Days of doom and gloom
Can a pop song prepare us for the end of the world, and do we feel fine with this?
When we were still innocent babes, pop songs prepared us for the things that couldn’t be prepared for: Sex. Heartbreak. Nuclear annihilation.
Prince’s 1999 urged us to get ready for two out of three. He was our coolest Cold War child, sensitive and streetwise enough to convince the masses that dancing in the nuclear twilight might even be fun. Now, as the 45th president of the United States blurts forth his vision for an increasingly weaponized planet, 1999 sounds disconcertingly fresh. We’re a bit closer to “over-oops-out-of-time.” Old songs suddenly have new work to do.
Pop’s nuclear songbook is surprisingly thick, but its tensile strength has always been tested by the weight of our fears — fears that can feel dumb and irrational until smart, rational people start feeling them, too. So here’s Philip Roth in The New Yorker back in January: “What is most terrifying is that (U.S. President Donald Trump) makes any and everything possible, including, of course, the nuclear catastrophe.” Roth’s 2004 novel, The Plot Against America, isn’t about a farewell flash, but it does imagine a dystopia as chilling as those rendered in George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World — all of which have enjoyed a sales spike since Trump’s election. Readers crave wisdom in senseless times.
But we listen to nuclear pop for different reasons. We borrow Joe Strummer’s macho courage when we sing along with The Clash’s London Calling (“A nuclear era, but I have no fear”). We pout with Morrissey when he begs for the bomb during Everyday Is Like Sunday (“Come, Armageddon, come”). And when R.E.M. tells us that It’s The End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine), we feel pretty fine, too.
That’s because throughout the greatest hits of the apocalypse, the end rarely seems all that nigh — not even during A Hard Rain’s a- Gonna Fall, a ballad that Bob Dylan first performed a month before John F. Kennedy announced the existence of Soviet nukes in Cuba. Oblivion had never felt closer, but the dangers foretold in Dylan’s prophecy sounded far away — the stuff of “seven sad forests” and “a dozen dead oceans.”
Then again, that was 1962. Maybe they’re closer now.
Survival is a central theme in rap music, so when a new century approached, it only made sense that rappers began declaring themselves impervious to doomsday. And while Method Man, Three 6 Mafia and others funnelled end-times bravura directly into their rhymes, it was Busta Rhymes who most eagerly espoused the end the of the world, turning his first three solo albums into an informal rapture countdown. The cover of 1998’s E.L.E. (Extinction Level Event): The Final World Front depicts the entirety of Manhattan deliquescing in atomic fire, making it the most horrific album jacket since Count Basie’s The Atomic Mr. Basie circa 1958. As for the music itself, few rappers have sounded more defiantly alive in the face of death than Busta did in 1996 when he warned, “There’s only five years left!” Don’t mock the guy’s miscalculations. There may only be five years left, someday. Keep listening.
In the meantime, the durability of rap’s most salient Armageddon jam has more to do with systemic racial profiling than lingering nuclear paranoia. In the second verse of 1997’s Apocalypse, Wyclef Jean reports that Brooklyn has just “turned to Hiroshima,” so with an entire borough vaporized, he flees to New Jersey, where the cops attempt to pull him over for driving while black. Amid the chaos, someone has robbed a gas station, and our hero matches the description. But it couldn’t have been him — “I was at the Grammys with Brandy,” Wyclef raps. “Didn’t you see me on TV?” Twenty years later, the truth in this song still burns: American racism will survive the apocalypse.
Still, as sobering, thrilling and distracting as they may be, our greatest nuclear pop songs are little more than hedges against the void. We buy them up hoping that we’ll never actually have to use them, like bicycle helmets, or the extra coverage at the Hertz kiosk. They feel insufficient. As they should. No one song could truly prepare us for a self-inflicted mass extinction — but there are two that bravely and generously try.
The first is Nuclear War, a relatively obscure jazz prayer recorded by the visionary Sun Ra in 1982. Over a series of ascending piano chords, the bandleader casually draws the members of his legendary Arkestra into a devastating singalong: “It’s a mother------, don’t you know/If they push that button, your ass gotta go.” The man sounds loose, relaxed, profoundly disappointed, but ultimately at peace with the fact that his wishes have no bearing on our planet’s nuclear destiny. This is a piece of music that looks oblivion square in the eye and accepts it.
And then there’s 1999, which soothes our collective fear of collective death by inviting all of humanity to the greatest party ever thrown. “Everybody’s got a bomb, we could all die any day,” he sang, “but before I’ll let that happen, I’ll dance my life away.”
This was an ecstatic expression of resistance. Still is. To resist fear is to deny the button-pushers power over your mind, your body, the lion in your pocket. And until disarmament or Judgment Day, it remains our only option.