Modern Visions of the End: Information Apocalypse in the 1990s

As the '90s dawned a new type of rock music emerged from the underground intending to pull the music out of nostalgia and back into the present. Equally influenced by the Sex Pistols and Black Sabbath, grunge exploded in the early '90s, led by Nirvana. "Many young Americans felt left out of the optimism of the '80s. Reagan had, essentially, not only declared war on the less privileged factions of the country by cutting back on welfare payments and services, but he'd also … allowed crippling new censorship measures to invade the arts and media." Nirvana's Nevermind was all about disillusionment, as was the entire grunge movement, "whatever 'American Dream' the Republicans … supposedly represented, it apparently excluded a lot of Americans." 167 The kids who listened to the new music were branded with the alienating tag of "Generation X".

After the success of Nirvana, the major labels began signing any underground band they could find. As a result, the music was quickly co-opted and stripped of its rebellious power only a few years after it began. The major labels were part of huge multinational corporations that sprang up in the '80s and they treated their music like any other product, which seemed anathema to those who had been toiling in obscurity since punk first appeared in the '70s. Those left in the underground saw all this and retreated further away from the mainstream.

Corporate mergers only accelerated in the '90s and internet use exploded. In 1996 only nine percent of adults were online. By 2003 internet penetration had reached 67 percent among adults. 168 The sheer volume of information multiplied accordingly, and the crushing density of popular culture pushed far beyond what REM had ever envisioned. America had entered the Information Age and the world was squeezed tighter together by the bonds of business and technology. Conspiracy theories, cults and UFO believers multiplied in the '90s as well, aided by the easy spread of information available on the Internet.

REM's vision of the end times seemed ever more prescient as a general sense of paranoia, alienation and fear of technology began permeating the apocalyptic music of '90s. Due to the model presented by X-Ray Spex and REM, the traditional vision of the apocalypse was easily adapted to the new world of technology and with the Soviet Union's collapse in 1989, the threat of nuclear war no longer seemed like such a threat. Information collapse became a much more plausible vision of the end. No one really knew what would happen if the technology broke, if the computer networks crashed, which many people believed would happen when the clocks hit the numerical millennium in the year 2000.

Radiohead manifested this anxious fear of technology on their 1997 album OK Computer. Taking their name from a Talking Heads song, Radiohead was an English band that first came to prominence during the grunge explosion of the early '90s, though they managed to outlive many of their peers. The band's survival allowed them to clearly see the fate of many of their contemporaries who were swallowed up by multinational corporations and spit out as soon as the grunge boom was no longer profitable. Although the band itself was in contract with Capitol/EMI, the same company that had dropped the Sex Pistols in the late '70s, OK Computer was rife with corporate badmouthing and moaning about the fearful state of modern civilization. The band used all manner of musical technology to craft the album: synthesizers, drum machines, digital recording technology, guitar effects, even a computerized voice on "Fitter Happier". The lush but subtle layering and unpredictable shifts within songs perfectly captured the feeling of information overload in modern society.

Despite all the technology laid across the album, there is an innate sense of despair and decay underlying every song. The cover shows a picture of highway surrounded by an all-consuming white space, implying some type of desert lying just outside the bounds of modernity, slowly creeping in at the edges. The album's opening song "Airbag" establishes the fearful tone. After a heavily distorted guitar opening, it begins with a reference to the apocalypse, a scene lifted from the Terminator movies, "In the next World War / In a jackknifed juggernaut / I am born again." In the midst of the destruction, singer Thom Yorke finds his redemption. He continues onward, finding redemption in modern consumer goods like neon signs and German automobiles, linking together the destruction of world war with the easy gratification of consumer culture. The fact that the German's were the purveyors of the last two World Wars makes clear the connection: just living in modern society is itself a World War, capable of the final destruction of the apocalypse. 169

Frodus was another band that saw modern society as being on the brink of collapse. Unlike Radiohead, they remained in the underground throughout the '90s and were determined to react against the manufactured, feel-good post-grunge music that was laying claim to the punk legacy. The band returned to the force of the original punks, accelerating it to such insane speeds that their music was called 'spazz-core'. 170 The band's sound branched out on their last album to include slower tempos, less intense vocals and more intricate instrumentation. …And We Washed Our Weapons in the Sea was recorded in 1999-hypothesized by Prince as the final year before the end of the world-and sounds like a document preserved from a civilization unknowingly on the edge of its own demise. The album's title implies conflict and the finality of war while its cover features the band dressed in dark colors, wearing surgical masks against the bright lights of downtown Tokyo, strangely prescient of the SARS and Anthrax scares.

