[sic]

As a younger lad, I went through a phase during which I was fascinated by the space programs of the 1960’s. That being the case, when I stumbled a few weeks ago upon a Discovery Channel special on this exact topic, I of course settled in for an hour of uninterrupted space flight. The show culminated with footage of Apollo 11, including (of course) Neil Armstrong’s first step on the moon, complete with subtitles to illuminate the sometimes-scratchy audio. As Armstrong stepped off the lunar lander, the Discovery subtitles read:

“That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.” [significantly, sic]

The “[a]” ought to jump out at you there. These brackets don’t serve their most common purpose—to clarify a reference, like replacing an ambiguous pronoun with a specific proper noun—here; instead, the Discovery Channel producers decided they needed to correct Armstrong’s grammar. That’s quite an editorial decision, to correct one of the most famous spoken lines of the twentieth century. But in some sense, it’s nearly required.

Consider the alternative: “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” This is nonsensical, the interstellar equivalent of tripe like “winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.” Without the article “a,” the two terms “man” and “mankind” are equivalent and the juxtaposition of “one person” and “the whole species” is lost. Now, I’m not covering any new ground here—the grammar of Armstrong’s first lunar words has been debated very nearly since the moment he uttered them. The astronaut has argued that the “a” was intended, and that he naturally drops syllables on occasion. Others have claimed that Armstrong actually did say “a,” but it was lost to radio static. And the Discovery Channel is far from the first source to bracket the “a” in its transcription of the line.

But let’s be straight here: Armstrong messed up his line. Doubtlessly, he intended to put the “a” in there, but he didn’t. And I’m here to argue that it’s better this way. But first, we need to talk about Journey.

I should be clear: I don’t think Journey is a bad band, or that “Don’t Stop Believing” isn’t a pretty great karaoke song. So what follows should not be interpreted as “a person is a dope if they like Journey.” That being said, Journey has no humanity—by which I mean, their records have a sterility that removes them from what should rightfully be called “music that relays recognizable human emotion.” Admittedly, it isn’t fair to single out Journey: there’s a list of more-or-less sonically interchangeable rock bands from the ‘70s and early ‘80s, like Boston, Foreigner, and so forth. To anyone not completely obsessed with their music, all of those bands sound exactly the same; what, really, is the difference between “Don’t Stop Believing” and “More Than a Feeling”?

What unites these interchangeable classic-rock-radio monsters is a sort of sterile sheen that extends not just to the production values of the songs (although it’s a big part) but to the songwriting and the vocal styles. All of the big hits from these bands feature recognizable verse structure, interchangeable vocalists, and production that polishes each track to a high gloss. This similarity doubtlessly helped the bands thrive; after all, this was the period in which radio stations realized big money could be made as long as listeners didn’t bother to change the channel, so stations pursued similar-sounding bands. If song after song sounded pretty much alike, listeners wouldn’t change the station to hunt for something else.

Again, I feel compelled to stress: this music isn’t awful, and I’m not mocking people who enjoy it. Different strokes, after all. And I’m very conscious of the fact that the argument I intend to present here can come across as elitist or holier-than-thou. I ask the reader to trust that this is not my intent, but I also admit that I may be feeling skittish because this argument actually is elitist and holier-than-thou. Oh well—damn the torpedoes, I suppose.

When you set out to create (or promote) music that sounds exactly alike, you kill off what’s interesting and human about it: the randomness, the imperfections, the (dare I say) soul of it. Embracing one’s humanity means embracing one’s flaws, admitting that perfection is unattainable, and learning to see the beauty in what we cannot control. Creating assembly-line rock music requires absolute control: anything overly unique or unexpected fucks up the reasons people listen (or, at least, don’t not listen) in the first place, so everything must be carefully constructed to appeal to a generalized taste.

In doing so, affecting little moments of humanity get cut out of the music-making process. The randomness and uniqueness of individual performance gets papered over by endless multi-tracking, tight control of pitch and feedback, and precise editing. While this level of control can create something catchy, I argue it is rarely memorable or interesting. Indeed, many of the little moments in songs that people remember and adore are little weird bits of amplifier feedback, an unintended microphone pickup, a moment when the singer’s voice catches in just that way that adds new emotional resonance. It’s the flawed, uncontrolled, human nature of these moments that makes them what they are, and you’ll never find something like them in a Journey song.

