Apocalypse Now or Never
Armageddon through the lens of popular music
On an otherwise cloudless and sunny Fourth of July, I saw a perfectly symmetrical circle-shaped cloud above me. I joked with uncomfortable ease, “Oh! Is it finally time?!”
Time to be abducted by aliens and be freed of this torment.
Witnessing the decline of literacy, compassion, freedom, and hope makes it easy to throw my hands up in surrender and exclaim, “We’re cooked!” and wait patiently to get burned to a crisp by a nuke, a meteor, or alien radiation.
I far too often imagine myself as a third-wave zombie apocalypse survivor: I’m thoughtful and resourceful enough to get past the initial wave where the doctors and scientists warned us about impending doom; I’m healthy and quick enough to escape the next wave where my neighbors start to transition and I get my ass outta dodge; but when that third wave hits, and we’ve started hoarded scraps of soap and I break my glasses in my first hand-to-hand combat, I know with complete confidence my time on Earth will have ended.
Have you developed a soft-enough life that imagining yourself making bread as a survival tactic instead of a cozy hobby brings you gloom? Maybe the fantasy of living on a compound with your best friends turned sour after you watched Midsommar (2019). If you talk to any beings that accept hopes and prayers, is one of your prayers that the fiery end comes immediately and directly to your doorstep? (No post-nuke radiation for me, please!!)
Since the dawn of storytelling, humans have found creative ways to cope with the afterlife and how we will meet the End of Times. In the major religions and musical storytellings, there’s a consistent presence of war, famine, and suffering at the hands of tyrannical empires and God-like figures. The good news is that Good triumphs over Evil in nearly every story. The bad news is that the victory comes only after Death.
More good news: It’s up to us to decide if Death will be metaphor or a stark and bloody reality.
Listening Guide
The News
To the extent that Americans are uninformed about politics, economics, and other issues relevant to democracy, the reason may be simply that they are choosing not to inform themselves.
- Jennifer Allen et al., Science Advances
As of March 2025, three conglomerates (Gray Television, Nexstar Media Group, and Sinclair Broadcast Group) each own about 100 affiliate stations covering 80% of US media markets. More than half of nearly 700 daily newspapers are owned by seven corporations as of May 2021.
Many songs referencing the end of times mention learning about the catastrophe from the news or having “woken up” to the news from what I can imagine they thought was an ordinary sleep. Is it a literal or metaphorical awakening?
“The News (A Wholly Owned Subsidiary of Microsoft Inc.)” by Deltron 3030 was released in 2000, not too long after the Y2K Crisis passed like an asparagus fart in the wind. The world, now deeply into the Internet Age, had manufactured a $600 billion IT project to course-correct after poor risk management planning during their construction of globalized tech infrastructure built on a two-digit system.
“We have much worries that Armageddon is really close and we should find refuge. We're not sure what to do in the situation, but these weird creatures are starting to behave pretty strangely. These aliens are making people really scared, so we really need to be cautious towards these creatures”
“The News (A Wholly Owned Subsidiary of Microsoft Inc.)” by Deltron 3030
“The News” is one of 24 tracks on a concept album reflecting on (what was at the time) the rise of technology and its impact on society. The opening song “State of the Nation” creates a clear sense of dystopian time and place with the opening line “It’s the year 3030 and here at the Corporate Institutional Bank of Time…”
25 years ago when Big Brother was a fledgling reality TV show and not something we voluntarily placed in our pants pockets (and our bedrooms, and our cars, and our police forces…), the global community was learning the negative consequences of building technology into all of our critical infrastructure. Mind you, the infrastructure we had back then was at least owned by more than two bozos. MSNBC was created in 1996 as a $200 million investment from Microsoft. MSNBC has been so integrated in our news diet that we hardly even think about the “MS” standing for Microsoft anymore. Everywhere we look, there’s some billionaire’s fingerprints all over it. In 2000, Bill Gates, as “good” of a billionaire as we could get, was still a cause for concern with how much wealth and dominance he had acquired.
