Unless you’ve been living under a billboard (without ever looking up to see what’s on the billboard), you probably know that an evangelical Christian group based in Oakland, California has predicted end times are nigh, beginning with the Rapture occurring on May 21st. The actual end of the world is due a little later this year on October 21, 2011. Mark your calendars, you won’t want to miss it.
Seems like high time to pull out this great mashup that brings The Doors’ Riders on the Storm together with Blondie’s tune Rapture. Blondie’s song is not actually about super-nice people flying up to heaven; it tells the tale of an urban rampage by an ET who consumes cars, bars, guitars, etc. It is also both the first #1 rap song in the US and was the first rap video played on MTV. Seriously. In an interesting numerical coincidence Rapture hit #1 30 years ago and Riders just turned 40.
Music history is full of great tunes about the world ending, and often a good bit of day-seizing in the face of it (see: Prince’s “1999”). Some variations on this theme, include of course R.E.M.’s It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine), Armageddon by Prince Far-I, Waiting For The End Of The World by Elvis Costello, and my personal fave Train to Doomsville by Dub Syndicate featuring Lee “Scratch” Perry from 1988.
A fellow who goes by the moniker The Real Tuesday Weld even made a whole album on the concept of a final night out at a nightclub on Armageddon-eve, “as both performers and audience prepare themselves to say goodbye and to face an uncertain future realizing that only heaven knows what tomorrow will bring.”
Here’s Sun Ra‘s entry in this category, “It’s After The End of The World” from the 1974 film Space Is the Place:
