Spacehog - In the Meantime

The Meantime Will Kill You: Spacehog, the '90s, and the Tyranny of False Hope

It’s easier to just bob your head to that glam-rock stomp and pretend it’s all sunshine and platform boots: Spacehog’s In the Meantime is a fucking lie. Or rather, it’s telling us the truth about the lie we’ve been living, which is maybe worse. It came out in 1996, smack in the middle of that decade we’re all so desperate to crawl back into now, and it sounded like hope wrapped in fuzz guitar and Bowie-esque affectation. But listen, really listen, and what you’re hearing is the sound of someone trying to convince themselves that waiting is worth it, that the meantime is just a bridge to something better, when deep down they know the bridge is on fire and we’re all standing on it.

The entire song is built on that word: meantime. In the meantime, we wait. In the meantime, we hope. In the meantime, life happens or doesn't happen or happens to us while we're making other plans. And yeah, the '90s were full of that energy. We were waiting for something, though none of us could quite articulate what it was. The Cold War was over, the economy was supposedly booming, and we had just been promised a digital revolution that would democratize everything. We are all so connected through America Online. We were in between the past and the future, and we thought that was a comfortable place to be. Turns out, it's where you go to die.

But Spacehog knew. They fucking knew. “Well, perhaps in time we shall see the day when all of the stars smile at you and me.” Perhaps. Perhaps! Not “definitely,” not “certainly,” not even “probably” - perhaps. That’s the word you use when you don’t believe what you’re saying, but you need to say it anyway because the alternative is admitting that hope is dead and you’re dancing on its grave. And sure, they dressed it up in all that glitter and glam, made it sound like a party, made it sound like celebration, but underneath it all is this bone-deep exhaustion, this weariness that comes from watching the world promise you things it has no intention of delivering.

What Henry Rollins knew and what Spacehog intuited and what we’re all learning the hard way in 2026: there is no such thing as spare time, no such thing as free time, no such thing as down time. All you got is lifetime. Go. And what does that mean? It means the meantime isn’t a waiting room. It’s not the opening act. The meantime IS your life. The meantime is ALL you have. And while the children of my generation are sitting here waiting for the stars to smile, waiting for that divine moment when everything clicks into place and makes sense, we’re bleeding out. So are the kids of all the generations. We’re getting killed in the streets. We’re getting killed financially. We’re watching our rights erode like beach sand at high tide. The meantime is the arena where the actual game is being played, and we’ve been sitting in the parking lot waiting for someone to tell us when it’s time to go in.

Politicians love this shit. They LOVE the meantime. They gorge themselves on it like vampires at an all-you-can-drink blood bank. “Tomorrow,” they say. “The future is bright,” they promise. “Trust us, have faith, just wait a little longer, and everything will be better.” And meanwhile - IN THE MEANTIME - people are dying because they can’t afford insulin. IN THE MEANTIME, wages have stagnated for forty years while CEOs make 400 times what their workers earn. IN THE MEANTIME, the planet is cooking, and we’re arguing about whether it’s rude to point that out. The meantime is where they keep us distracted, pacified, hoping, while they ransack the present and mortgage our future to the highest bidder.

And now we’re all nostalgic for the ‘90s, aren’t we? Check the movie slate for 2026. It’s a graveyard of franchises being exhumed, reboots being reanimated, intellectual property being strip-mined for every last ounce of remembered feeling. We live in a world with THREE Spider-Man 2s. We want back in because the ‘90s felt simple. Not because they were - Gulf War, Rwanda, Oklahoma City, Columbine - but because we were young enough or naive enough or just plain tired enough to believe that the meantime would eventually end. We believed in the perhaps. We thought those stars would smile.

I spin In the Meantime now and I pump my fist and I dance around my house like an idiot and I hum the melody and for five minutes, I’m back there, back when the future seemed like it might actually arrive someday, back when “perhaps” didn’t sound like a death sentence. Then the song ends, and I’m here, in 2026, where the present is terrifying and the future looks like more of the same only worse, and that’s when I realize what Spacehog was really trying to tell us.

They were trying to tell us that hope without action is just another way to die slowly. That “in the meantime” is where life happens, for better or worse, and if you spend it waiting for some mystical future moment when everything will be okay, you’ll look up one day and realize you’ve wasted your only lifetime in the lobby of a building that was condemned years ago. They were trying to tell us that the glam and the glitter and the fun we were having was real, but so was the emptiness underneath it, and we needed to reckon with both if we wanted to survive what was coming.

Because here’s the brutal truth: those stars aren’t going to smile at us. They never were. The divine thing we’re supposed to achieve in time? It’s not coming. Not on its own, anyway. Not from politicians, not from corporations, not from technological advancement, not from market forces or invisible hands or manifest destiny or any of the other fairy tales we tell ourselves to make the meantime bearable. If we want those stars to smile, we have to make them. If we want the divine, we have to build it ourselves, right here, right now, in this terrifying present that’s the only moment we actually have.

Spacehog gave us a banger about waiting, and we danced to it, and we waited, and we’re still waiting, and we’re still dancing, and we’re still getting killed. The meantime is what matters because the meantime is ALL that matters. There is no “after” to wait for. There is no “eventually” coming to save us. There’s just this - this moment, this meantime, this lifetime that’s ticking away while we hope for something better to arrive like a package we ordered from Amazon.

In the Meantime is a great song because it’s honest about the lie we want to believe. It gives us the glitter and the stomp and the perhaps, but it also gives us the weariness, the doubt, the knowledge that we’re fooling ourselves. That’s all any work of art can do; hold up a mirror and hope we don’t look away. Maybe that’s enough.

But probably not. Probably we’ll just keep dancing, keep waiting, keep hoping those stars will smile while the meantime kills us in a thousand small ways and 200 huge ways. And in 2046, someone will write a nostalgic piece about how great 2026 was, how simple everything seemed back then, how we had hope.

In the meantime, we’ve got In the Meantime. And for five minutes, that’s enough to make the terror bearable. Which is either everything or nothing, depending on whether you think bearing the terror is the same as defeating it.

Perhaps in time we’ll know, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.