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The Apocalypse’s Apocalypse and Post-Apocalyptic Visions of Sunshine and Blessings

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This first ran at CiCO3.
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This posts stems from a conversation with Kyle Johnson after we watched Mad Max: Fury Road together. Thanks to Linda Quiquivix , Zoé Samudzi and William Copeland for feedback on the idea and draft to help make it vaguely coherent. In thinking about worlds I leaned heavily on Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth and Frank Wilderson’s Red, White and Black even where not cited directly. None of the above can be blamed for what follows. After completing the draft a couple of friends put me onto this great recent CBC conversation which also covers parts of what is below. Special thanks to Cass Chen who was a wonderful friend, host and conversationalist while I scribbled.

George Miller’s 2015 film Mad Max: Fury Road takes place in a post-apocalyptic Australia. Like most apocalypse/post-apocalyptic stories Fury Road comments on the present through envisioning a dystopic future. The film opens with news clips framing the violence to follow as descended from resource wars and global warming. Resource extraction and climate change are ready topics for exploring the end of the world and it is no surprise to find them as common topics for apocalyptic storytelling in cinema, novels, television and comic books. In settler colonies these stories comment upon today’s problems while neglecting to mention that another apocalypse, one suffered by the indigenous population, pre-dates the story. Exploring post-apocalyptic storytelling with this in mind challenges settler colonial normativity and further opens up the world’s end to decolonizing visions.

Ending Othered Worlds

>Fury Road, Brian K. Vaughn & Pia Guerra’s comic book Y: The Last Man and Robert Rodat’s tv series Falling Skies all offer different causes to the apocalypse. Fury Road is unspecific but points towards ecological destruction through climate change and resource wars. Y: The Last Man‘s apocalypse is an unspecified illness or curse that simultaneously kills all the mammals with a Y chromosome (in an unproduced script, Vaughn lays the blame with a U.S. biological weapons attack on China). Falling Skies‘s end of the world comes from extraterrestrial invasion.

Fury Road further comments on climate change and monopolization of resources as a means of centralizing authoritarian, patriarchal power. It follows a group of people through a mostly empty wasteland as they seek the “green place” while they are hunted by those who control the resources. Y: The Last Man narrates Agent 355 and Dr. Allison Mann as they seek to find a cause and cure for the plague that killed all terrestrial mammals with the Y chromosome but for Yorick Brown and his monkey Ampersand. The authors focus on patriarchy, Israeli militarism and market violence. While it is is a global story, it starts in the United States and most of its key plots points take place in three settler colonies, the United States, Israel and Australia, before departing to Japan and France later on. Falling Skies looks at the Second Massachusetts, an irregular militia comprised of survivors of the extraterrestrial Espheni conquest that killed 90% of Earth’s human population as they seek to overthrow Espheni rule and restore the United States. Falling Skies affirms American exceptionalism, laments how the U.S. strayed from the perceived ideals of early republic and takes a geocentric view of the universe in its firmly conservative critique of the present.

These stories offer three different critiques of the present from three different political views and are produced in three different mediums in two different settler colonies. Yet all are representative of a genre of post-apocalyptic storytelling that does not contemplate that the lost U.S. and Australian societies are premised upon settler genocides against the native populations. The closest any of the three comes and the closest the overwhelming preponderance of the genre come is when Y: The Last Man briefly discusses Israeli civil disobedience against Israeli bulldozing of Palestinian houses as part of developing the Israeli character Alter. One notable exception is Mel Gibson’s film Apocalypto which engages a pending colonial apocalypse only to justify it. Another is District 9 where some references are made yet are mediated by the white South African hero.

Settler colonialism, the establishment of the stories’ lost worlds, is an anti-native apocalypse and, in the United States, Canada, South Africa, Brazil and Rhodesia, also an anti-Black apocalypse. The racializations of Black and native are mostly different but were simultaneously constructed through the same colonizing events. Both are products of settler colonialism. Settler colonialism builds the settler’s world – the anti-Black world – by destroying the native world and does so in a 1:1 ratio. Every acre created of coastal British/American Virginia is one acre less of Powhatan Tsenacommacah. Every dunam of Israel is one less dunam of Palestine. Settler colonialism through eliminating sovereignties and populations and creating regimes of gratuitous violence brings about the end of a world. It is sometimes even named as such as when Palestinians refer to the accelerated 1947-1949 period of Zionist ethnic cleansing and the establishment of the Israeli settler state as the Nakba (‘catastrophe’).

