Day 13 - "Woe, Woe... The Great Fall" by Jerusalem (1987)

 

It’s a sad fact that most people live their daily lives entirely oblivious to the joys of Christian hair metal. Just think about it. Today in America there are at least twenty to thirty respectable, clean cut, nicely trimmed pastors out there who had a hand Christian music’s expansion into the mainstream world of popular metal in the mid-1980s.  Next time you’re in church, take a look at the preacher. Could he be one of the pioneers? Does he have a Van Halen glint in his eye? How would he look in spandex and leather? Actually, it’s probably best to stop thinking about it at that point.

Leading the charge were STRYPER (standing for Salvation Through Redemption, Yielding Peace, Encouragement and Righteousness - pictured above) who managed to have a good deal of success on MTV in the days when the channel showed music rather than simply filming drunk people wandering around Newcastle. STRYPER certainly didn’t look like your traditional evangelists – it’s hard to imagine Billy Graham or Dwight Moody ever squeezing into a tight spandex jumpsuit – but they saw their music as a form of ministry and were rewarded with three gold and one platinum record.

Yet STRYPER were only one part of a wider Christian metal scene which attempted to merge the seemingly incompatible worlds of heavy metal music and Evangelical Christianity. Whereas the music of the Jesus Movement was very much in line with the popular music of its time (and has aged quite well), Christian metal of the mid-1980s was very much in line with the popular music of its time, and has thus aged quite badly. Imagine the Bon Jovi or Poison hits of the era, but with an added sprinkling of Jesus, and you get the idea. Unsurprisingly, though, the combination of metal, traditionally a genre which revelled in destruction, with Christianity led to a focus on its own destructive text – the book of Revelation.

Jerusalem, were one of the key bands within the movement. Formed in Sweden in 1975, the band were at the forefront of merging metal with Christianity, releasing albums up until 1992, and recently reuniting to record new material. Their 1987 album Dancing on the Head of the Serpent  was one of their most controversial, depicting (as the cover to the right shows) a jackbooted foot stamping on a demon’s head – an picture that many Swedish stores felt was uncomfortably close to neo-Nazi imagery. The album was stuffed full of apocalyptic imagery charting the destruction of the powers of darkness, including today’s track, which condemns the evils of the Whore of Babylon, proclaiming her downfall as found in Revelation 18. The “Whore” has traditionally been seen to represent the corrupt powers of the world, and Jerusalem here interpret it to refer to the general pollution which infects the secular world, without being overly specific as to what exactly they condemn.

Woe, Woe… The Great Fall (Christiansson, 1987)

Woe, Woe, great Babylon
Woe, Woe, you re a great fool, Babylon
You're gonna drink your cup
Whether you want it or not

The kings of the earth will cry over you
Your filth and adultery is tormenting them
Yes, fallen, Yes, fallen is Babylon the great
The cup of God's wrath is what they have to taste

Come, come, watch and see
Where is her glory and luxury?
Woe, Woe, the great prostitute is gone
Doom on the sinful Babylon

She's been like a queen, but she's now like a widow
and all of her wisdom, trust and hope have vanished
She gathered herself with the Beast and his servants
In pride she decieved herself unto judgement

Chorus:
Come, come and watch the scriptures fulfilled
Come, come and watch, and see the signs of the times
Come, come you nations, great and small
City of power, will fall, will fall

Wash, wash your hands, wash off the dirt
and clean your hearts, you citizens on earth
Make up your mind, it's time, it's time
Saints and sinners do not drink the same wine

Chorus:
Come, come and watch, the justice from Heaven
Come, come and watch, the signs of the age
Come, come you nations, great and small
The King of kings is callin’ you all

And she's falling, falling, falling!

Listen on Spotify: Apopalypse: Apocalyptic Advent Calendar

Buy: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Woe-The-Great-Fall/dp/B005J5RC34/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1355349471&s=dmusic&sr=1-1 

Day 12 - "99 Red Balloons" by Nena (1984)

 

There are perhaps a few famous tunes that you think about when contemplating songs about the end of the world. For example, you’re probably automatically musing on REM’s “It’s the End of the World As We Know It (And I feel fine)” right now. It’s understandable – few apocalyptic songs have been able to enter the public consciousness to such an impressive effect. One of the few others which enjoys a similar penetration is a tune which many people don’t even realise is apocalyptic – Nena’s 1984 hit “99 red balloons”.

