More on Time Travel

So while discussing Time Machines (see previous post for more details) the song 3000 by Busted was mentioned to me.
There's a lot going on here, although most of it was not worth the time we spent on it. However this part of the lyrics caught my eye:
I took a trip to the year 3000
This song had gone multi-platinum
Everybody bought our seventh album
Which means that the song had been reported as going multi-platinum by the year 3000 before completion of this version of the song. This is paradoxical; the song could not have been written and recorded in this form before the neighbour returned from their time trip to report on it's success*.

This song exists at the intersection between the complexity of self-referential songs** and the paradoxes of time-travel stories. And I'm not a Busted fan and this isn't even the song of there's I like most.

* For the curious I checked and Busted have released three studio and one live album so their seventh album has not yet been released.

** For example: I was 21 years when I wrote this song/ I'm 22 now but I won't be for long which makes a prediction in the lyrics (Billy Bragg, New England, although perhaps the Kirsty MacColl version is better known)


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