Music of the Apocalypse?

URL got clipped -- maybe this will work? http://www.urbanhonking.com/supercal/2008/07/music-dialogue-blow-gabriel-mu.html

Coupla classic 80s metal choons about nuclear war:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjlgUx7_aN0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TdrKGhQUpWA

I can think of dance tracks that sound apocalyptic, but aren't directly about the apocalypse (but then dance tracks are rarely directly about anything but dancing).

For hiphop, Extinction Level Event is the album to check out. Busta was pretty convinced the world was gonna end in 2000.

secretly plotting your demise
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRYP4xCpaWI

If this were a commercial I'd say "Thank you ILX -- I got great responses in just twenty minutes!"

There should totally be a late night infomercial for ILX with Ned and guest-starring the shouting monobrow Oxy Clean guy.

You should maybe check out 'Final Day' by Young Marble Giants which is a short and quite sweet (almost banal) song about the end of the world.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOuOx9zTNtE

Oh yea and dare I say it, Radio KAOS by Roger Waters sort of ends in a redemptive near miss situation, the album sucks balls though.

Some Popol Vuh makes me think of this, "Letzte Tage, Letzte Nachte", tho it's the title more than the lyrics I suppose plus Herzog used music from this album on the opening end-of-the-world/ dawn-of-a-new-world sequences in "Heart of Glass".

choons about nuclear war

i think this probably monopolises a lot of apocalypto-rock; there must be more let me die in my footsteps cold war kind of stuff than general gothic apolcapyse imaginings. that slim gaillard song's pretty boogie-some, but given that there's a lot of old kind of high concept premise-hits churned out in the fifties and sixties, it must be the tip of the iceberg. is there non-nuclear apocalyptic music outside the sphere of religious stuff, gospel or gothic? maybe something pops up on the future by leonard cohen.

ps letzte tage letzte nachte's so beautiful!

Oh yes, 'This World Over' by XTC is a classic Thatcher/Reagan era fear-of-nuclear-war song.

Ah well, thats this world over
Ah well, next one begins

Will you smile like any mother
As you bathe your brand new twins?
Will you sing about the missiles
As you dry odd numbered limbs?

Ah well, thats this world over
Ah well, next one begins
Ah well, thats this world over
You sadly grin

Will you tell them about that far off and mythical land
About their leader with the famous face?
Will you tell them that the reason nothing ever grows
In the garden anymore
Because he wanted to win the craziest race
Thats this world over

Will you smile like any father
With your children on a sunday hike?
When you get to a sea of rubble
And they ask ``what was london like?

You tell them, ``ah well, thats the world over

Will you tell them about that far off and mythical land
And how a child to the virgin came?
Will you tell them that the reason why we murdered
Everything upon the surface of the world
So we can stand right up and say we did it in his name?

Thats this world over
Or so it seems
Thats this world over
The end of dreams

Thats this world over, over, over and out.

hip hop: Mr Lif - Post Mortem. mentions nuclear war and eco-collapse.

godspeed you black emperor's "dead flag blues" is the most recent example I can think of

it went like this:

the buildings tumbled in on themselves
mothers clutching babies picked through the rubble
and pulled out their hair

the skyline was beautiful on fire
all twisted metal stretching upwards
everything washed in a thin orange haze

i said: "kiss me, you're beautiful -
these are truly the last days"

you grabbed my hand and we fell into it
like a daydream or a fever

we woke up one morning and fell a little further down -
for sure it's the valley of death

i open up my wallet
and it's full of blood

Leonard Nimoy, Visit to a Sad Planet

Apocalyptic dance music: this http://www.discogs.com/release/4150 springs to mind.

The End of the Earth is upon us.... Pretty soon it will all turn to dust.... SO GET UP!!!
Forget the past.... go outside and have a blast...

Warhammer 48k made a record called AN ETHEREAL ORACLE that includes a song called "Save the Last Rave (for the year 2012)." I know a couple of them read the Pinchbeck book. Here's their myspace page. They were pretty obsessed with the idea of apocalypse when they made the album. It opens with a tribute to the movie THE DAY AFTER which depicts a nuclear holocaust and stars Steve Guttenberg and Jason Robards. We watched it at my house one night and the Kansas City focus of the story kind of hit home for the guys (living in Columbia, MO).
I just bought Yeti 5!

reggae: Two Sevens Clash by Culture

i own that culture record but i guess i don't know really what it's about/ how it relates?

i need to learn about the apocalyptic/ babylon-falling aspect to roots/ reggae.

does the black ark have significance there? any suggestions where to start my research there?

thanks everyone else -- this subject is pretty huge, obviously.

i think i should remove atomic references that aren't explicitly apocalyptic, unless they're just referred to in passing. the slim g. song is great but maybe doesn't fit. not sure "jesus hits like the atom bomb" fits too well but i do need to play it for kicks...

