Exist – Avenged Sevenfold ft. Neil deGrass Tyson

From their 2016 record, The Stage, Avenged Sevenfold (A7X) takes the listener on a true expedition with “Exist.” In this 15-and-a-half-minute cosmic voyage, A7X creates a rock/metal musical interpretation of replicating the Big Bang. In true musicianship lyrics aren’t even heard until the 7:31 mark. However, the highlight of the track comes from the outro, specifically written and performed by Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Whether Sevenfold is your cup of tea or not, one thing that can be more universally understood and accepted is Tyson’s message in this track, which poignantly blends existentialism perilously close to the facts of today’s modern world.

(Listen with some spatial and/or noise-reducing headphones and let your mind sail away beyond the reach of anyone, far beyond the dreams of everyone.)

Tyson’s outro narrative is featured below.

“We have one collective hope: the Earth

And yet, uncounted people remain hopeless, famine and calamity abound
Sufferers curl themselves into the arms of war
People kill and get killed in the name of someone else’s concept of God

Do we admit that our thoughts and behaviors spring from a belief that the world revolves around us?

Each fabricated conflict, self-murdering bomb
Vanished airplane, every fictionalized dictator, biased or partisan, and wayward son
Are part of the curtains of society’s racial, ethnic, religious, national, and cultural conflicts

And you find the human ego turning the knobs and pulling the levers

When I track the orbits of asteroids, comets, and planets
Each one a pirouetting dancer in a cosmic ballet, choreographed by the forces of gravity
I see beyond the plight of humans. I see a universe ever-expanding, with its galaxies embedded within the ever-stretching four-dimensional fabric of space and time

However big our world is, our hearts, our minds, our outsize atlases, the universe is even bigger

There are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on the world’s beaches
More stars in the universe than seconds of time that have passed since Earth formed
More stars than words and sounds ever uttered by all humans who have ever lived

The day we cease the exploration of the cosmos is the day we threaten the continuing of our species

In that bleak world, arms-bearing, resource-hungry people and nations would be prone to act on their low-contracted prejudices
And would have seen the last gasp of human enlightenment
Until the rise of a visionary new culture that once again embraces the cosmic perspective

A perspective in which we are one, fitting neither above nor below, but within.”