Page - 81 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 05/02

series of napalm explosions in the jungle of Vietnam. The contrast between Morri- son’s melancholic voice and the sudden violence of the bombs is daunting. The lyr- ics fit perfectly with the dystopian motifs that Coppola was looking for in his com- plex examination of the Vietnam War. In the scene an anguished existentialism prevails: “This is the end, beautiful friend / … I’ll never look into your eyes, again”. David Bowie has been an assiduous composer of apocalyptic-themed music like “Five Years” (The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, 1972). “As the World Falls Down” (from the film Labyrinth, Jim Henson, UK/ US 1986), and the late “Black Star” (Black Star, 2015) are other interesting cre- ations. “Future Legend” (Diamond dogs, 1974. A–3) lasts barely one minute; it begins with a distorted howl and features Bowie’s spoken-word vision of a post-apocalyptic Manhattan, now renamed Hunger City, comparing the human- oid inhabitants to “packs of dogs”. “Future Legend / 1984” is based on Orwell’s 1984, a true paradigm of dystopian literature. The two-part song opens the al- bum, and although lacking specifically apocalyptic content, it evinces the dysto- pian denunciation and positioning of Bowie. Some verses reveal a recreation of the aesthetics of horror: “And in the death, as the last few corpses lay rotting on the slimy thoroughfare … Fleas the size of rats sucked on rats the size of cats, …” In the following “1984” Bowie sings: “Beware the savage jaw / Of 1984 … / They’ll split your pretty cranium / … tomorrow’s never there”. With these early songs Bowie enlarged the list of classical dystopias, incisive in their complaints about chaos and anarchy, but rather resigned to their effects. “London Calling” (A–4) is the opening song of the homonymous double LP released by The Clash in 1979. The list of horrors in the song is outstanding, describing awful man-made destruction and societal breakdown in marching beat: “London calling upon the zombies of death / … A nuclear era … London is drowning”. With its stomping rhythm and reiterative ostinato bassline, “Lon- don Calling” embodies the bleakest outlook upon the future. The official video clip emphasizes a dark and rainy atmosphere. Lyrics attack the Beatles popular- ity echoed by sound-alike bands in late 1970s (“that phoney Beatlemania”) in an implicit declaration of authenticity, as the Beatles belonged to mainstream in the punk territory. Punk is dystopian and nihilistic in essence; caustic state- ments stem from the particular aesthetics of the genre, intended to express horror and nausea, not to change the world. As Cyrus Shahan stated in his study of this genre in Germany: “German punk positioned itself in opposition to ‘1968’”, thus creating a “third space” in the generational struggle against the establishment. Punk’s “no future” mantra, “was not about resignation but rejection, rejection of the future promised by failures of the past at the violent moment of punk’s birth”.59 However, the “subversive, counter-discursive, and 59 Shahan 2011: 371. Apocalypse as Critical Dystopia in Modern Popular Music | 81www.jrfm.eu 2019, 5/2, 69–94