| The End.
As the year 2000 approached, apocalypticism invaded pop culture as it almost never had before. Besides being the subject of Prince's ode to destruction, the numerology was perfect for those who believed in Jesus' return. Two thousand years since Christ's birth was a nice round number that demanded special significance in the mind. For the first time since the 19th century, a specific apocalyptic date was set and widely recognized and acknowledged by the mass of mainstream culture. The certainty of setting a date for destruction was no longer just the province of fringe groups or religious sects. What was strange though was that the religious numerology was applied to secular ideas about the end of the world. A computer programming error that confused the year 2000 with 1900 became an inflated crisis that led people to stock up on supplies and build bomb shelters as though it was still the height of the cold war. This Y2K bug mixed with the Christian numerology and belief in the second coming to provoke widespread anxiety in believers and atheists alike. The computer error was more than just a recognition of the warnings about information apocalypse long offered by bands like REM and Frodus-it was a vindication.
Although it turned out to be a fluke-overblown by the media machine REM had criticized-Y2K was just the start in a string of crises that has prompted a new onslaught of apocalyptic tension and anxiety in mass culture. Between terrorist attacks, wars, poison scares, unending violence in Israel, and mass political dissent, a new cold war mentality and apocalyptic thought has surfaced in American thought. The weapons that once provoked such fear of the end are becoming smaller and simpler to build. As nuclear arms are becoming more accessible to not just countries but to private citizens, the threat for many has become more real than it has been since the Cuban Missile Crisis. And that's before it gets cycled through the same media machine that exaggerated and exploited the fear of Y2K.
Many artists revisited the topic as well, David Byrne-former leader of the Talking Heads-offered "Tiny Apocalypse" on his 2004 solo album Grown Backwards. The song's title, lyrics and carefree bounce point to Byrne's realization that the ultimate end of the world has become a piece of everyday life, another tiny object of pop culture. Radiohead's Hail to the Thief was even darker and more dystopic than OK Computer. The album even contained a song called "Where I End and You Begin (The Sky Is Falling In)" that lyrically offers the inner monologue of a lonely god looking down on humanity and making angry threats like, "I will eat you alive". 173 Frodus reformed as Decahedron and tailored their mechanical punk sound and destructive vision to the current politics of George W. Bush's White House. The title of their debut album also continues Frodus' implications of technological doom, Disconnection_Imminent. The lyrical imagery they use is also clearly the same as before, but specific mention of apocalypse is gone, as though the threat is suddenly more real, as though the current situation is exactly what they had been predicting all along and warnings are now useless. Even Johnny Cash and Joe Strummer-the former leader of the Clash-collaborated on a cover of Bob Marley's classic "Redemption Song", which references atomic weapons and the stoppage of time.
Songs of apocalypse continue to offer comment on the problems, beliefs and attitudes of society. As the idea has seeped into western pop culture free of its religious origins, so too has the music expressing apocalyptic angst moved from the Christian interpretation offered by country and blues to modern secular ideas of nuclear war and technology collapse. Though the expression and interpretation has changed greatly over the course of the century, the continued expressions of apocalyptic fear and desire remain the same, sometimes even salvaging long lost fragments of medieval apocalyptic belief. Although it is a bedrock foundation of specific genres like punk, heavy metal, and reggae, the fact that the apocalypse appears in innumerable musical genres over nearly a century-at times even appearing at the top of the mass-market pop charts-shows us that apocalypticism is an irrepressible piece of the Western mindset, particularly in America. Even as it has moved into the secular realm apocalypticism has retained its unique duality: it still offers the terror of ultimate destruction and the promise of a final redemption.
Every major and minor catastrophe has come to be viewed in apocalyptic terms and over the last ten years everyone from Sadam Hussein to Ronald Reagan himself as has been posited as the Antichrist. 174 After the phony Y2K scare though, America faced a much more real apocalyptic moment. A sense of dislocation ruled and destruction, of the ultimate kind, seemed a very real thing.
The idea was cemented in the popular mindset by the London Daily Mail the day afterwards. On September 12th, 2001, their one-word headline simply read, "Apocalypse". 175
________________ 173 Radiohead. "Where I End and You Begin (The Sky Is Falling In)", Hail to the Thief, 2003. 174 O'Leary, Stephen. D. Arguing the Apocalypse: A Theory of Millennial Rhetoric, 193. NY: Oxford University Press, 1994. 175 Barkun, Michael. A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America, 158. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. |