliens. Also, they are all powers humans possess, and can/have inflicted on each other. 

The intensity of the song really ratchets up at the pre-chorus, where Perry shows off the top of her vocal range, eerily singing: “You’re from a whole ‘nother world/ a different dimension”.

There is an abundance of commentary online that the song is a metaphor for relationships that straddle racial/social/cultural divides. That would be corny. Instead, I’m prepared to give Katy Perry the benefit of the doubt and assume the metaphor is much more nuanced. The “whole ‘nother world” is not any physical place outside. It is inside, it is the world of the human subconscious.

Christopher Nolan’s film Inception was released a month before the solo version of “E.T.”, bringing the world of the subconscious to life in full 3D IMAX surround sound. On June 13th 2011, Perry tweeted that she used “The Inception Method” in the music video for “Last Friday Night”, by including Rebecca Black, singer of “Friday”. My point? Christopher Nolan is an artistic influence on Katy Perry. She could have written “E.T.” with this whole other subconscious world in mind. And who is from this whole ‘nother world? The alien. Katy Perry knew damn well that aliens are a projection of our subconscious.

I’d love to break down the chorus in depth, but I’ve only got so many words, and tbh, choruses are often the most lyrically boring parts of pop bangers. All of the artistically adventurous lines are usually hidden away in the verses. Therefore, let’s dive into the wild ride that is Kanye’s last verse on the track. 

Penning this verse a few short months after the release of his masterpiece My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, Kanye must have been exhausted. It shows. “I know a bar out in Mars/ where they drive spaceships instead of cars” is hardly Ye’s most attention grabbing start to a verse. However, lines like “pockets on Shrek, rockets on deck” sustain the juxtaposition of primitive monster and outer space that he set up in the first verse.

Tell me what’s next? Alien Sex. From here, things take a turn away from the comical, towards the downright disturbing. Alien Kanye West raps: “First imma disrobe you/ then imma probe you”. I know, I can’t believe I was allowed to listen to this as an eleven year old either. Kanye is notoriously lustful on the mic, but it seems that rapping from the point of view of an alien enables him to express even more depraved desires. But his lust is not really alien, it’s animal. In the music video, there are a handful of very brief cuts to wild animals mating, and we can understand that the alien’s urges are those that much of humanity possess, but aren’t proud of. 

Closely tied to the alien’s lust is control and power. Kanye signs off by repeatedly reminding us: “so I tell you what to do.” The alien has an unbridled will to power. The philosopher Neitzsche sees such a will to power as present in all of nature. Not everyone desires to abduct and take total control over people. Fortunately, very few people do. However, we all are constantly straining to exert some degree of influence over our fellow humans. We project this to the extreme in Aliens, and no one does it better than Kanye West.

“E.T.” is a banger. It’s catchy, it demands you get up and dance. But it is also so much more. It holds up a portrait of an alien in which we can see our own reflection staring right back. There are things about the human psyche that could be confronting and unsettling to learn directly from a Psych121 textbook, or realise all by yourself at the end of a long night on the goons. We can thank Katy Perry and Kanye West for subliminally drip feeding our generation these ideas in our tweens, so we are not too surprised by and can (hopefully) enjoy this article now. 

It’s supernatural
Extraterrestrial
Extraterrestrial
Extraterrestrial

Except, it’s not.