Originally released in the singer’s native Germany as “99 Luftballons” in March 1983, the song was internationalised with an English translation and the same, thumping, classic eighties sound (check out that synth!) to achieve hit status across the world. The lyrical content of the song doesn’t suggest that it was destined to become an all-time classic, being, to put it frankly, bizarre. Nena stops to buy some balloons in a toy shop with a friend, releasing them into the summer sky. A software malfunction causes the military to mistake them for an enemy incursion, and warmongering generals snap to attention amid ever-increasing tensions and plunge the world into all out nuclear war. But in a danceable way.

The upshot of this finds the singer left all alone in a destroyed city, looking for some kind of evidence of humanity’s existence – finding a lone red balloon she releases it, the last vestige of a dead race. Bleak doesn’t do it justice – although the music doesn’t once threaten to give away its darker undertones.

While the situation recorded in “99 Red Balloons” seems slightly ludicrous as a cause of nuclear holocaust, perhaps the most frightening thing about the song is that its scenario came very close to being reality. In a slightly terrifying instance of life imitating art, on 26^th September 1983 Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov (right) was on duty at the Serpukhov-15 bunker, an early warning site outside Moscow, when he saw a satellite warning of nuclear attack. As this coincided with the start of a large NATO exercise in Europe and tensions were running high following the USSR’s downing of a Korean passenger jet three weeks previously, such an attack did not seem all that unlikely. Initially dismissing the first attack alert, you can imagine the panic when a second, third, fourth and fifth flashed up on the system. Petrov had a life or death decision. His panicked superiors wanting to know whether he believed the attack to be real (and thus necessitate the launch of a full nuclear response), Petrov was required to provide confirmation that the onslaught was an actual attack, or to make a gut-decision and declare it a false alarm. Given that we’re still here, you can guess which choice he made.

Reassuringly it wasn’t anything as random as a sudden flight of balloons which caused the meltdown in Russian early warning systems. Instead, it was the entirely unpredictable phenomenon of the sun’s reflection on clouds, which some rather primitive satellites decided to interpret as missile launches. It must have been a relief for Nena to realise that her song was so far removed from reality…

99 Red Balloons (Fahrenkrog-Petersen-Karges-McAlea, 1983)

You and I in a little toy shop,

Buy a bag of balloons with the money we’ve got

Set them free at the break of dawn

Till one by one they were gone

Back in the base, bugs in the software

Flash the message something’s out there

Floating in the summer sky

99 red balloons go by

99 red balloons floating in the summer sky

Panic bells, it’s red alert

There’s something here from somewhere else

The war machine springs to life

Opens up one eager eye

Focusing it on the sky

Where 99 red balloons go by

99 decision street, 99 ministers meet

To worry, worry, super-scurry

Call the troops out in a hurry,

This is what we’ve waited for,
This is it boys, this is war

The President is on the line

As 99 red balloons go by

99 knights of the air

Ride super hi-tech jet fighters

Everyone’s a superhero

Everyone’s a Captain Kirk

With orders to identify

To clarify and classify
Scramble in the summer sky,

99 red balloons go by

As 99 red balloons go by…

99 dreams I have had

In every one a red balloon

It’s all over and I’m standing pretty

In this dust that was a city

If I could find a souvenir

Just to prove the world was here

And here is a red balloon

I think of you and let it go.