That we settlers comprise an anti-native apocalypse means that all our cultural production is apocalyptic, is the product of an ongoing apocalypse, including post-apocalyptic visions. John Grisham’s The Firm is an apocalyptic novel of legal corruption. Miley Cyrus’ “Wrecking Ball” is an unrequited love anthem of the apocalypse. Strictly Ballroom is a film about apocalyptic cross-cultural and cross-class ballroom dancing and romance. Almost all of Danielle Steel’s opus are apocalyptic love story books. Only Miley Cyrus’ career of those four actually feels like a sign of the apocalypse but all are inherently apocalyptic as products of settler colonialism. What the intended post-apocalyptic stories Fury Road, Y: The Last Man and Falling Skies unknowingly narrate is a prior apocalypse experiencing an apocalypse itself, the apocalypse’s apocalypse. The destruction of the settler colony provides the post-apocalyptic wasteland the protagonists navigate.

Elizabeth Povinelli describes settler normativity as the “organization of sociality on the basis of the naturalness of a civilizational displacement.” Alternately put, anti-native genocide, quashing of native sovereignties and, in some settler colonies, African slavery are the fabrics that weave together and underline all settler colonial discourse and relations. Settler everyday life is the anti-native and anti-Black apocalypse but for we settlers, it is just life. In this read Furiosa and Max are settler revolutionaries fighting Immortan Joe and the settler capitalists over control of stolen Aborigine land and resources. This is why it is unsurprising that Falling Skies and Y: The Last Man both fail to engage the anti-native apocalypse despite making numerous references to the early U.S. republic, a time when even normative settler discourse knows (but always remembers to forget) that Indian Removal programs were aggressively underway in some way, shape or form.

It is hard to imagine dystopic settler stories being otherwise for settler colonialism, like all organizations of power, builds the world it inhabits. In settler colonialism’s world settler colonialism – the anti-native and anti-Black apocalypses – is near impossible to see as it is our very frame of reference. A challenging thing about normativity is it’s paradigm paradox: From what frame of reference can we observe our frame of reference? When settlers imagine the end of the world then, we imagine it as synonymous with the end of the planet or species and not the end of settler colonialism’s world. But stories consciously narrating the apocalypse’s apocalypse could describe the end of that world. They can offer a new frame of reference and play a role in subverting and disrupting settler colonial power and discourse.

The World is Ending! Hooray!

Settler storytellers explore all kinds of fascinating, entertaining and illuminating scenarios to describe the end of the world. The Terminator and The Matrix stories look to the artificial intelligence singularity. Deep Impact ends part of the world with a comet collision. The Walking Dead comic book, tv series and a long-running series of George Romero’s …of the Dead films narrate a zombie apocalypse. The Wayward Pines book trilogy and tv series look at apocalypse through divergent evolution and On the Beach‘s apocalypse happens through nuclear war. None of the above reflect on the anti-native and anti-Black apocalypses.

Potentially even non-anthropocentric ones can be told. For example there is Vitamin Z – a yet to be made film documenting the multiyear boon in slow-moving, uncoordinated, easily obtainable, though quite bitey, prey for carnivores and scavengers that follows the zombie apocalypse and restores their populations to pre-capitalist/pre-colonial population levels. I hope Keith David or David Attenborough is available to narrate!

But what about when the end of the world is the apocalypse’s apocalypse? Frank Wilderson notes that, “The Slave needs freedom from the Human race, freedom from the world. The Slave requires gratuitous freedom.” Indeed, settler colonialism’s world of dispossession and gratuitous violence not only can end, but should. Stories of the end of this particular world need not be burnt skies and genocide. In narrating the end of an apocalypse they may well tell the opposite: clean air, vitality and an end to gratuitous violence and suffering. The end of settler colonialism’s world can be sunshine and blessings, little children laughing and singing silly songs, lovers dancing or any other beautiful thing. These are legit post-apocalyptic visions when describing an apocalypse happening to a prior apocalypse when combined with Black and native liberation. So are ones less polarly optimistic or romantic.