I worry that — what with Meta products being owned by a terrible animatronic billionaire, ByteDance being owned by a terrible foreign billionaire, news channels being owned by a terrible group of billionaires, our telecommunications infrastructure being monitored by terrible elected billionaires — we won’t have a safe, reliable, and unbiased medium to communicate with each other in crisis should these bros decide to succumb to their not-so-latent supervillain tendencies and cut us off from each other.
According to a 2020 study conducted by Jennifer Allen et al. for Science Advances, despite widespread access to news, the vast majority of Americans across all age groups and mediums, overwhelmingly consume non-news media, with only a small fraction of their daily media time devoted to news content. They found that even “passive” consumption of news on social media makes up less than 5% of overall consumption. A 2023 study by the Pew Research Center supports the findings: traffic to top digital news sites is slowing and that the average time spent on those sites is also declining.
We’ll be taking our final breaths during our morning poop doom scroll. Swipe screen, swipe butt, BOOM.
The Sound of War
Apocalyptic belief thrives in oppression. For oppressed people, a prophecy of the end of the world offers relief from their suffering and hope that their suffering will come to an end.
- Nicholas Campion, PBS
Depending on where you were born or what religion or philosophy you subscribe to, life after death and the idea of the apocalypse can be either be a sweet relief or an everyday terror.
Zoroastrianism, a faith that precedes most Abrahamic religions, believes in purity at birth and there being only one chance to live in a way that achieves eternal peace. The Abrahamic religions (Christianity, Islam, Judaism) hold linear views of time and tend to use more binary language, particularly when it comes to defining a life “worthy” of salvation. A straight forward reading of these texts is that we’ve been hurdling toward a final event culminating in all souls’ final judgment for their assignment in hell or “New Earth and Heaven.” In dharmic religions (Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, Sikhism) their views of time skew more cyclical and, while they also have world-ending events in their texts, they fundamentally believe in impermanence and detachment. By contrast, Taoism and related traditions notably have no culmination of events as their core principles rely on free will and balance.
Christianity, the most practiced religion in the world, has some of the most pervasive and long-lasting images of salvation, damnation, and the end of times. Regardless of your participation in the religion, it’s probable you’ve heard of The Four Horsemen, Armageddon, and Judgement Day. There are at least two schools of thought about whether the Bible’s Book of Revelations is a prophecy (preterism) or is both a recollection of historical events and a prophecy (dual fulfillment).
The preterist point of view makes space for instilling fear and conspiracy in the present day; we look for signs that the anti-Christ has returned and we’re closer to the end than our beginning. The dual fulfillment perspective allows for acknowledgment that the books in the Bible are human accounts and interpretations of historical events and that it’s also possible these events could reoccur. Either way, opportunistic interpretation of this body of work have enabled atrocities against humankind.
Using Revelations 20:1–10 as their guide, right-wing extremism and Nazism took hold. Nazism is a milleniarian movement based on the Biblical idea that there will be a thousand-year reign of Good after a defeat of Evil. Germany, in the throes of despair after the Treaty of Versailles and their loss in World War I, combined the six characteristics of millenarianism and their Nordic ancestry to use the Jewish people as a scapegoat and excuse for violence and political domination. They combined the apocalyptic language and imagery from the Bible with Viking symbolism (Thor’s hammer, the red wolf Fenrir) to drive their vision toward a "New Heaven and New Earth".
Nazism’s use of both Christian and Norse mythology is of no surprise or coincidence. Early Germanic religions (Middle Ages/500 CE) were primarily pagan, considered “barbaric” and worshipped many gods similar to those in Roman and Greek mythologies. The written accounts of these stories, and Ragnarok specifically, however, were not documented until centuries later in the 12th and 13th centuries as Germany was converting to Christianity. The ideologies and imagery are inextricably linked.
Therefore, as we move to more modern times, it becomes no surprise that renowned composers like Richard Wagner not only drew upon this history to create his own tellings of Ragnarok, but that it becomes a piece of “evidence” of the Germanic superiority during Hitler’s rise to power.