Listen on Spotify: Apopalypse: Apocalyptic Advent Calendar

Buy:   http://www.amazon.co.uk/99-Red-Balloons/dp/B002VJAU30/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1355301024&sr=8-3

Day 11 - "Ooh, You Gotta Have Apocalypse" by Barbershopera (2011)

 

Listen to full track here: http://www.robcastell.com/listen.php

Given that we're half way through the countdown to the end of the world (on this blog – the Mayan count reached half way in about 551 BC), and that there was no day 10 ½ to mark the occasion, today seemed a good time to take a breather from the general destruction of everything and retreat to erm, the general destruction of everything in comedy.  If you can’t laugh at the end of the world (or any phenomenon capable of producing the Left Behind novels) then there you’d probably collapse under the weight of sheer apocalyptic misery (see 1984 BBC film Threads for a textbook example of how such grimness can be achieved). As Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove showed in 1964, the apocalyptic logic of nuclear war in particular was more than capable of raising a smile, and more recent efforts, such as Seeking a Friend for the End of the World have tried to make romantic comedies out of the apocalypse. Indeed, biblical apocalypse as a genre presumes a critique of the world and a radical change to the status quo, usually described in highly symbolic, if not surreal, language. As such, the book of Revelation has always been a bit of a draw for those who revel in the absurd.

Barbershopera are a vocal group who do exactly what their name suggests. The three male and one female member of the group use their impressive harmonies to produce shows which are marked by a hilarious absurdity. Having started on stories set in the world of barber shops, they have since expanded into classic literature such as The Three Musketeers and, of course, the Apocalypse. Apocalypse No! tells the story of the four, no, make that three horsemen of the apocalypse who have been stood up by Death on a mission to bring about the end of the world. In his place, they employ primary school teacher Beth after a mix-up about the location of a child’s birthday party (“… here, at the St. Anne’s Leisure Centre?”/ “Satan’s…Satan’s Leisure Centre, not St. Anne’s”).   The plot, which reveals how unsuited each of the Horsemen are for their jobs (“You know sometimes when you get summoned to do an apocalypse and you think – why are we doing this? Is it really necessary?”)  is entirely silly, but is undeniably very funny and well worth a listen. The show’s first song, “Ooh, you’ve gotta have apocalypse” is pretty much my theme tune at present – beautifully sung, completely apocalyptic, and a probably quite accurate appeal to God to destroy us all. After all, if the world does end on December 21^st, surely the fact that Piers Morgan has television shows in on two continents must be the ultimate sign of our depravity?

Barbershopera have a lovely website where you can buy their music, and will also be on Radio 4 on Christmas Eve, so make sure you check them out!

Ooh, You Gotta Have Apocalypse! (Castell and Sadler, 2011)

Ooh you gotta have apocalypse

It really is the biz you’ve got to blow it to bits

Please don’t be put off by this, but we’ve gotta put a stop to this,

The only remaining option is apocalypse!

You see there’s inequality and poverty and all the trees are being felled

It’s ecological hell

Yes, the bio diversity is in serious adversity

Cos if they’re not making the cities get bigger

They’re digging another oil well

They won’t stop expanding

They need a firm hand

And though we understand

You hadn’t planned it out this way
For homo sapiens the race is run

The time is come

For you to unfurl the end of the world

So won’t you bring it about today?

It’s the doobie-doobie-doobie-do-doomsday

It’s all we’ve gotta say
And though we know the truth may hurt,
It would be worse to leave this curse upon the earth,

Than to obliterate the human race

So shout horary for doobie-do-doomsday

Doomsday, doomsday, doomsday, doomsday…

They’ve got economies in crisis, they’ve got vices and sin,

They need enlightening over which items go in the recycling

And which don’t – and they won’t take control of their souls

And they still can’t cure the common cold

[Achoo!] – [Bless you!]

They bottle water then they make you pay,

When you could have just got it from the tap anyway,

They gave Piers Morgan his own show,

There’s no solution

And some of them are still unwilling to believe in evolution

We want a rinky-dinky-donky –ram-a-lama Armageddon

That’s where we should be headin’

Cos the human race is treading on thin ice,

Don’t think twice, we’ve been nice

But these guys are ready for Armageddon

So won’t you say it’s doomsday

And shoot from the hip

And let rip this apocalypse?

Listen on Spotify: Apopalypse: Apocalyptic Advent Calendar

Buy: http://www.barbershopera.com/?page_id=252

Day 10 - "The Last Battle" by Mike Johnson

As our breakneck tour through the music of the Jesus Movement comes to an end, there is no better place to conclude than the climactic battle between good and evil. Mike Johnson’s powerful imagining of this last great confrontation is well worth a listen not just for its excellent horn section (which adds  meatiness to its tale of destruction) but also for the its exploration of the horror of the final battle, a theme which is often lost in Christian rock focused on Christ’s return.