The material world stories of the whole or partial end of settler rule in Zimbabwe, Liberia and South Africa are decidedly complicated and frequently tragic. Settler colonialism is not the only wronging world in play as Black feminism’s intersectional resistance teaches. Yet stories consciously telling the apocalypse’s apocalypse can offer a discursive break, a frame of reference separate from settler colonialism’s dispossession and gratuitous violence. As Frantz Fanon wrote, “To break up the colonial world does not mean that after the frontiers have been abolished lines of communication will be set up between the two [colonial and decolonized] zones. The destruction of the colonial world is no more and no less than the abolition of one zone, its burial in the depths of the earth.” Stories telling the end of this world can be part of the shovel.

None of this is to argue that post-apocalyptic and apocalyptic stories cannot be robot apocalypses, nuclear holocausts or extraterrestrial invasions. They are frequently insightful, critical, imaginative and even beautiful. But such visions can still adopt a frame of reference not dependent upon settler colonialism’s dispossession and gratuitous violence and recognize that the anti-native and anti-Black apocalypses have long been happening. In doing so stories of the apocalypse’s apocalypse can obliterate a world that has it coming.

An Agnostic Apocalypse

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The end of the world is a comfort. Things have finally and definitively fallen apart, no more struggle, and, most importantly, all the Big Questions are answered. In literary terms, an apocalypse is a mystery novel. The word means “uncovering” or “unveiling,” the exegesis Sherlock Holmes performs at the close of every story. Religions promise big reveals in the afterlife, delivered on a first come first served basis, but an end-of-the-world apocalypse provides closure to all readers at once.

Sometimes the answers suck. The Walking Dead apocalypse reveals that God is dead, life is brutal, and death a mockery and negation of all human values. But that’s still an Answer. Mystery solved. Horror usually tips the opposite scale: the universe overflows with supernatural import. Sure, most of the supernatural forces want to flay and eat you, but even when they succeed, the stench of blood and brimstone is still comforting. You finally know what’s what—whether Buffy or the Winchester brothers swoop in at the last-minute or not.

But the biggest horror is an apocalypse that doesn’t reveal anything. That anti-Rapture, the ten-episode adaptation of Tom Perrotta’s The Leftovers, has been airing on HBO this summer. Although I’ve met Tom Perrotta (nice guy, drove him back to his hotel after his reading at UVA a few years ago), I have the blissful ignorance of having not read the novel. So I don’t know how season one will end, and based on ratings, season two is anything but a certainty.

leftovers book cover

That’s appropriate for a show about radical uncertainty. Left Behind, the book series Perrotta is at least partially lampooning, delivers the ur-apocalypse of Revelations, complete with an all-mysteries-solved Antichrist at the center of its plot. The Perrotta Apocalypse is way scarier. When 2% of the planet’s population pop out of existence, the leftover 98% are left without any answers. Dr. Who, in the form of Christopher Eccleston’s American-accented clergyman, says it wasn’t God. A three-year congressional report might as well be blank.

That abyss-deep level of not-knowing is too much for some people. Liv Tyler and Any Brenneman join a nihilistic cult of mute chain smokers hell-bent on proving life is worthless. Their evangelical pamphlets are literally blank. They are the show’s zombie horde: they stare at you blankly from the sidewalk outside your living room windows; they buy your church and paint its windows white; they stage protests at commemorations for your vanished loved ones; they break into your home and steal your family photos from their pictures frames.

At least zombies are accidental. Reanimated flesh-eating corpses are random byproducts of a random universe. Perrotta’s zombies choose meaninglessness, abandoning their families and severing all emotional ties and then terrorizing others into adopting their philosophy—while inwardly struggling to maintain it themselves. People secure in their nihilism wouldn’t bother to terrorize or recruit converts or take vows of silence—behaviors as inherently meaningless as all other behaviors.

But the cult is a fundamentalist church. Most non-apocalyptic atheists don’t congregate in the name of non-God. They have better, more meaningful things to do. But being leftover raises the stakes. When the bank forecloses on Eccleston’s church, he gambles the existence of God at a roulette table. But do three double-or-nothing wins equal divine intervention? Are those pigeons gray-feathered messengers of the Supernatural—or are they just brainless birds? Are the voices in the ex-sheriff’s head evidence of his schizophrenia—or did they send a very corporeal, tobacco-chewing hunter to help his son shoot packs of wild dogs? These and many other burning questions will not be answered next week, or any other week.

