Since the end of the sixties, when Vietnam, stabbings at Altamont and the like turned the Woodstock dream sour, a sense of finality has dominated pop music. Consequently, while po-faced we-mean-it-man bands come over all pretentious and portentious, the most disposable of pop moments have been lent an air of sweaty desperation, as if whoever wrote and/or performed it was trying to avoid the big issue of the day - the end of the millennium, the three nines becoming three scary noughts, setting the counter back to zero. Assuming, of course, that we make it - if 50,000,000 Elvis fans can’t be wrong, maybe it’s the turn of those loveable Christians, offering us all front row tickets on Jesus' own very special Vegas-style comeback tour.
Yup, it’s apocalypse time, and everyone from Tricky to Busta Rhymes is getting in on the act. You’ve probably noticed that 1998, in spite of the spate of jailbait honeys that overran Top of the Pops for the duration of the year, was not the most... ‘up’ of years - everything seems to be falling to pieces, and not in a good way. As the modern world accelerates, we seem to be left behind, bewildered and frightened in its wake, desperate to make some meaning out of the increasingly fragmented mess we call our lives, our once-reasonable spleen-ventings now tinged with hysteria and weariness. Hey, popkids - listen to Radiohead: favoured by the pre-millennially tense. With only eleven months to go before bearded, nigger-hating Americans go apeshit in the Kansas hills, people are bound to get, well, a little uppity. The inevitable end of the world has sent many a band on an increasingly frantic and wayward path, willing to try anything - take drugs, set a world record for number of cocks sucked in an hour, find religion, lose religion, go insane - to make sense of it all.
And it’s not just music: Hollywood has deemed it necessary to foist shite like ‘Meet Joe Black’ and ‘City of Angels’ upon us, clumsily trying to deal with concepts that are way beyond their grasp. But they’re forgetting one thing, one very important detail: the millennium is, quite frankly, going to suck. The single memorable thing about it will be the record number of people going out of their way (and heads) to be incapable of remembering it. Midnight will come and go, good will not battle evil at the end of the Universe, and the everyone will wake up on January first, killer hangovers dimming their minds, distinctly not dead. Armageddon will involve, at best, a stupid number of beers, crap songs no-one knows the words to and some surreptitious tonguing of someone other than your chosen partner - in other words, the anti-climax to end all anti-climaxes.
So, once music has picked itself up, dusted itself down, spent a few hours in a darkened room and snacked on Resolve, it can, blinking in the weak sunlight, face up to... what? In a word, as Tim might say, post-millennial tension. A collective shrugging of the shoulders, as if to say ‘well, we’re still alive. Sorry. Too busy going for Marc Almond’s record to realise it wasn’t all going to end dramatically, I guess,’ lots of cod-serious soul-searching and, in the period of adjustment, maybe a few half-decent records. If we’re lucky: self-awareness is a good thing, self-absorption is not. Let’s hope that the next eleven months and beyond don’t bear witness to some of the most crass, over-commercial, what-does-it-all-mean?, make-peace-with-God wank ever to have been endured by listeners everywhere. Heal the world? Nah, fuck off.