Richard Wagner (1813-1883), a notable antisemite, composed Götterdämmerung, Dritter Aufzug (1876) as the final entry in his four-part opera (known as a cycle) in Der Ring des Nibelungen (1869-1876). Wagner’s involvement in early nationalist movements, his claims that “Jews were incapable of true creativity”, and his undeniable musical talents gave permission for Nazism in the early 1930s to use his works as tools for propaganda. It was reported that Wagner’s original compositions were lost in Hitler’s bunker where he eventually took his own life.
Translated to “Twilight of the Gods,” Götterdämmerung is a loose interpretation of the Norse myth of Ragnarok in which there is a final battle between gods, demons, and giants, ultimately ending the gods’ reign and spurring the rebirth of the world. One of these notable pieces is “Fliegt heim, ihr Raben! (Immolation Scene)” which captures the ebbs and flows of the battle and resolution.
🧠 Listen to the composition paying special attention to the use of trumpets, strings, and chimes to signal battle scenes, the climax, and resolution. How do you think a composition like this one would embolden the nationalist party? Can you draw parallels between the Bible, Norse mythology, and the Nazis’ use of these stories to frame themselves as the victim and eventual victors?
Moving closer to the present, we find more contemporary compositions using Biblical allusions or language to describe their discontent with war, impending societal collapse, and environmental injustice.
Ozzy Osbourne’s 1980 release “Revelation (Mother Earth)” speaks to the environmental harm we have caused and uses several religious motifs to describe our imminent doom. His use of church bells and his direct pleas to Father and Mother (Earth) for forgiveness drive home his request for salvation. His plea to “let my mother live,” feels like an interpolation of the famous Moses quote “Let my people go” and is only emphasized by his singing of “the seas turned red” to describe not just bloodshed but a reference to the Red Sea that Moses parted.
The 1970s and 80s were huge moments in activism and environmental justice was still nascent; the first Earth Day was on April 22, 1970. Historians often link and credit the rise of environmental activism to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1967 and treat it as an extension of the greater social justice movement. Though missing an official label as an environmental activist, much of Ozzy’s solo catalog and work with Black Sabbath includes anti-war and pro-conservation themes. “Revelation” was released 7 years prior to a landmark 1987 US study that confirmed there were massive disparities in communities of color with hazardous waste disposal methodologies and policy.
Wyclef Jean’s 1997 release “Apocalypse” uses our now familiar Biblical lexicon to describe how his own neighborhood feels like it’s in a war-torn, post-apocalyptic state. The character from this piece learned about the apocalypse from the news, and describes the moon as red, details the horsemen at his door…all the lyrical markers are there.
The song transports the listener from the imaginary bloody future to real present day 1997 as he describes being pulled over by an undercover detective accusing him of robbing a gas station. He tries to use his star power to get him out of the situation (“I was at the Grammys with Brandy, didn’t you see me on TV?”) And ultimately decides to make a break for it. As the car chase ensues, he ends the verse with an all too familiar result even 28 years later: “The headline reads every ghettos sad story / A rookie shoots a boy over mistaken identity…”
Released November 14, 2024 after Trump was elected, “Like the End” by James Blake captures woe and fear both in tone and lyrics. He opens the song with what sounds like a broken music box and his signature haunting croon. The song begins softly with few instruments and, as the song progresses, the drums and his voice get louder, with an ominous organ carrying us through. The final stretch is screechy strings emphasizing the dystopian and foreboding future that awaits us. His original art work for the single was a Photoshopped image of the Las Vegas sphere projecting a smiley face on fire.
This might only be day one / But doesn't it feel like the end? / Something's coming for us / I think we're not prepared.
“Like the End” by James Blake
Kamala Harris and any reasonable person that read Project 2025 predicted that as bad as the price of eggs was at the time, the worst was yet to come. We were told point blank that mass deportations were on their way and we were called conspiracy theorists.
