Music for the end of the world

How The 1975 and Julia Holter unsettle the sights and sounds of the present 

I am watching Season 15, Episode 13 of Keeping Up with the Kardashians—the one where Khloe gives birth. Khloe lies on the birthing bed, surrounded by no fewer than six cameras. Each camera will share this moment with a wide audience of strangers like me. She screams. Kris grins. I stare. I whisper to myself, “This is the end of the world.” Yes, this is some next-level Kristevian abjection: True (Khloe’s daughter) is not only ceasing to be part of her mother, and so becoming her own person, but she is also becoming an object of the public, an object divided millions of times over through phones and televisions. She is not only in that hospital room, cradled by her grinning grandmother, but also on my phone, on my Apple TV, in my mom’s People magazine. Khloe is in “full beat,” she looks fabulous, she is ready for these cameras, for my consumption of her delivery. I find myself deeply moved by this woman I have never met but have come to care for. How? Through my TV screen I feel connected not only to Khloe and True, but also to everyone else watching this scene of double abjection. Why? I close my eyes and hear her scream. I whisper to my compatriots through the screen: “Alright, we have come here together, to what has to be the end of the world.”  

I am struck. I must write about this. How? What will I say? This is the end of the world!  

The episode ends and my screen says: “‘thank u, next’ video beginning in 5, 4, 3…” 

“Oh, wow, I love that video…”  With an apathetic shrug I think: “I’ll write about the end of the world later.” 

***

Apocalypse anxiety is as old as the Book of Daniel, but with recent revelations such as the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s report and the rising popularity of governments that could not care less about the air we breathe, end-of-the-world narratives feel particularly relevant. Two of my favourite albums of 2018 deal explicitly with this anxiety. The 1975’s A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships and Julia Holter’s Aviary engage with the end of the world as something we are quickly approaching (if we haven’t reached it already). But as I continue to listen into 2019, I find myself asking: What does the end of the world sound like? Why do both albums incorporate older musical landscapes to frame today’s uncertainty? And why does the end of the world have to sound at all?  

Both Holter and The 1975 have been outspoken about their intentions to depict a post-Trump world on their most recent projects. In response to the 2016 American election, Holter found herself asking how love and empathy shape and are shaped by a populist political shift. As she relayed to Rolling Stone’s Sasha Geffen, “It’s not just Donald Trump. We have autocratic leaders all over the world now who are challenging human rights. It’s not necessarily that that’s new, but it’s happening in a new way.” Holter wanted to explore alternative methods of communication through sound in response to these new challenges to human rights. Enter Aviary, a 90-minute record that borrows as much from Arthur Russell’s 1980s experimental disco as it does from Hildegard von Bingen’s 12th-century plainchant. On Aviary, Holter quotes Dante’s Inferno (“I Shall Love 2”), sings about ancient Greek femininity in a mesostic poem of Anne Carson’s name and the title of her Sappho translation (“I Would Rather See”), and includes a nearly eight-minute atonal barrage of bagpipes (“Everyday Is an Emergency”). To say the least, this album is all over the place. And it is through this allusive and sonic crucible that Holter seems to “hold the mirror up to nature” (to throw another allusion up in the proverbial air). That is, to respond to a world on the brink, where reality stars give birth and become president as much on our phones as in reality, and Holter mimics this pandemonium. 

The 1975’s approach to this threshold of collapse hardly differs. In the album’s centrepiece, “Love It If We Made It,” (voted Pitchfork’s Best Song of 2018), Matty Healy mournfully flits from observing a Mediterranean “beach of drowning three-year-old” refugee children to eulogizing Lil Peep to quoting Trump (“I moved on her like a bitch!” / “Thank you Kanye, very cool”). The effect of this panorama is like a Twitter feed put to pop music, haunted by the hopeful, but ultimately cynical, refrain of “I’d love it if we made it.” The album’s joyride does not end with this song. Before A Brief Inquiry’s conclusion, the band grants its listener a tender jazz track (“Mine”) and a man/computer love story narrated by Siri (“The Man Who Married A Robot/Love Theme”). The album is bookended by two songs about negotiating suicidal impulses in the digital age (“Give Yourself a Try” and “Always Wanna Die Sometimes”). Similarly to Holter, The 1975 answer a world that feels like “the most” by mirroring its maximalism.  

One of the most striking elements about these albums that confront the chaos of 2018 is their shared reliance on the past. Holter spoke to Pitchfork about how she drew inspiration from Mary Carruthers’ The Book of Memory, a canonical text in both medieval studies and memory theory. And even without Carruthers’ intellectual influence, medievalism pervades Aviary: take for instance the allusion to Dante in “I Shall Love 2,” or the opening bars of “I Shall Love 1” that sound like a Plantagenet procession. A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships similarly frames its exploration of 2018 through the past, albeit a different part of history from Holter’s medievalism: ’80s and ’90s pop-rock nostalgia. The band has always acknowledged its reliance on retro musical landscapes. In 2013, Healy told NPR that he sources inspiration from John Hughes’ filmography. These movies, Healy said, “discuss everything that I discuss: love, fear, sex and a longing for something beyond.” The fantasy of our parents’ teenage angst is everywhere in A Brief Inquiry, from the Joy Division guitar riff that opens “Give Yourself a Try” to the Oasis-influenced “Always Wanna Die Sometimes.” According to these albums, part of depicting today’s threat of the “end” involves confronting the past. 

So why are these artists so insistent on framing today’s world with yesterday’s sounds? And why does a world on the brink have to sound like anything at all? The carefully titled “Everyday Is an Emergency” from Aviary suggests that chaos must be musicalized (atonally so) because it is on the verge of being normalized. The title of this eight-minute cacophony of bagpipes implies that the “everyday” (not “every day”) is the real emergency. Few things feel more everyday than my social media scroll, but that space is precisely where I confront what feels most like “the end.” Every hour or so, I open Twitter: Trump is threatening to close the entire southern border; the death toll of the tsunami in Indonesia has risen to 426; Khloe posted a picture of True wearing a white hat. The first two tweets elicit a sigh—they are “the end”—but the third tweet is the only link I click to get the full story. This is Holter’s “emergency.” I believe it is my apathy, my normalization of catastrophe, that Holter and The 1975 want to shake their listeners out of. And perhaps one method of doing so is to infuse old sounds into 2018’s musical landscape. Their albums’ sonic allusions might not be intentionally soothing or nostalgic, but they illuminate the present through a Brechtian destabilization of it. They are not the Drake, Ed Sheeran, or Taylor Swift records (no shade to any of these artists) that could not sound more like 2018 if they tried; Aviary and A Brief Inquiry immerse the past into the present perhaps to elucidate and destabilize the normalization of the end of the world. The end of the world, that is, might have to sound like the past to draw attention to itself. By interlacing the sound of 2018 with the past’s uncanniness, these records perhaps intend to shake their listener into a finer awareness of the present’s chaos.  

Cool. So now what? I close my laptop, leave Starbucks, and head home to watch another episode of Keeping Up. Now that I have been sonically shaken out of my stupor and I see it’s the end of the world, maybe I’ll buy a metal straw on my way home so I don’t have to keep using plastic ones. Thanks, Julia Holter and Matty Healy. However regrettable my apathetic conclusion, I believe these albums are aware of its likeliness. Maybe it is enough to know it is the end of the world: I saw it (Khloe and True), I heard it (Aviary and A Brief Inquiry); now “thank u, next.” Yes, I’d “love it if we made it,” but perhaps that is as far as it goes—a hopeful, but finally despondent, chorus to sound us out.