Perrotta’s teenagers at least know how to channel their universe’s amoral indifference into an app (in addition to “kiss” and “hug,” a game of spin-the-cellphone includes “punch” and “fuck”). They know the baby Jesus in the town’s Christmas display is just a mass consumer object–yet one so haunted with a residue of meaning that burning it isn’t as easy as stealing it. In this world of heightened uncertainty, even the disappearance of a nametag or a bag of dry cleaning or a bagel is enough to trigger existential crisis.

Although this agnostic apocalypse is Rapture-inspired, it reminds me more of Kurt Vonnegut’s brand of godless humanism. Vonnegut’s end-of-the-world revelations challenge basic assumptions of reality: water only freezes when cold, time moves in one direction, gravity is a constant, humans have free will. After a “timequake” causes years of predetermined repetition, humans find themselves suddenly at the metaphorical wheel again and are so unprepared they literally drive into each other. The Leftovers opens with a similar car wreck, a driverless car careening through a not-just-existential crossroads.

Vonnegut founds his own religions too. The Book of Bokonon announces that its teachings are lies, although useful ones, godly untruths that impose order on an unloving universe. Perrotta’s Guilty Remnant can’t cope with such abandonment and so their lies impose an uglier order. Their leader writes on her tablet: “There is no family.” It’s as true/false as any other religious claim. The “Lonesome No More” government in Vonnegut’s Slapstick randomly assigns the population middle names, providing everyone with an extensive family of siblings and cousins to care for them. It’s nonsense, but it also works. There might not be any Supernatural order to your life, but that doesn’t mean you have to act like a soulless zombie.

If that orderless order sounds too frightening for you, wait till October. The powers-that-be are giving the Left Behind franchise a second chance. Nicholas Cage will be our pilot through the end-of-days reboot.

I’d rather take my uncertain chances with The Leftovers.

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Tyrannosaurus Stalin

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Dystopias are always also utopias, just as hell always also implies a heaven. A blighted future is a warning, but it’s also a hope that the wrong-doers (if they do not repent) will finally, finally get theirs. Orwell’s 1984 broods luxuriously on the triumph of totalitarianism over all those who do not see as clearly as he. Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games revels in the voyeuristic exploitation bloodshed enabled by scolding us all for our voyeuristic exploitation jones. Disaster porn is — adamently, enthusiastically — porn, a sadistic/masochistic wallow in the end times. Grim visions are what we want to see; the rain of fire that scourges injustice — or, sometimes, that just scourges. Because scourging is fun.

Alun Llewellyn’s 1934 sci-fi dystopia, The Strange Invaders presents a particularly complex apocalypse — and, ergo, a particularly complex set of apocalyptic desires. The story is set in a far future earth, where a combination of nuclear holocaust and oncoming ice age have knocked humanity back to the middle ages. The action is centered in a factory town of the former Soviet Union, now a holy city, inhabited by a people called the Rus. The Rus worship a Trinity — Marx, Lenin, Stalin — who they only vaguely understand. Church Fathers rule over a military class of Swords, who keep the peasants in line scraping out a subsistence existence.

This already-quite-grim-thank-you world is plunged into chaos as nomadic Tartars begin fleeing to the Rus’ holy city from the South, seeking shelter. They claim to be pursued by giant, man-eating lizards. The Church Fathers at first don’t believe it (Marx said nothing about giant man-eating lizards!) and so order the Swords and the peasants to massacre the Tartars before they eat too much of the food supply. Soon after the deed is done, though,the saurians show up and set about killing just about everyone they can get their talons on. Finally, in a War-of-the-Worldsish stroke of luck, winter comes in and for some reason the in-all-other-ways evolutionarily perfect lizards are unable to sense the temperature drop soon enough, and go dormant, allowing the few remaining humans to slaughter them. This isn’t exactly a happy ending, though; humans are now trapped between the lizards to the south and advancing glaciers to the north, and while there may be a respite for our particular band of the Rus, humanity’s long-term outlook seems awfully dicey as the book closes.
 

 
In his book Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction, John Rieder reads The Strange Invaders along a number of allegorical lines. First, he notes that it maps and reverses the traditional lines of imperialism; instead of a vigorous northern European invasion of the decadent Southern periphery, Llewellyn presents a vital South launching an attack on the decadent, etiolated north.