To understand exactly what Mike is talking about in this song, it’s necessary to have a basic understanding of the “millennium” described in chapter 20 of the Book of Revelation. The chapter imagines the arrival of an angel who “seized the dragon, that ancient serpent, who is the devil, or Satan, and bound him for a thousand years”. During this period, those who had died for Jesus “came to life and reigned with Christ a thousand years”. This thousand year period has been hugely controversial, for it seems to presume that there will be a physical reign of Christ on earth, in which the Saints (who are currently persecuted) will finally enjoy dominion. Because this point of view imagines Jesus returning before the millennium, it is often called premillennialism. As a result of some of the more elaborate ideas advocated by extreme premillennialists (Free food! Free drink! Free sex!), the belief was generally discouraged from the time of St. Augustine (354-430) onwards. Augustine claimed that Revelation 20 did not actually refer to any future period of time, but instead represented a spiritual binding of Satan which took place at the resurrection of Christ (amillennialism – or “no millennium”). Despite the continued antipathy of most of the divines in my Fantasy Theologians all-time best XI (Aquinas, Luther, Calvin), the belief in a premillennial return of Christ persisted and was espoused by both radicals (see the carnage at Münster) and conservatives (see 17^th century Cambridge professor Joseph Mede). For the sake of completeness I should also mention a final millennial position – the idea that everything will slowly improve, and Christ will return at the end of the millennium. This form of postmillennialism is far too optimistic for nearly everybody on our countdown, with the exception of “The Spokesmen” from last week (“What about the Peace Corps organization? Don’t forget the work of the United Nations” – thanks boys, we won’t!).

Indeed, nearly all of our song writers so far have imagined a premillennial return of Christ. Yet despite predicting a thousand years of peace, Revelation also tell us that “when the thousand years are over, Satan will be released from his prison and will go out to deceive the nations in the four corners of the earth”. Premillennialists therefore believe that Satan will gather together all of those who have secretly resented Christ’s rule and march “across the breadth of the earth” to surround “the camp of God’s people, the city he loves.” We might well ask exactly where these rebels will come from – after all, a thousand years of peace reigned over by Christ sounds pretty good. Yet as premillennialists are quick to remind us, people who never knew the old world of sin will be born during the millennium. Not all of them will become Christians. Engaging in a form of nostalgia even more socially damaging than discussing old episodes of Doctor Who online, these people will yearn for the mystical past in which they were free from Christ’s “dictatorship”. These are the people that Satan will mislead and cause to march against God for this final battle. Of course, things won’t go well – God destroys them by fire and consign Satan to suffer for all eternity – but that doesn’t mean that Mike doesn’t succeed in making a stirring song out of the whole affair.

One of the many musicians to come out of the Jesus Movement, Mike Johnson cut this record in 1972, and has released things sporadically ever since. I view this song as a bit of a lost apocalyptic gem, and was glad to see that Mike still seems to be around (i.e. he has a MySpace page) – and has released some new music over the past couple of years.

The Last Battle (Johnson, 1972)

Ringlings, jinglings, hoof beats in the air

The sound of an army, giving me a scare

The munching, the punching

Soldiers marching feet

The smell of new armour where the air was sweet

Pillage, pillage came from everywhere

Up on the mountains to stand on long roads bare

I said to God, what can this be?

He said to me boy, come tap on me

My Lord, my Lord how can this be?

Where the fathers and the brothers,

Those who you set free?

He said “Men are not happy, though they know no pain

They will not be contented boy, while I have my reign

One thousand years, they have had their fill

Now they rebel at the beauty of my will!”

Man child, man child what have you done?

Man child, try to find the holy one!

Millions, millions came dressed in white,
The beauty of the glory, set fire to the night,

They came to the mountains, the valley down below

To fight the greatest battle that

Men had ever known

I had to look away, I could see no more

But read it in the book my friend it’s what it’s written for

It is the greatest battle that men shall ever see

And then and then, we’ll have no war, finally to be free

Man child, man child, what have you done?
Man child try to find the holy one! 

