{"id":412,"date":"2009-06-22T08:17:05","date_gmt":"2009-06-22T13:17:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.greatsociety.org\/?p=412"},"modified":"2018-10-30T22:44:35","modified_gmt":"2018-10-31T02:44:35","slug":"high-rotation-special-apocalypse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/?p=412","title":{"rendered":"High Rotation Special: Apocalypse!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Just having finished The Pesthouse<\/a><\/em>, a love story disguised as a post-apocalyptic novel, and having my interested piqued by Nacho\u2019s new project<\/a>, I decided to join in the fun and present a list of the best cataclysmic or apocalyptic songs.\u00a0 Also, there is a giant high pressure system just squatting over the entire Gulf region and the past week has felt like I\u2019ve been reliving the same 104 degree day over and over.\u00a0 Even the dog doesn\u2019t want to go outside.\u00a0 My brain is mush.\u00a0 So no glowing stories or insight today, just an improvised playlist!<\/p>\n

Muse: Apocalpyse Please<\/strong>.\u00a0 The most obvious choice to start off with.\u00a0 This song, like many Muse songs, is big and scary, starting off with a perfectly threatening piano stomp that builds into the first line, \u201cDeclare this an emergency\/Come on and spread a sense of urgency\u2026\u201d\u00a0 When the chorus to your song is \u201cThis is the end of the world!\u201d you know that song has to be big and scary.\u00a0 I think as soon as this song was released every movie trailer editor creamed in his pants.<\/p>\n

Arcade<\/strong> Fire: Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels).\u00a0 <\/strong>As a breakout song on a breakout record, Neighborhood #1 is not just a moving song with a perfectly created buildup and explosion, but the lyrics are moving also.\u00a0 The images present a world without parents, a vanished adult world.\u00a0 The town occupied by the leftover children is malleable, conquerable.\u00a0 Tunnels can be built between windows, chimneys are modes of transportation.\u00a0 \u201cAnd since there\u2019s no one left around\/we let our hair grow long\/and forget all we used to know\/then our skin gets thicker from living out in the snow.\u201d\u00a0 The children rename things, reinvent the world, try to hang on to the past but can\u2019t.\u00a0 For me, it provides a kind of bridge song that covers a gap that always bugs me about post-apocalyptic visions of the future: what happened to the first generation, how did the culture and language get so distorted?\u00a0 How did everyone forget \u201cthe event\u201d or the way things used to be?\u00a0 Neighborhood #1 sees it as a kind of purification, a rejection of the old world\u2019s self-destructive tendencies.\u00a0 Good riddance, now the kids are in charge.<\/p>\n

Gorillaz: Last Living Souls<\/strong>.\u00a0 Demon Days<\/em>, Gorillaz\u2019 second real album, is a kind of end-of-the-world, or, at least a fin-de-sciecle album, featuring songs like \u201cO Green World (Don\u2019t Desert Me Now)\u201d, \u201cKids with Guns\u201d, and \u201cEvery Planet we Reach is Dead.\u201d\u00a0 \u201cLast Living Souls\u201d kicks the whole batch off, a somber dub\/discobeat song that would be good as a soundtrack to survivors emerging from the sewers and basements where they\u2019ve hidden, but also, to me, expresses the dread of the current population, wondering if they will be the last generation, the final witnesses, the period on the sentence of human history.\u00a0 Kind of unnerving when you think about the song that way.<\/p>\n

Tom Waits: And the Earth Died Screaming<\/strong>.\u00a0 With drums that sound (purposefully) like tribal people beating skeletal xylophones or shaking bags of bones, Tom Waits portrays a dreamlike apocalypse that has more in common with biblical plagues than sci-fi: \u201cThe moon fell from the sky\/it rained mackerel, it rained trout.\u201d\u00a0 A Broadway version of the Book of Revelations.\u00a0 Yet the narrator of the song ignores the calamity, walks between the bloody raindrops, distracted by sleep and the dreams of his woman.\u00a0 Sounds like the type of hero we don\u2019t get enough of in the movies.<\/p>\n

Tool: Aenima<\/strong>.\u00a0 Ah, the late nineties.\u00a0 When a song hoping for an Armageddon that destroys Los Angeles and all its crazy, self-centered subcultures can top the charts, get played every hour on the hour on rock radio, and becomes summer fuel for undersexed high school kids.\u00a0 Try doing that <\/em>in a post-9\/11 world.\u00a0 This song rocks, that\u2019s about all you need to say.\u00a0 Justifiable anger, meteors, tidal waves, kick-ass solo, and, of course, the creepy combination of threat and advice: Learn to swim, learn to swim, learn to swim, learn to swim!<\/em><\/p>\n

David Bowie: Five Years<\/strong>.\u00a0 Apparently Bowie wrote this song at the age of 25, viewing thirty as a death sentence.\u00a0 Five years to accomplish, five years left to rise before the inevitable fall.\u00a0 But, being Bowie, he also ties \u201cFive Years\u201d into the mythology of Ziggy Stardust, the alien advance guard who comes to earth ahead of his fellow spacemen and preaches love and gets seduced by rock and roll.\u00a0 Or something.\u00a0 Five years for earth to shape up before the aliens come back!\u00a0 As a concept album, it\u2019s not great.\u00a0 But as an expression of a personal apocalypse, as an anti-death urge anthem, this song comes through.\u00a0 Bowie\u2019s scattered images and maniac yell end the song with a bang.<\/p>\n

Jason Molina: Alone with the Owl<\/strong>.\u00a0 A song that could be about being the last man on earth.\u00a0 And, of course, the last man on earth is going to have some regrets.\u00a0 If anyone should be doing the soundtrack to The Road<\/em>, it should be Jason Molina.\u00a0 Always haunting, always soul-heavy.\u00a0 His voice is the lone voice of memory, and his heart is big enough and, apparently, lonely enough to store the whole world, even if the rest of us are gone.<\/p>\n

Download these songs here!<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Just having finished The Pesthouse, a love story disguised as a post-apocalyptic novel, and having my interested piqued by Nacho\u2019s new project, I decided to join in the fun and present a list of the best cataclysmic or apocalyptic songs.\u00a0 …<\/p>\n

High Rotation Special: Apocalypse!<\/span> Read More »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[58,57],"tags":[68,153],"class_list":["post-412","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bangs-whimpers","category-cass","tag-cassander","tag-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/412","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=412"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/412\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":875,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/412\/revisions\/875"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=412"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=412"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=412"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}