Some random apocalypse tunes:

Prince - 1999
Midnight Oil - Minutes to Midnight
Steely Dan - Black Friday
Bob Dylan - Talkin' World War III Blues

Killing Joke - Asteroid

And the 3rd Angel sounded
And a star fell from heaven
Burning as it were a lamp
And it fell upon the 3rd part of the waters

Asteroid

I’m a ball of fire
Fire from heaven
Terror from nowhere
You’ll never shoot me down
Days turns to minutes
5 seconds till it hits us
3 seconds to ground
1 second to ….

Asteroid
Coming in from the void

On the bed of the ocean
Where history lies
Strange civilisations
Vapourised
Days turns to minutes
5 seconds till it hits us
3 seconds to ground
1 second to ….

Asteroid

I.N.R.I
Nature renewed by fire made whole

And I climb to the mountain
Light to dark
Behind time and space
A hole in your Ark
Days turns to minutes
5 seconds till it hits us
3 seconds to ground
1 second to ….

Asteroid

Briefly, Joseph Hill (lead singer of Culture) had a vision that judgment would come during 1977, when the two sevens clashed. I think Marcus Garvey prophesised all hell to break lose on July 7, 1977, when the sevens "fully" clashed.

There should totally be a late night infomercial for ILX with Ned and guest-starring the shouting monobrow Oxy Clean guy.

?!?!

How about Young Marble Giants' "Final Day"?

xx-post: another friend of mine dared me to NOT find an apocalyptic song by k.j. -- so yeah they have to be included. thanks.

x-post: great, succinct explanation of the culture thing, thanks! i need to speed-read norm cohn's awesome millenarianism book for some other references to end of the world cults that fixed dates. there's so much of that! versus' hale bop song where he switched the type of sneakers those guys wore might work (baluyut being so into adidas rather than nike).

ned: you don't agree? i think you'd make an awesome team.

I really love The Sun is Burning, which Simon and Garfunkel covered, as a folky nuclear song.

A friend of mine was doing a myspace collaborative environmental collapse musical project, which is quite silly, and has some great misspellings, but anyway http://www.myspace.com/floodbuoy

There's a book by Peter Worsely about millenarian cargo cults in Melanesia called The Trumpet Shall Sound. I think it's out of print, but it's really interesting.

Killing Joke - Asteroid

Their Pandemonium album has lots of apocalyptic imagery.

ned: you don't agree? i think you'd make an awesome team.

I was more amazed than anything else!

between posting here and another list i'm on, i feel much more confident about this thing, thanks so much to all who posted.

an editor at soft skull even shared a way-advance manuscript of a book called 'apocalypse jukebox' which deals with this very subject, written by two atlanta-based pop culture professors, which will be out i guess early next year?

still, if anyone could help with music that refers to 2012-oh-my-god-the-mayan-calendar-ends, that would rule.

also i can't find any koresh mp3s on the net -- anyone can point me in the right direction? dude's record is out of print.

More suggestions here: http://www.defectiveyeti.com/archives/002564.html

Weird how this was a not uncommon pop song trope in the 80s and seems to have mostly fallen out of that realm since. You've got the Lydon/Bambaataa World Destruction already?

Have you looked into Earth Crisis and shit like that? Also recent eco-black metal; Wolves In The Throne Room are kind of on to that thing (supposedly they live in a farmhouse and play shows in the woods and all that), but my knowledge isn't too deep either.

This project sounds like a blast, please keep us apprised of your progress!

Yes!

* The music made by apocalyptic cults and sects

SOUNDS OF AMERICAN DOOMSDAY CULTS VOL. 14 - The Church Universal and Triumphant Inc. feat. Elizabeth Clare Prophet (Faithways International)

http://www.aquariusrecords.org/bin/search.cgi/artist=SOUNDS%20OF%20AMERICAN%20DOOMSDAY%20CULTS%20VOL.%2014
http://www.discogs.com/release/754057

Rev. Jim Jones - He's Able - http://www.discogs.com/release/778438

* Messiaen's "Quartet for the End of Time"

though that's his best known piece, his most direct statement on your topic (and his most apocalyptic & frightening & my favorite etc.) is 'Et Exspecto Resurrectionem Mortuorum', I recommend this recording if you're crazy

Judas Priest just put out an entire concept album about Nostradamus! See also: Dimmu Borgir's Death Cult Armageddon record.

Someone mentioned Godspeed You Black Emperor! upthread, referencing a specific lyric, but I think there's something of the apocalypse in everything they do. This is also true of some of their contemporaries/followers, especially Explosions in the Sky. It seems as though these bands are consciously making soundtrack music for the "end times", and the relative popularity of this style says something about the age we live in. Same goes for the recent semi-mainstream interest in black metal and extreme doom (Khanate, etc.). Outside cult metalhead circles, I mean.

Crass - What The Fuck (from Penis Envy)

total apocalyptic vision.

this is the greatest song about the apocalypse

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9MIrSbhJQIM