From REM to Johnny Cash, what is the best song about the rapture?
Music follows culture like a shadow. From The Beatles to Chappel Roan, from good times to bad, whatever is happening in the world, music will be a representative of those events until the end of the road.
Speaking of, a story which always seems to plague the world is its impending end. Whether you’re religious and worry about divine intervention bringing everything to a close, or an atheist who revels in us godless creations destroying ourselves, people everywhere are frequently worrying about what will eventually turn our beautiful world to dust. With these fears constantly lingering at the back of pessimistic or existentialist minds, it’s not a surprise that many people have written songs about it.
As a plethora of creative people tackle the potential end of the world and it won’t surprise you to hear that those depictions vary from one another. Some artists opted to write a song laced with doom and gloom, a reflection of the impending conclusion; meanwhile, other performers opt to go down a more joy-filled route, essentially submitting to the fact that they will never be able to stop the Earth’s spin to the end, and therefore, may well have fun while it still turns.
Look at REM’s offering, for example, with their 1987 hit ‘It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)’, when they decided to go down the more joy-oriented route. The references made in the song are disconnected, mixed with a jaunty rhythm that doesn’t reflect the real world, meaning the listener isn’t given a whole lot to dwell on, occupied instead by a fun and catchy chorus. Haven’t we all sung along to that section of the song at some point in our lives? Despite how sad the subject may be, at the execution of those lines, it is hard to do anything but smile and dance.
“The words come from everywhere. I’m extremely aware of everything around me, whether I am in a sleeping state, awake, dream-state or just in day-to-day life,” said Michael Stipe when explaining the abstract nature of the album, “There’s a part in [the song] that came from a dream where I was at Lester Bang’s birthday party, and I was the only person there whose initials weren’t LB.”
Contrast REM’s approach to someone like Johnny Cash, who opted for a much more serious and religious approach to the end of days with his song ‘The Man Comes Around’. Cash’s seriousness in this tone is a reflection of the fact that he genuinely thought the world was going to end, as he awoke from a dream having had an amalgamation of the Queen quote a line in the Bible to him. “Johnny Cash, you’re just like a thorn tree in a whirlwind,” she allegedly said, which was a line taken from ‘Job 38’. Cash took this as a sign of the end of days and so decided to write about it, conveying the seriousness of the situation in every second.
This brings us to how you decide what the best song about the end of the world is, and I should say, if you overthink or are a pessimist, you should stop reading now. Okay, hello fellow optimists, glad you’re still with me. Well, I believe that the best song about the end of the world likely changes depending on how real the threat of the problem is.
We can sing along to REM’s tune with glee right now, but if the doomsday clock were seconds from midnight, our response to the track would more likely be, ‘This is serious Michael, why are you talking shit?’
Similarly with Johnny Cash, as right now, we can hear the song and appreciate it as the byproduct of a dream, as a fictional piece of storytelling rather than an actual foreshadowing of the end of days. However, the song would be given even more artistic merit if we stood at the edge of apocalypse, an unforgiving God ready to smite us in moments, with your last two thoughts being, ‘I wish I’d told [insert name] that I loved them’ and ‘Damn, Johnny Cash was bang on’.
The best song about the end of days varies depending on how certain we are that the end of days are here. If we’re not, we would more likely say one of the more upbeat offerings from Billy Joel, Prince or Europe take the crown. However, if circumstances were more dire, we would likely turn to songs by The Doors, Johnny Cash and Tool, who give quite accurate depictions of the mood which would surround the end of everything we love.
What’s the best song about the rapture? It’s obvious, but wait till I tell you.
