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How is it {that a} catchy melody, stable groove, or infectious hook could make you need to dance to even the darkest and most nihilistic of ideas? Prince’s “1999” is an authorized banger that simply so occurs to be set on the sting of nuclear armageddon. “Everyone’s bought a bomb / We might all die any day,” he sings. However, he’s nonetheless going to bop his life away with the assistance of some funky guitar licks.
Trendy English’s “I Soften With You” is likely one of the best-known new wave hits from the ‘80s, a lot in order that it as soon as appeared in a Burger King business. In accordance with singer Robbie Gray, nevertheless, the music is definitely a few couple having intercourse in the course of a nuclear warfare.
Discover a sample? Not surprisingly, the ’80s had been replete with songs influenced by nuclear anxiety.
Any such nihilism can comprise echoes of a craving for a world and an existence that actually do imply one thing, for a universe that isn’t huge and random.
Nihilistic impulses are nothing new in pop music, to say nothing of extra outré genres like goth, industrial, and heavy steel’s numerous offshoots. Who can overlook Robert Smith wailing “It doesn’t matter if all of us die” within the opening moments of The Treatment’s Pornography or Depeche Mode’s Dave Gahan intoning “Demise is all over the place” on Black Celebration? However I spotted this anew through two latest singles that exist at reverse ends of the musical spectrum.
Someday in late 2023, Instagram’s algorithms selected to inundate my feed with clips from Juliet Ivy’s “We’re All Consuming Every Different.” Launched on Ivy’s playpen EP, it’d simply be essentially the most joyous ode to nihilism I’ve ever heard.
The music is undeniably catchy due to its dreamy textures and Ivy’s breathy vocals, however it’s additionally shot via with such sentiments as “We validate our fantasies to really feel like we’re particular inside” and “We don’t know learn how to settle for we’re only a product of an opportunity.” After which there’s the refrain, which Ivy sings with pure jubilation and wild abandon:
However we’re all gonna die
Decompose into daffodils and dandelions
The bees will use our flowers for no matter they like
Make the honey that our grandkids will put inside their morning tea
It’s the factor of life
Lots of Ivy’s lyrics oppose the Christian view. Even so, her music is just not with out some reality. When she sings, “We paint our face with mind / Pretending we’re not curious,” she nails our fashionable tendency to rationalize the wild world round us to make it safer and extra manageable. And although the Christian ought to undeniably reject Ivy’s assertion that we’re all simply merchandise of random probability who’re “much less like gods however extra like vegetation / Who can’t cease making up causes we’re alive,” she hits a nerve there, as properly. Particularly, our determined scramble to search out some semblance of which means in our lives, an impulse that usually leads us to search out solace in intercourse, relationships, cash, careers, and materials possessions—all good issues, however hardly able to offering any true sense of which means or goal. (It’s not for nothing that Qohelet tells us in Ecclesiastes that God “has put eternity into man’s heart.”)
As for the music’s refrain—which will get catchier the extra I hear it—I discover it humbling as soon as I push via the nihilism. Whether or not this was Ivy’s intent or not, her flowery (no pun supposed) lyrics are a reminder that I don’t stay a singular, atomistic, autonomous existence. I’m not disconnected from the world, however quite, am topic to its cycles, to entropy and decay, similar to all of my fellow creatures—on this facet of eternity, anyway. I’ll die sometime, and my physique will decompose. And although I could not change into the honey for my grandkids’ morning tea, my hope is that I’ll nonetheless be related to them even lengthy after I’m gone.
Whereas Juliet Ivy finds a way of launch, even euphoria, in embracing life’s meaninglessness, Beth Gibbons adopts a extra somber perspective. Gibbons is best-known because the vocalist for Portishead, one of many main lights of the ’90s trip-hop scene due to their haunting mix of hip-hop, jazz, digital music, and cinematic soundscapes. And naturally, via Gibbons’ personal world-weary voice, which continually appears like she’s on the breaking point and might imbue any lyric with an ocean of emotion with little greater than a whisper.
Portishead has solely launched three studio albums within the final 30 years, all of them masterpieces, however Gibbons is poised to launch her first correct solo album, Lives Outgrown, later this 12 months. (2002’s Out of Season was really a collaboration with Rustin Man, aka Paul Webb of Talk Talk fame.) A decade within the making, Lives Outgrown contains ten songs impressed by Gibbons’ experiences with ageing, motherhood, menopause, and bidding farewell to buddies and family members who’ve handed on.
These experiences manifest themselves within the album’s pastoral first single, “Floating on a Second,” with Gibbons realizing and finally embracing the frailty of existence. She sings of being “a passenger on no abnormal journey” and “touring on a voyage the place the residing / They’ve by no means been.” As for the music’s refrain, it’s nowhere close to as ebullient as “We’re All Consuming Every Different,” however nonetheless conveys the same outlook:
I’m floating on a second
Don’t know the way lengthy
Nobody is aware of
Nobody can keep
All going to nowhere
All going, make no mistake
Because the music fades out, Gibbons leaves the listener with a closing thought that’s half lamentation and half acceptance: “It’s not that I don’t need to return … It simply reminds us that each one now we have is right here and now.”
As with Ivy’s music, Gibbons’ “Floating on a Second” could also be discomfiting for the Christian. In any case, her assertion that “all now we have is right here and now” appears to contradict any perception in an everlasting life. However that interpretation could also be too simplistic. Once more, Gibbons’ music appears to speak a reality, albeit a partial one.
As a result of we consider in heaven, Christians typically face the temptation to denigrate this world: as the nice Larry Norman famously stated on 1972’s Solely Visiting This Planet, “This world is just not my residence / I’m simply passing via.” However doing so dangers dismissing the valuable earthly existence that God has given us as a part of his good creation, an existence the place—due to our everlasting nature—each single second counts.
These phrases typically attributed to Nineteenth-century Quaker missionary Stephen Grellet had been behind my thoughts as I listened to Gibbons’ single: “I shall move via this world however as soon as. Any good due to this fact, that I can do or any kindness I can present to any human being, let me do it now. Let me not defer or neglect it, for I shall not move this fashion once more.”
There’s nothing nihilistic in these phrases, however quite, an admonition to acknowledge the significance of our lives on this world and act accordingly. Not as a result of this world is all there’s for us, however the precise reverse—and it’s in opposition to that backdrop of eternity that our lives finally have any which means or significance.
Maybe as a result of I’m nearing fifty myself, Gibbons’ somber music resonates with me on a a lot deeper stage than Ivy’s upbeat pop. I can really feel my very own physique (and metabolism) slowing down; I really feel extra aches and listen to extra cracks and pops then I did even this time final 12 months. And my spouse and I are keenly conscious that we’re coming into the stage of life that entails seeing time catch as much as our dad and mom and their technology. The dissonance of Ivy’s music, however, attributable to its seamless mix of nihilistic absurdism and irrepressibly cheery tone, is just doable to take care of—and solely sounds acceptable—while you nonetheless have your complete life, with all of its desires and potentialities, forward of you.
Nihilistic impulses in music, be they from Prince and Trendy English or Juliet Ivy and Beth Gibbons, don’t upset or scare me. Nor do they symbolize harmful challenges to my religion. Reasonably, I discover them useful, even illuminating. And dare I say, inspiring. And never simply because the songs themselves are nice. Any such nihilism can comprise echoes of a craving for a world and an existence that actually do imply one thing, for a universe that isn’t huge and random. Which is exactly the form of existence—and universe—which were given to us.
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