The more perfect something is, in the end, the more difficulty we have relating to it. That’s the reason why utopia literature is so damn boring. George Orwell explores this point at some length in his 1943 essay “Can Socialists Be Happy?” In that essay, Orwell contrasts works of utopia like H.G. Wells’ with portraits of fleeting, impermanent joy like Dickens’ The Christmas Carol; “The Cratchits are able to enjoy their Christmas,” he writes, “precisely because Christmas comes only once a year. Their happiness is convincing just because it is described as incomplete.” That’s a picture of bliss we can relate to: one in which we enjoy the perfection precisely because of its contrast with the daily failures of life.

Utopian literature, on the other hand, comes across as drab and dull. When an author tries to describe perfection, all sense of emotion is lost. We can see this particularly well in literary portraits of heaven and hell. As Orwell points out, “Heaven is as great a flop as Utopia—though Hell, it is worth nothing, occupies a respectable place in literature, and has often been described most minutely and convincingly.” We don’t have the vocabulary to describe a perfect existence in any sort of detail; instead, we have to fall back on vague platitudes. For something to relate to our human experience in any deep way, it needs to be flawed in a way we can understand and sympathize with.

The very title of Orwell’s essay, though, points at the political, not just the artistic, and that’s an area that requires more careful steps. When thinking about how we should order our society, it doesn’t seem quite right to say, “Well, we ought to try to preserve some imperfections so that our civilization remains noticeably human.” Clearly, we are better off trying to move society forward and making every reasonable attempt to improve the environment in which we have to live our lives. The reason we find utopia stories boring isn’t that we would hate to live in a perfect world: instead, we just lack the ability to make an invented perfect world interesting or realistic. That perfect world isn’t realistic. That isn’t an excuse to stop trying.

The difference lies in the fundamentally accidental nature of our human flaws. What makes mistakes human is the fact that we’re trying to avoid them, and we fail to do so. If we make flaws goals in and of themselves, we’re far off the mark.

This is why the accidental nature of those memorable little musical moments is so important. It would be one thing if a band decided to meticulously place a weird microphone pop in the middle of a song, but it’s quite another if that little pop just happens on its own. (I should point out here the obvious: most music is meticulously edited in post-production. But there’s a difference between deciding to leave an interesting little flaw in the final cut of a song, and trying to place it there purposefully. The latter can be interesting, but the former will be more affecting. [If, that is, we can tell the difference. Which, of course, we can’t. We can only assume, and I would suggest that we tend to assume the former.])

So we don’t run any danger of creating a sterile, uninteresting world by attempting to make society better. We can accept the fact that we’ll never be able to get it exactly right—those little problems will keep popping up—but we don’t have to abdicate agency. The world will be plenty imperfect without our trying to guard those imperfections.

By now, it’s probably clear what all of this has to do with Neil Armstrong. When he fucked up his poetic line as he made tracks on the moon, he injected a vital bit of humanity into what was at that time our species’ crowing technological achievement. He not only said something beautiful and poetic: he tried to do so, and messed it up. That’s unique, un-recreate-able, human.

This may not come as a surprise, but I believe that elegant language is a striking and uniquely human thing: plenty of organisms express themselves, but it takes a diverse and complicated language to express one’s self well. In this sense, Armstrong’s (intended) line is a thing of beauty. There’s symmetry to the two halves, while at the same time providing an interesting contrast. Structurally, it calls to mind lines like “To err is human; to forgive, divine,” and please don’t think that wasn’t a carefully chosen example. But while the poetry is good in its own right, slipping up on delivery added a human touch that elevates Armstrong’s moment.

Consider the scale of Apollo 11’s achievement. We didn’t get a person (Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin) into space until April 1961. It took barely 8 years from that first set of tentative sub-orbital space flights to land people on the moon. Most of us have used calculators more powerful than the computer that got people there. But the story of manned spaceflight in the 1960’s is made all the more interesting by its repeated failures: toppling rockets, spacecraft fires killing astronauts, probes crashing uselessly into the lunar surface. After all of that, at the moment of success—whoops! Is there time for a second take?

Well, no. No there is not. We don’t get second takes—we just have to do the best with the one shot we had. That’s why Armstrong’s [sic] is better than any sort of perfect delivery he may have practiced in his head: it reminds us that even when we manage to get everything right, we can still get something wrong. We’re only human, and we shouldn’t feel the need to bracket that fact away in the transcripts.