Day 21 - Britney/"Four Horsemen of 2012" by The Klaxons (2007)

 

In the White House situation room, President Obama paced nervously.
 

“The asteroid’s getting closer, damn it! We’ve got to use nuclear weapons!” Gently, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta squeezed the president’s arm. It was a long time since he'd seen the Commander in Chief as agitated as this.

“Give Britney another minute sir. If anyone can dance away the apocalypse, it’s her”. Obama sighed and looked out of the window, stoic, but with fear growing in his eyes. He knew this strategy was high risk. Dancing didn’t always avert a crisis. At times, it even made things worse.  With a shudder he recalled the Irish attempt to use a Jedward\Riverdance mash-up to solve the Euro-zone crisis. But what choice did they have? If the Mayan prophecy was to be averted, then he’d just have to trust her…

 If Britney Spears has taught me anything (and believe me, she’s taught me a lot) it’s that there is only one way to avert the apocalypse today – as the above video shows, even as we speak crack teams of hipsters in highly impractical leather outfits are gathering in sewers/underground clubs the world over to try and dance away the end of the world. Either that or the apocalyptic events are causing them to have some kind of fit (are the mad convulsions in the middle voluntary, I wonder, or a reaction to fear?) It’s comforting to know that even when we feel  abandoned and alone in this world, celebrities are still there to protect us.

I first read about the December 21^st 2012 prophecy in 1994. Sitting on the back step of my house on a blazingly hot summer’s day, I remember imagining exactly where I would be when the fatal moment hit. For some reason at that age I had the deluded belief that I would become a police officer and move to New Zealand (a kind of reverse Flight of the Conchords, I suppose). I could vividly picture the scene as I rolled through a small Kiwi town in my patrol car as a terrible earthquake ripped through the ground and I jumped from the vehicle, the heart of my well-toned handsome body pounding amid the thunderous roar of apocalyptic destruction, screaming to my partner that this marked the end of everything.

The reference to a well-toned and handsome body should be enough to clue you in on the fact that I’m no prophet – my 11 year old self certainly didn’t ever daydream about blogging in Manchester as the apocalypse came to pass – but my fascination with the 2012 date is one of the things which drove me towards a career in examining apocalyptic speculation. Of course, my young self was incredibly naïve – I remember writing a short story in school in 1994 featuring a man who discovered that the Mayan prophecy was being covered up, and being killed just as he was able to release the information on to the internet to inform the world. Obviously, I now realise that putting information on the internet is the perfect way to convince people that a prophecy is false. How’s that for a conspiracy?

The 2012 prophecy itself is derived from the Mayan long count calendar, which began in 3114 BCE and comes to a conclusion, well, today.  This is the finale of the thirteenth pik or baktun cycle a series of 395 year cycles within the grand cycle itself. While there are relatively few references to what the Mayans actually thought would happen at the end of the cycle, it is unlikely that they actually expected doomsday – this was, after all, just one a series of long count cycles. Nonetheless, there are some hints that some did expect catastrophic events. A tablet which came to popular prominence in 2006, but discovered in Mexico some years earlier, for example, suggests that the mysterious god Bolon Yokte will descend at the end of the 13^th b’ak’tun cycle. A similar tablet was discovered just this year in Guatemala. Nobody really knows much about Bolon Yokte, but he is probably a war god, associated with both the start of the current cycle and the underworld.

The Mayan prophecy itself came to prominence mainly through the new age movement – popularised by thinkers such as Josee Arguelles and Trevor McKenna - although it has also been linked to UFO and increasingly conspiracy belief in recent years. Perhaps, today heralds alien invasion, or a shifting of the poles, or the collision of the planet Niburu with Earth. Or perhaps, as some new age theorists have suggested, it simply heralds the birth of a new age of consciousness, which quite frankly, wouldn’t be all that bad. Regardless of what actually happens, what better song to conclude with than the Klaxons’ paranoid imagining of the “four horsemen” marching out today? I’ll see you all tomorrow for a dose of apocalyptic disappointment… if we’re still here, that is…

 

Four Horsemen of 2012 (Reynolds, Righton, Taylor-Davis, Halperin, 2007)

 

There’s a half man, half horse, that still pollutes my thoughts

As he rides on a flame in the sky
He comes through the centuries with me on his entries
The kids and the cats watch him fly
Please catch that half horse as he murders my thoughts,

The fragments of flames anyway.
Halfman, half horse as he still pollutes my thoughts as he rides on a flame in the sky

Four horsemen, twenty twelve!
Klaxons not centaurs!

Won’t you please catch that horse as he murders my thoughts.
I’m left with the fragments and flames

Won’t you please catch that horse as he murders my thoughts

 I’m left with the fragments and flames

Four horsemen, twenty twelve!
Klaxons not centaurs!

There’s a half man half horse that rides through my thoughts as he rides on a flame in the sky.
He comes through the centuries with me on his entries
The kids and the cats watch him fly

There’s a half man half horse that still pollutes my thoughts as he rides on a flame in the sky
He comes through the centuries with me on his entries
The kids and the cats watch him fly

Four horsemen, twenty twelve!
Klaxons not centaurs!

Listen on Spotify: Apopalypse: Apocalyptic Advent Calendar

Buy:  http://www.amazon.co.uk/Four-Horsemen-Of-2012/dp/B003TUMYDY/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1356080132&sr=8-2