Day 15 - "8 1/2 Minutes" by The Dismemberment Plan (1999)

The post-Cold War era was a confusing time for apocalypse watchers. While the Soviets had always been a conveniently frightening enemy looming over the horizon (Sarah Palin, famously, could see them from her house), with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent evaporation of the Communist threat it became increasingly hard to agree on who would bring about the end of the world. This is if we were even capable of imagining the end – in Francis Fukuyama’s words, the fall of Communism represented the “end of history”. Things couldn’t get better than this.

Movies in the 1990s therefore struggled to agree on a dangerous antagonist to engage in the apocalyptic tit-for-tat of “blow up everything until the final reel, and then be blown up yourself” template. Viruses threatened to kill us all in Outbreak (1995) and 12 Monkeys (1995); Aliens arrived on a mission to exterminate everything in sight in Independence Day (1996); while giant lumps of rock twice worried audiences in Armageddon (1998) and Deep Impact (1998).

While things were far from perfect in the late nineties, much of the music from the period expresses a sense of frustration which the seemingly comfortable and nonchalant status quo. A sense of anomie pervades the work of some of the most interesting musicians of the period, which often combined with a generalised sense of a fear of something as the year 2000 approached. This is portrayed perfectly in today’s song from the Dismemberment Plan’s 1999 breakthrough album Emergency and I. Here, the apocalypse can at least be seen as a real event in a mass of  unreality – as, contra-Fukuyama, it at least it imagines that change is possible. Referring to the possibility of the sun burning out, the apocalypse here serves as an event that will jolt the Western world out of its inherent complacency to realise exactly what matters. The “8 ½ minutes” of the title refer to the amount of time light takes to get from the sun to the Earth.  If the sun went out, we’d only have those minutes remaining. With only eight and a half minutes to survive, would we realise the emptiness and pettiness of everyday life and focus on those we truly loved? Or would we, Strangelove style, start making crazy plans to survive the end of the world (better start digging…)? It’s an important question, and asked well.

Yet as with many apocalyptic films, TV shows and songs of the past ten years, despite imagining the end of the world as we know it – in fact, even thinking that it might be something to break up the dull routine we find ourselves in – “8 ½ minutes” is driven by nostalgia for “what we’d lose”. The apocalypse here, as in Derren Brown’s recent “experiment” of bringing about a Zombie apocalypse for one individual, doesn’t even remind us of our own mortality, but of how lucky we are to be blessed by the friends and family who surround us. While this is a laudable aim, the possibility of apocalypse to imagine fundamental change gets lost somewhere in the mix with this kind of attitude, which paradoxically valorises the society it attacks. This remains, as we will see in coming days, a problem for more recent apocalyptic songs as well…

8 ½ Minutes (Morrison, Caddell, Axelson, Easley, 1999)

Oh, launched all the world’s nukes this morning
Hoping it would kick-start something
Some of them went off course and hit the moon instead
It was kinda pretty.
Hasn’t been a whole lot of looting
On the other hand, oh, it’s fucking freezing
Someone on TV said something about going underground…
Guess we better start digging.

What were you doing for those eight and a half minutes?
Was it mean, was it petty, or did you realize you were sorry
And that you love them?

I saw an astronomer break down on CNN
He said, “I’m a scientist, not your fucking clergyman!”
And no one’s going nowhere ‘cause the cars are all frozen
They give the power plants ten days

What were you doing for those eight and a half minutes?
Was it mean, was it petty, or did you realize you were sorry
And that you love them?

But the sky is like a dome of black metal flake
And stars bleed together in phosphorescent lakes
And a dead black disk slides silently overhead
It’s fucking beautiful is what it is.

What were you doing for those eight and a half minutes?
Was it mean, was it petty, or did you realize you were sorry
And that you love them?

When I die I’m going to heaven
Leave it to the cockroaches and the 7-11s
But it’d be nice to think we could get it right down here just once 

Listen on Spotify:  Apopalypse: Apocalyptic Advent Calendar

Buy: http://www.amazon.co.uk/8-1-2-Minutes/dp/B005Z2ZA9E/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1355583981&sr=8-1-fkmr0