Where Radiohead used musical technology to get their point across, Frodus actually made their instruments sound like machines. The bass growls and grumbles, the drums pound like pistons, the guitars screech like expanding metal and vocalist Shelby Cinca's screams sound like rusted gears grinding together. Unlike the introverted, melancholy attitude that Radiohead projected, Frodus boils over with detached anger and cold hatred as they detail an explicitly apocalyptic image of the modern world. The hopelessness is intense as the band speaks of deathless machines and their own decaying culture, how they stand "waiting for the bombs to start falling". "The Earth Isn't Humming", the second track on the album, makes the band's position apparent from its opening lines, "I hear these times are the end / and another one must fall down." The very title of the song implies that the Earth itself is dead-it no longer hums-choked by the heavy waste of modern society. The bass moves in a jerking motion and the guitar whines up and down, alternately sounding like a drill and a laser gun. Cinca sings smoothly and clearly against the mechanical backdrop. After establishing the apocalyptic setting of the song, he moves on to describe his alienation, "Stare back into my own eyes / Fall down / A stranger in my own skin …Unchanged by those around / Directionless." In the final death of the world his alienation is ended and the narrator is no longer an 'I' but a 'we', as proved by his final pronouncement, "we'll watch as time tumbles down." 171

Elsewhere in the underground, the Dismemberment Plan were crafting their own vision of the end in the form of "8 ½ Minutes". The band picked up the spastic funk mantle of Prince, and injecting it with a bit of wild punk abandon, though they sound just as happy as Prince did about the possible end of the world. Starting with a scratchy funk guitar riff, the song is as jam-packed full of sounds as Radiohead, but the synthesizers sound like cartoon sirens, and the fun is palpable. Vocalist Travis Morrison sounds positively elated and eager to see the end. Much like Robert Johnson, Frodus or Radiohead, he sees it as the end of his alienation. Morrison is so disconnected from modern life, his senses so dulled by the onslaught of information, that he sets off the world's nuclear weapons just to see what would happen and describes the destruction of the moon as "kind of pretty".

Much like Bowie, he describes people's horrified reactions, and like Byrne he recounts the corporate landmarks left behind after the fall of humanity, "When I die I'm going to heaven / leave it all to the cockroaches and the seven-elevens." The technology around him dies out and modern society collapses as cars freeze and power plants go offline. Morrison also goes in-depth to describe the events of the apocalypse, conjuring an image similar to the supernatural phenomenon presented in Revelation, "The sky is like a dome of black metal flake / and the stars bleed together in phosphorescent lakes / and a dead black disk slides silently overhead." After the rather jumpy verse, a chorus of pure pop ensures us that the Dismemberment Plan, like Frodus and Radiohead, believe that the aftermath of apocalypse is not a heavenly paradise, but a simple place where people can connect on a basic human level. The song speeds to its conclusion as Morrison boldly shouts, "It'd be nice to think we could get it right down here just once." And the song stops dead. 172

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167 Harrington, 471-472.

168 Anonymous. "Internet Penetration Rate Slows," Silicon Valley / San Jose Business Journal. February 5th, 2003. <link>.

169 Radiohead. "Airbag", OK Computer, 1997.

170 Wilson, MacKenzie. "Frodus", All Music Guide <link>

171 Frodus. "The Earth Isn't Humming", …And We Washed Our Weapons in the Sea, 2001.

172 The Dismemberment Plan. "8 ½ Minutes", Emergency & I, 1999.