This song is worked around the now defunct website skyisover.com which Tankian supports. This means that the song is about pollution and global warming. Tankian said also, about the meaning of the song, in an interview with Roadrunner Records:
I've always thought of the sky as, like, an open canvas. When I was a kid and I looked at the sky, I always remember being able to daydream, just looking at the sky, being creative, being able to design things. What would happen if we had no sky? Where would we be? Well, obviously, scientifically, without an atmosphere, we'd all be dead.
Elect the Dead was accompanied by a complete set of videos for each track, September 11, 2007. Tankian was not pleased by the original video and so he and director Tony Petrossian made an official video for "Sky Is Over", released on January 16, 2008.
The music video begins with Tankian playing a white piano in the middle of the street. After establishing the main piano melody, he gets up, walks down the street, and picks up a chalkboard eraser. With the eraser he begins literally "erasing" the sky out with erratic swipes over the wordless chorus, then throws the eraser far away and walks to a black piano to play the last note. The camera pans up to reveal that amid the random eraser swipes he has written civilization is over. The entire video was shot in one take. At the end of the video a web address is shown for the now defunct "Sky Is Over" website, which gave links to various environmental organizations.[4]
^ abJurek, Thom. "Serj Tankian – Elect the Dead". AllMusic. Retrieved January 8, 2024. 'The Sky Is Over' melds everything from acoustic rock, industrial metal and Queen-like opera cadences and winds it all into something so addictive it's irresistible.