It’s not a conspiracy that I haven’t seen my corner fruit cart vendor in weeks. The Home Depot that’s three minutes away from my house is a constant target for kidnappings. Families are sheltering in place. This is real and this is happening right now.
Up to this point, we have seen how the use of apocalyptic language gives way for power-hungry fascists to incite war, how the metaphor easily extends to the impacts of climate change, and how the effects of these seemingly large and faraway choices by politickers have devastating impacts on everyday people.
Pestilence, War, Famine, and Death are not just the Four Horsemen in a battle of Biblical proportions, but everyday realities in our global communities.
Dance Till We’re Dead
You have every reason and justification to feel helpless and at a loss for what to do next. It’s only reasonable to succumb to nihilism or hedonism, but I implore you to stay checked in, engaged, and joyful.
Prince and the pop icons that succeeded him knew exactly how to handle their fear: dance like it’s “1999” (1982). And if they weren’t dancing, they were calling their lovers and holding them close as they watched the asteroid approach.
I was dreamin' when I wrote this / So sue me if I go too fast / But life is just a party / And parties weren't meant to last / War is all around us / My mind says, ‘Prepare to fight’ / So if I gotta die / I’m gonna listen to my body tonight
“1999” by Prince
Like many of the preceding songs, the artists were reflecting on their present times and political goings on, rather than pontificating about stories their parents strategically used to trick them into being “good” to avoid “the bad place”.
The 80s are reflected upon with fauxstalgia because of the portrayal of sex, drugs, and rock & roll in film and pop culture. Not to say that people weren’t having a good time, but a real and different life was happening outside CBGB when Prince released this song: Reagan was overseeing the Cold War and the AIDS epidemic, there was a short but powerful recession that hit American pocketbooks, and there were two wars that year abroad (Falklands and Israeli invasion of Lebanon). And yet, in true Prince fashion, he reminds listeners that God made everyone and sometimes there’s nothing to do but dance.
What surprised me the most was listening to “1999” and never truly hearing the final line in the jam: “Mommy, why does everybody have a bomb?”
Tim McGraw implored us in 2004 to “Live Like You Were Dying” (the main character in his song received a terminal diagnosis) so to take this metaphor way too far, the Earth has received its terminal diagnosis and the sun definitely won’t be rising tomorrow — how are you spending your final day? Will you be calling your ex to apologize even though you told them to eat dirt two weeks ago?
When songs about describing armageddon aren’t being so damn dramatic with their operatic overtures and wailing screams posing as string instruments, the end of times sounds dreamy and romantic.
“If the World Was Ending” (by now the happily defunct couple Julia Michaels and JP Saxe) showcases prescient lyrics about a couple one year post-breakup wondering “you up?” and if they would reunite if they discovered they only had one day left. They didn’t want to spend forever together when they thought they had more time, but now that forever ends in one day, they want to spend it together. True love or relationship of convenience?
On the flip side, you’ve got Miley Cyrus begging her devotee to have more urgency: “Baby, you’ve been thinking ‘bout the future like it’s already yours / Show me how you'd hold me if tomorrow wasn't comin' for sure.” The structure of the song implies an in-universe surety that there will not be a tomorrow and demands more presence in their remaining moments. Personally, I’d hate to get loved on just because the world was ending — if he wanted to love me now, he would.
The narrator in “Apocalypse Whenever” by Bad Suns (2022) admits he’s not ready to die, but he’s made his amends, chased his dreams, learned from his mistakes. The apocalypse can come “whenever” because he’s worked on having a life without regrets.
As humans do, I get caught up in the mundanity of life and the forced rituals: going to work, doing the laundry, paying bills… it’s with great intention and effort that I stop to practice gratitude and snap back to the present moment. I’m in the practice of asking myself, “If not now, when?”
These songs urge us to think of what’s in front of us now: the opportunity to feel good, be good, and do good.
What will you do with the opportunity?
I thought for sure REM would be on here. lol