Apocalypse Jukebox: The End of the World in American Popular Music

Apocalypse Jukebox: The End of the World in American Popular Music

No other industrialized country has so thoroughly embraced the bitter end of itself as much as America. Not only are we, the people, routinely swept up into increasingly histrionic paroxysms of fear and a general sense that the end times are just around the corner, but we've also managed to sublimate our night terrors via our nation's popular music, historical and contemporary. Think of it as the skull beneath the song. Janssen and Whitelock come from academic backgrounds, and Jukebox is both a smart, intellectually chewy examination of how we got into this musical pas de deux danse macabre in the first place – why the phenomenon feels so intrinsically American – and what it says about us. Enter Leonard Cohen, the late Arthur Lee, Laurie Anderson, and Green Day to help make sense of it all. Devo's whip-smart Mark Mothersbaugh might be the best reason to pay money for this book. Anderson's Concert Amidst the Ashes, performed just days after 9/11 and mere blocks from the ghastly fresh anti-space that had just days before been the twin towers, is a gripping look into a famously inscrutable performer's mindset during the apocalypse next door. Her simple act of eloquent artistic courage tells us more about our relationship to our own musical mortality, and our often equally uneasy relationship to those who compose it, than almost everything else in this exhaustive, analytical, and long overdue examination of what keeps us all awake at 3am.