I don’t necessarily disagree with Rieder’s take here…but I think it’s important to take into account the fact that this is not just any north we’re talking about here, but Russia in particular. Obviously, the Cold War was not underway in 1934 — but Llewellyn (according to Brian W. Aldiss’ preface) had actually visited the Soviet Union, and appears to have had a better sense of its problems than many of his contemporaries. In any case, there’s no doubt that the northern weakness here is a particularized Russian weakness. The blind obedience to authority, the inflexibility, and the cruelty of the Rus is linked specifically by Llewellyn to Communism.

It was a tale often told, a moral often preached. They had sinned; all mankind had sinned. Marx from whom the world had received the blessing of the Faith had remade the world in a plan of Five years…. The faith had been wronged and the Destruction was the vengeance enacted. Therefore must the faith be honoured strictly by those that survived, and they must to that end give obedience unquestioning, surrender thought and spirit and body to their rulers who were guardians of that faith.

Rieder of course appreciates the satirical fillip (now perhaps rendered into almost a commonplace of anti-communism) of turning the resolutely materialist Marx into a deity. But he never quite links the Russian context to the discussion of peripheries. If one does so, the novel becomes a parable not so much of reversing center and margin, but rather of wars on the margins — of Russia, perhaps, being devoured by its own atavistic, subservient Orientalist weakness.

From this perspective, then, the saurians and the Russ are not in opposition, but are on a continuum. And in fact, there is a fair bit of textual support for the idea that the giant lizards are not the death of the Rus, but their perfection. The ideal of the Rus is unthinking obedience; direction without will. Adun, the protagonist, is caught between his human desires and his society’s demand that he become merely the tool of the Fathers — a kind of machine, like those left in the factory/church and worshiped. “The Fathers and the men they kept to uphold them were not to be questioned,” Adun thinks to himself. “Mind and body they commanded, as the Faith directed. He was nothing. He dared do nothing.” (18)

If Adun has to convince himself to become an object, the giant lizards have no such problems. As Rieder notes, the creatures “hover on the uncanny border between the organic and the mechanical.” In one of the most striking passages of the novel (which Rieder quotes), the creatures are envisioned as a depersonalized collective; a single coherent unity of force.

The plain, where it came down from the river, was alive with inter-weaving movement. They played together in the sun as though its brightness made them glad, running over and under one another, swiftly and in silence, but with an almost fierce alacrity, eager and unhesitating, unceasing. The eye was not quick enough to catch the motion of their rapid, supple bodies that seemed not to move with the effort of muscles but to quiver and leap with an alert life instinct in every part of them. They were brilliant. As he looked, Karasoin saw the play of colour that ran over those great darting bodies, a changing, flashing iridescence like a jewelled mist. Their bodies were green, enamelled in scales like studs of polished jade. But as they writhed and sprang in their playing, points of bronze and gilt winked along their flanks and their throats and bellies as they leaped showed golden and orange, splashed with scarlet. Now and then one would suddenly pause and stand as if turned to a shape of gleaming metal, and then they could see plainly its long, narrow head and slender tail and the smoothly shining body borne on crouching legs that ended in hands like a man’s with long clawed fingers; five.

This is the awesome fulfillment of Ronald Reagan’s “ant heap of totalitarianism.” Stalinism is here embodied not by the proletariat, but by those even below them, the lizards forged into a remorseless, infinitely flexible machine-state. The blind watchmaker forges the revolution, and thus Marxism for Llewellyn will literally, and beautifully, eat itself.

Again, though, just because the lizards are the ultimate totalitarians doesn’t mean that the humans are somehow battling totalitarianism. In 1984, Big Brother is schematically opposed to the human emotions of love, friendship, warmth, and sex. Llewellyn’s vision is less pat. Adun’s love, not to mention his sexual desire, does in fact inspire his resistance to the regime of the Fathers. But that resistance isn’t exactly idyllic. On the contrary, Adun’s passion for the hardly-characterized Erya is almost inseparable from his own pride and desire for power. At one point he threatens (and it is not an idle threat) to kill her if she chooses the captain of the Swords, Karasoin — a murder-lust echoed by his participation in the genocidal slaughter of the Tartars within the city walls. Eventually, Adun does win Erya…by murdering Karasoin after the Sword almost rapes her. Thus, the alternative to mechanized, unfeeling destruction is not love or peace, but rather the cthonic, feeling bloodshed of jealousy, rage, and rape-revenge.

