The Post-Apocalyptic Playlist
- Taran
- Feb 8
- 13 min read
Paulie: Howdy folks, we're back! And we're feeling apocalyptic. Fallout season two just concluded (for better or worse), various political leaders are competing to end the world first (for worse), there's microplastics in my balls and I'm addicted to huffing glue. What better time then, for Taran's latest piece on the music of the apocalypse. Read on dear wanderers.
Natural disasters, ravens and locusts, ill omens in the night sky or the cold earth; these are all heralding signs of the end times. Pagan soothsayers, religious zealots and everyone in between have obsessed over supposedly impending apocalypses for millennia, yet the uncaring sands of time never came to a standstill. In 2012, the end of the Mayan calendar gripped the public imagination with doomsday theories of galactic alignments, supermassive black holes and geomagnetic reversals, but New Age pseudoscience proved unable to bring about planetary collapse.
A global pandemic came and went, and the climate crisis continues escalating towards the realm of irreparability. Only last Tuesday, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock advanced four more seconds to only 85 seconds to midnight, the closest the modern world has ever been to planetary catastrophe, citing the rise of aggressive, nationalistic militarism by complacent, indifferent leaders accelerating these existential risks, rather than mitigating them.
With rising geopolitical tensions and climate emergency dominating our bleak visions of the future, the apocalypse possesses as much cultural capital as ever. Disaster cinema proves an enduring medium, from 28 Days Later to Sharknado and 2012 itself. Mere days before Christmas, the number one movie on Netflix was a South Korean disaster movie called The Great Flood where an asteroid impact leads to global flooding and the end of the world as we know it. Festive, right?
But what about beyond the silver screen? What about on the airwaves? What’s plucked, strummed or hummed as another geopolitical crisis is beamed straight to our smartphones? How does music grapple with themes of the apocalypse, and what does living beyond the end times sound like?
The Tradpocalypse
