Introduction

Every war, every earthquake, every election and economic recession, technological achievement, political assassination, celebrity scandal and accompanying slow-motion car chase, every domestic attack or foreign aggression--every major or minor catastrophe in modern society can be and often is interpreted as a sign of the imminent end of the world. Whether it sparks talking heads to calmly debate the path to nuclear warfare, or sends preachers raving to their radio pulpits, it is undeniable that we live in a culture constantly prophesizing its own demise. Perhaps it is a result of the expansion of nuclear arms ownership across the world, maybe it is access to immense and constant streams of information about international wars, murder and disease, or maybe, just maybe, its the steady marginalization of religion in Western politics and society. The threads of this apocalyptic belief have become so ingrained in American culture, and so secularized, that apocalyptic scenarios appear in films, books, television--all media. Throughout the course of the 20th century, apocalyptic and millennial themes have consistently appeared in Western pop music, reflecting the larger problems, beliefs and social attitudes of the specific era in which it was created and gradually becoming more and more secularized through the very same mass media that continually reticulates it.

Because of this secularization, a rather loose definition of apocalypticism is required. Here it will be referred to as any belief in the imminent, unavoidable and catastrophic end of civilization as we know it. The key point here is the catastrophe--apocalypticism, especially of the secular variety, is squarely focused on destruction and suffering and is marked by fear and apprehension. Originally, the apocalyptic included the belief that this would be accomplished through deities or other supernatural, outside forces. 1 Millennialism, on the other hand, is much more optimistic. It is primarily interested in the redemption, either divine or manmade, that would follow the fall of the current corrupt society. Millennialism also has undergone a process of secularization but its basis on redemption allows it to retain religious or mystical connotations, even when removed from its source material. Millennialism is inspired by the promise in the Book of Revelation that Jesus Christ himself would reign over the earth for a thousand years after the initial defeat of Satan but before the final and true end of the world. 2 Christian thought generally regards this millennial kingdom as a return to Paradise: a perfect utopia and a sinless existence for man in a new Eden. Millennialism is marked as being collective, terrestrial, imminent and total. 3 In short, it is "belief in the imminent perfection of human existence". 4

As the process of Western secularization proceeded, the apocalypse and its accompanying imagery became dissociated with religious implications and in the information age it simply became another idea, another fragment of free-floating culture waiting to be picked up and used by anyone, to describe almost anything. Most often when apocalypticism makes its appearances in pop music, it is wielded as a powerful metaphor by disenfranchised or alienated people who are desperate to see some fundamental change in society. In the apocalyptic, they find both reprieve from and retribution for all wrongs perpetrated against them. It provides fear and hope, destruction and redemption, metaphor and critique. Unlike other utopian visions, like communism or socialism, it does not require a long-term commitment or belief in a particular political ideology.

According to Norman Cohn in The Pursuit of the Millennium, apocalyptic messages most often come from disenfranchised or fringe elements in the culture at large: the poor, the young, the undesirable. Their position on the outskirts of society makes the idea of a rapid change quite appealing, even if it is one of total catastrophe. 5 In the Middle Ages, this largely meant peasants and the landless poor, but in the Twentieth Century it has a broader application: those who feel powerless and alienated in modern society. On the other hand, Richard Landes asserts that the poor in these movements were largely followers. He claims that the apocalyptic is attractive to educated elites, those who led the medieval apocalyptic movements, but in the modern day such distinctions are vanishing. Compulsory state education has rendered everyone at least somewhat educated, and certainly more so than the medieval elites. Landes's hypothesis is inapplicable to the present era, except perhaps to explain the continued widespread appeal of the apocalyptic in modern popular culture.

Quite often, those people who fervently believe in the imminent end of the world exist in 'apocalyptic time'--an identifiable feature of almost all apocalyptic movements, from the heresies of the Middle Ages onward--during which the future essentially does not exist and actions have no consequences. People live in a state of unbound freedom, unconstrained by social convention because of the sure knowledge that they and everyone else could die at any second. This overlaps with antinomianism--the belief that human law does not bind believers because they have a higher law to follow. 6 These are similar events with comparable outcomes but they are not identical because the distinction between human law and divine law has blurred or disappeared altogether in the Twentieth Century, thus changing the origin and rational.

Apocalypticism made its first noticeable appearance in pop music with the roots music of the Great Depression. The Depression itself served as an overarching and very real metaphor for the apocalypse. Since country and blues were genres of largely sorrowful songs written by social outcasts or vagrants, the fringe elements of religious apocalypticism found a perfect fit. The next major appearance was in the 1960s, beginning with the folk revival that drew heavily on the music of the 1930s. Bob Dylan offers the earliest visible sign of secularization, using the religious metaphors to refer to contemporary events. As psychedelic rock blossomed in the late '60s, the secularism became much more apparent and the millennialism of the music gave expression to the New Left hopes for radical change and cultural revolution. As those hopes began to diminish and fade into jaded cynicism and social chaos, the music of the 1970s took a much more grim and apocalyptic tone. That tone finally found its full expression in the English punk movement, which stripped away the few remaining shreds of obvious religiosity and replaced it with a desire for total destruction: physical, political and artistic. These different styles of music each reflect the apocalyptic in their own unique way, offering a distinctive form of commentary on the different permutations of the apocalyptic in Twentieth Century culture. As society secularizes in the post-war era, so does apocalyptic music. It mirrors the popular ideologies and political pressures of the specific decade in which it appears: mystical millennialism in the '60s, pessimistic doom in the '70s, and technological angst in the 1980s and '90s.

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1 Baumgartner, Frederic J. Longing for the End: A History of Millennialism in Western Civilization, ix. NY: Palgrave, 1999.

2 Revelation, 20. The New American Bible. Iowa Falls: World Bible Publishers, Inc., 1987.

3Cohn, Norman. The Pursuit of the Millennium, 13. NY: Oxford University Press, 1961.
Cohn's full description of millennial beliefs also includes "miraculous, in the sense that it is to be accomplished by, or with the help of, supernatural agents." It has been removed from this discussion due the secular nature of many of the groups in question.

4 Barkun, Michael. A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America, x. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.

5 Cohn, 15.

6 Baumgartner, ix.
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