Llewellyn is willing to suggest other possibilities. Erya, for example, has a vision of independence and freedom — though that’s eventually crushed by the ongoing crisis which requires her to get a man for protection or else. Karasoin, before he actually rapes Erya, is ashamed and decides not to attack her — just in time for Adun to hack him apart. And at the book’s end, Adun’s brother Ivan speaks haltingly of the need for men to stop killing each other…and then, of course, he dies of his wounds.

The novel’s flirtations with peace, then, are all cynically inflected; they are raised to be shot down in a frisson of pathos and irony. Both the lizards and the rape-revenge narrative, on the other hand, have a visceral, awful appeal. The beautiful, terrible new force which will inherit the earth; the beautiful, terrible old force that has held the earth: they rush upon each other, soundless or howling, and from their writhing, bloody struggle there rises genre pleasures, old and new — violence, lust, apocalypse, the cleansed earth and the pleasure of watching its filthy cleansing. The Strange Invaders is a bitter reversal of imperialism, a prayer for a more perfectly genocidal imperialism, and — to the extent that its vision is enacted on and powered by Orientalist tropes — arguably an act of imperialism itself.

The final twist of the novel is, perhaps, that, despite its prescient and honorable anti-Stalinism, its apocalyptic vision is ultimately not apocalyptic enough. The saurians, in all their awesome power, and the humans, for all their ugly narrow-mindedness, can neither compare with the power, the ugliness, or the narrow-mindedness of what can’t really compare with the atrocities Stalin was perpetrating while Llewellyn was writing his book. The gigantic force of the state, wielded by a jealous, paranoid madman, was able to generate a holocaust in the Ukraine, and throughout Russia, that makes Llewellyn’s bleak vision — shot through with beauty and with joy at the bleakness — seem positively naive. That’s not Llewellyn’s fault exactly, though. History, indifferent alike to justice and desire, will always be grimmer than dystopia.
 


“Passers-by no longer pay attention to the corpses of starved peasants
on a street in Kharkiv, 1933.”

 

Rock The Apocalypse

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A version of this ran on Madeloud.
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The central thesis of David Janssen and Edward Whitelock’s book Apocalypse Jukebox: The End of the World in American Popular Music is sound — there is a lot of American popular music that deals with the end times. Unfortunately, the vast majority of apocalyptic music at this point in history falls under the rubric of “metal”, a genre in which Janssen and Whitelock have no interest. Instead, the two of them are standard issue rock critics, which means that their canon is comprised of the usual holy trinity: roots rock, punk, and a couple random token black guys.

What this all means is that the Jukebox in the book’s title is probably more important than the Apocalypse. Rock’s canon, and its criticism have never really gotten out of the sixties and fifties — for Greil Marcus and all his bastard heirs, the real music still comes on 45s, or at least sounds like it wants to. For all their claims to revolution and/or apocalypse, roots rock and its criticism are both very much nostalgia exercises, compulsively referring back to…well, to their roots, in blues, country, and whatever other authentic volk music is handy.

The contradiction here is that those volk musics were, in fact, obsessed with future Armageddon, as Jannsen and Whitelock clearly demonstrate in the early, and best, part of the book. From bluegrass duo the Louvin Brothers harmonizing about retribution for sins, to the Spirit of Memphis Quartet calling the Lord on an atomic telephone, to rockabilly bombshell Wanda Jackson comparing herself to the annihilation of Hiroshima in “Fujiyama Mama”, American music demonstrated a communal fascination with Armageddon.

That “communal” bit is key. Individuals die all the time, but civilization goes on — except in the apocalyptic vision, where everybody dies, all at once, and the community itself is destroyed. Apocalypse, then, is in some ways an ultimate vision of togetherness and group identity. Whitelock and Janssen express some surprise that “Fujiyama Mama” was a bigger hit in Japan than in America — but of course it was. The song is talking about Japan, after all. Why wouldn’t the Japanese community embrace it?

