planet Earth. He said:  You better get back home,  cause up here Lincoln
lost the election. 26
Although some of the blues lyrics about the Twist and
the space race are rather trivial, it is clear that both sub-
jects were a source of escape and excitement in the
early 1960s. In spite of the fact that there were no
African-American astronauts as yet, space travel
was the stuff of dreams for black and white
alike. Looking back on the dance craze in 1968
Eldridge Cleaver compared the Twist itself to
 a guided missile, launched from the ghetto into
the very heart of suburbia. The Twist succeeded,
as politics, religion, and law could never do, in writ-
ing in the heart and soul what the Supreme Court
could only write on the books. 27
[ 58 ] Twistin Out in Space