Listen on Spotify: Apopalypse: Apocalyptic Advent Calendar

Buy: http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Last-Battle-Mike-Johnson/dp/B002IWIHXU/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1355131531&sr=8-1

Day 9 - "Prophecies of the Coming of The End of The World" by Truth of Truths

         
                                               

 In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Evangelical Christianity in the United States was far from immune from the influence of the wider counter-culture movement. The “Jesus Movement”, which began in California in the late 1960s and continued throughout the 1970s was one of the most interesting manifestations of this merging of cultural interests. While Evangelicalism was generally seen as straight-laced (and therefore a little dull), a number of preachers (most famously Chuck Smith in Costa Mesa) showed a relaxed attitude to Hippies and those seeking enlightenment. With Smith, it really was a case of “no shirt, no shoes, no problem” – he was willing and able to engage the counter-culture not only with conservative Evangelical theology, but a vision that was more accepting of social justice concerns, freedom of expression and especially popular music and theatre.

The Jesus Movement, widely populated by ex-Hippies calling themselves “Jesus Freaks”, caused a quite wonderful explosion of Christian creativity, that as with Larry Norman, resulted in music which was both theologically and musically interesting. Because of this, it tends to compare very well with other music of the era. Indeed, the Jesus Movement had quite wide cultural visibility, with several of its key artists performing at the “Christian Woodstock”, Explo ’72, which welcomed around 80,000 people.

Today’s song is taken from a rock opera of the period, the 1973 Truth of Truths. This was, of course, the great period of the hippy/religious musical – Hair, Godspell and Jesus Christ Superstar all also have their genesis in this timeframe. The brainchild of producer and former recording artist Ray Ruff (later to become a country legend as a producer). Working with songwriters including Val Stöecklein (writer of some classic psychedelia) Ruff crafted an epic effort which attempted to go through the entire Bible from Genesis to Revelation. This is, if I’m being honest, all a bit too much after a while – despite some fantastic music (Doctor Who fans might notice a theme which recurs in Murray Gold’s soundtrack for the 2007 series), the attempt to cram in everything means that the opera as a whole sags a little under the weight of what it’s trying to achieve. Nonetheless, it’s hard to hold a grudge against any song which attempts to sum up the whole book of Revelation in six minutes, using choirs of angels, a clearly agitated narrator and Jim Backus (famous for playing Mr Magoo) as God.  Interestingly, there is no rapture here – fans of fiery judgement are in for a treat though…

Truth of Truths - Prophecies of the Coming of The End of The World (Ruff and Hutchinson, 1973)

Jesus Christ is coming, to save his people from the tribulation

Wrath of God is at hand, but the people who believe will find salvation

He is coming! He is coming, and soon!

After him is coming, the seven seals of Revelation

Seven trumpets of Revelation

Seven vials of Revelation

Jesus is coming! He is coming!

Jesus is coming! He is coming! Soon!

Through the wrath of God by this time

Many people will have died

This time, it’s not the flood

It’s famine, earthquakes and water turned to blood

The sun and moon and stars are partly darkened

The air is filled with the smoke from the bottomless pit

And with this comes a plague to torment mankind

Those looking for the sign of the Lord that is to come will know this is it

The unfaithful are known by the mark of the beast

Three sixes on their foreheads

In the battle of Armageddon

The Lord Jesus Christ will overthrow them and lay them all dead

Including the great dictator

And away to conquer Satan later

And in this time Satan shall be bound for one thousand years

And Christ shall be King upon the earth for all these thousand years

After one thousand years a final judgement will come to pass

All those who don’t believe,

In the end will know God’s wrath

The Lord Jesus Christ will create a new heaven, create a new earth

He will rule his people, those who believe from the place of his birth

He is coming! In salvation!

He is coming! In his glory!

He is coming! Holy, holy, Lord!

Holy…Holy…Lord

“I am Alpha and Omega. The beginning and the End. The first and the last. All things will pass away, but my words will never pass away” [Thunder]

Holy…holy…Amen!

Listen on Spotify: Apopalypse: Apocalyptic Advent Calendar

Buy on Amazon: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Prophecies-Coming-End/dp/B003R7N3V6/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1355055601&s=dmusic&sr=1-3