Page - 88 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 05/02

played live, precedes an ecstatic instrumental climax: “Don’t! Give! Up! / Don’t! Give! In! / Our time will come / ’cause we are the flood”. The song is in E-Flat minor, following a well-known harmonic ostinato led by the violin. Its sound atmosphere is oppressive. Non-anglophone countries also participate in the production of dystopian music. For example, Spanish heavy metal bands have contributed doomsday songs and records, as in the case of Obús’ “Va a estallar el obús” (The obus is going to explode. Prepárate, 1981), Omission’s “Eve of an end” (The Unholiest of Them, 2016), and El Mago de Oz’s album Ira Dei (2019). Currently, dystopia still works and sells within the music industry. To cite but a few more examples, St Vincent’s “The Apocalypse Song” (Marry Me, 2007) sings, “All your praying moments amount to just one breath”, in a direct biblical refer- ence to the brevity of life in the grand scheme. The song “Radioactive” by Imagine Dragons (Night Visions, 2012) is completely apocalyptic. American progressive metal band Dream Theatre released The Astonishing in 2016, focusing explicitly on dystopia; it consists of a science-fiction narration structured as a “rock opera”. TRAITS OF DYSTOPIAN SONGS There are certain features that arise repeatedly in either the verbal or the for- mal narratives of the songs analysed. Most of them can be categorised within the broad concept of “dystopia”, while some belong specifically to the realm of “critical dystopia”. Contextual oscillations are frequent, as in the case of “millennialism”: there is a concentration of apocalyptic songs in the last years of the twentieth cen- tury, when the millennium effect became fascinating. Another watershed was provided by the 2001 attacks in New York City, indirectly echoed in popular mu- sic; as a consequence, critical dystopia might have lost strength with the sense of universal vulnerability. A third negative wave stems from the recent Great Recession, which has had a deep economic and sociological impact worldwide. In all cases it is an urban apocalypse, or an apocalypse in the city: in dystopi- an rock the city is the epicentre of disaster, and sometimes salvation consists of sheltering in nature, in a well-known exercise of contemporary pastoralism. And it takes place in the present, it is an apocalypse now, which stresses the urgency of the call: in rock culture, devastation happens in this life; most songs warn of immediate disaster (or disaster already accomplished). The accompanying iconography is expressive, visible on album images and video clips, as with the example of Busta Rhymes’ cover of his 1998 release Extinction Level Event, and Robbie Williams’ cover of Millennium the same year. The film-making quality in the videos is uneven, with some of them consisting of a simple and uncritical accumulation of disaster images, while others con- stitute a well-assembled short that develops an interesting plot in worthwhile 88 | Javier Campos Calvo-Sotelo www.jrfm.eu 2019, 5/2, 69–94