How is it {that a} catchy melody, strong groove, or infectious hook could make you need to dance to even the darkest and most nihilistic of ideas? Prince’s “1999” is a licensed banger that simply so occurs to be set on the sting of nuclear armageddon. “All people’s acquired a bomb / We may all die any day,” he sings. Nonetheless, he’s nonetheless going to bounce his life away with the assistance of some funky guitar licks.
Fashionable 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 response to singer Robbie Gray, nevertheless, the music is definitely a few couple having intercourse in the midst of a nuclear warfare.
Discover a sample? Not surprisingly, the ’80s have been replete with songs influenced by nuclear nervousness.
Any such nihilism can comprise echoes of a craving for a world and an existence that basically 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 varied offshoots. Who can overlook Robert Smith wailing “It doesn’t matter if all of us die” within the opening moments of The Remedy’s Pornography or Depeche Mode’s Dave Gahan intoning “Dying is all over the place” on Black Celebration? However I spotted this anew through two current 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 probably the most joyous ode to nihilism I’ve ever heard.
The music is undeniably catchy because of its dreamy textures and Ivy’s breathy vocals, but it surely’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 how one can 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 will not be 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 nicely. Particularly, our determined scramble to seek out some semblance of that means in our lives, an impulse that always leads us to seek out solace in intercourse, relationships, cash, careers, and materials possessions—all good issues, however hardly able to offering any true sense of that means or function. (It’s not for nothing that Qohelet tells us in Ecclesiastes that God “has put eternity into man’s coronary 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 reside a singular, atomistic, autonomous existence. I’m not disconnected from the world, however quite, am topic to its cycles, to entropy and decay, identical to all of my fellow creatures—on this aspect of eternity, anyway. I’ll die sometime, and my physique will decompose. And although I could not turn into the honey for my grandkids’ morning tea, my hope is that I’ll nonetheless be linked 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 because of their haunting mix of hip-hop, jazz, digital music, and cinematic soundscapes. And naturally, via Gibbons’ personal world-weary voice, which continually seems like she’s on the snapping 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 Speak Speak fame.) A decade within the making, Lives Outgrown includes ten songs impressed by Gibbons’ experiences with growing older, motherhood, menopause, and bidding farewell to mates 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 in the end embracing the frailty of existence. She sings of being “a passenger on no extraordinary 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 an analogous outlook:
I’m floating on a second
Don’t understand how 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 ultimate thought that’s half lamentation and half acceptance: “It’s not that I don’t need to return … It simply reminds us that every one we have now 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 we have now 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 usually face the temptation to denigrate this world: as the nice Larry Norman famously stated on 1972’s Solely Visiting This Planet, “This world will not be my residence / I’m simply passing via.” However doing so dangers dismissing the dear 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 usually attributed to Nineteenth-century Quaker missionary Stephen Grellet have been behind my thoughts as I listened to Gibbons’ single: “I shall cross 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 cross this manner 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 in the end have any that means or significance.
Maybe as a result of I’m nearing fifty myself, Gibbons’ somber music resonates with me on a a lot deeper degree 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 era. The dissonance of Ivy’s music, alternatively, on account of its seamless mix of nihilistic absurdism and irrepressibly cheery tone, is just attainable to take care of—and solely sounds applicable—while you nonetheless have your entire life, with all of its goals and prospects, forward of you.
Nihilistic impulses in music, be they from Prince and Fashionable English or Juliet Ivy and Beth Gibbons, don’t upset or scare me. Nor do they characterize harmful challenges to my religion. Slightly, 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 basically do imply one thing, for a universe that isn’t huge and random. Which is exactly the form of existence—and universe—which have been given to us.