Apocalypse, then, serves as a kind of social glue, a common ideology. In bluegrass, the saints will be separated from the sinners; in metal, abject nothingness, variously defined, will consume the world. Organized around apocalypse, both of these forms put a high premium on adherence to strict formal structures — dedication to a shared communal aesthetic vision. As Jello Biafra noted, no high school gym; teacher ever had as much success in getting kids to dress alike as metal does. Everybody dies together, so everybody lives together. Nobody stands out.

And in rock? Well, that’s the rub, isn’t it. There is no shared vision in the kind of critically acclaimed rock that Whitelock and Janssen are discussing. On the contrary, the whole point of the genius rockstar is a hyper-cultivated, hyper-marketed, endlessly fetishized individuality. The artists that Janssen and Whitehead have chosen to analyze are deliberately unalike — they use apocalypse in different, individualized ways. For Leonard Cohen, the apocalypse is a metaphor for his divorce; for Green Day it’s a metaphor for adolescence; for Devo, it’s a metaphor, contradictorily, for deindividuation and conformity. Regular folks may all go out the same when the fire comes, but each genius has a different end.

Whatever there other eccentricities, though, the daring individualists that Whitelock and Janssen love do share one trait in common: ambivalence. They’re all complex…or, if you prefer (and in the case of Michael Stipe, literally) inarticulate. Apocalyptic songs tend to celebrate the great simplification of the end — God will set your fields on fire, the traditional bluegrass lyrics insist; trying is not enough, roars Khanate. There’s not a whole lot of wiggle room there. But for Whitelock and Janssen, the apocalypse is yet another excuse to validate, not self-obliterating finality, but self-absorbed complexity. Dylan may insist that you have to serve somebody, but his burnt-out Beat poet doggerel mush ensures that, from song to song, it’s almost impossible to tell who — or, as the authors rhapsodize, Dylan’s audience keeps “bumping into mirrors on all sides.” Arthur Lee enjoys “playing with cacophony,” multi-tracking his voice singing different lyrics simultaneously in order to create a sense of “unreliability” and ambiguity. Devo both embraced and satirized pop success. R.E.M., through the power of refusing to enunciate, both did and did not make sense. They’re all having their Armageddon and maintaining their ironic distance from it too.

Which is to say that, as I read through this book, I started to suspect that for most of these performers, and, indeed, for the authors, the apocalypse was not so much a matter of belief as of self-dramatization. Like Samuel Jackson in Pulp Fiction, what the apocalyptic rhetoric means is less important than the fact that it is “some cold-blooded shit.” It’s a way of demonstrating rootsy bona-fides, much like boasting about your sexual prowess, or bragging about shooting your woman. The apocalypse is turned from a negation of self into a validation of it. The vision of a (supposedly) more authentic community is reified as part of some individual genius’ ambivalent contradictions. The go-to figure here is, of course, Harry Smith, whose “social music” volume of the Anthology of American Folk Music collected examples of 20s and 30s performers like Blind Willie Johnson warning of the coming end.

For critics like Janssen and Whitelock, however, those warnings become not literal calls to clean up your act, but secret subcultural testaments to Smith’s genius. They rhapsodize about Smith’s “sequencing” and about his decision to give no information about the race of the musicians he is appropriating — eclipsing their communal identity with his own liberal, proto-hippie, idealistic individualism. Smith’s final message, according to the authors, is “This is an imperfect world we have created, let us not uncreate it.” They limn this as apocalyptic — but surely it’s precisely the opposite. Celebrating imperfection, claiming that “we” have made the world — that’s not eschatological. It’s humanist.

At the end of the book, the authors more or less admit that humanism is where their sympathies lie. Working off of feminist writers like Lee Quinby, they highlight the cruelty and exclusionary nature of apocalyptic thinking, and praise Sleater Kinney for, refusing to “do ‘no future’ punk.”

It’s fair enough to point out apocalypse’s downside, certainly…but humanism has its problems as well. Specifically, to put your faith in the human (or in your rockstar heroes) is the definition of worshipping idols (and, indeed, the authors point out that poor John Coltrane has had a Christian church established in his name.) The human isn’t divine; to pretend that it is, you have to steal mojo from somewhere — a communal past, say — and then pretend that that theft is an act of generosity or continuity, betraying the faith you claim to espouse. A personal apocalypse isn’t an apocalypse at all; it’s blasphemy. If rock is the devil’s music, as Janssen and Whitelock ambivalently claim, it is not because it embraces apocalypse, but because it doesn’t.