From its indefinite beginnings through its broad commercialization and endless reinterpretation, American rock-and-roll music has been preoccupied with an end-of-the-world mentality that extends through the whole of American popular music. In Apocalypse Jukebox, Edward Whitelock and David Janssen trace these connections through American music genres, uncovering a mix of paranoia and hope that characterizes so much of the nation’s history. From the book’s opening scene, set in the American South during a terrifying 1833 meteor shower, the sense of doom is both palpable and inescapable; a deep foreboding that shadows every subsequent development in American popular music and, as Whitelock and Janssen contend, stands as a key to understanding and explicating America itself. Whitelock and Janssen examine the diversity of apocalyptic influences within North American recorded music, focusing in particular upon a number of influential performers, including Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, John Coltrane, Devo, R.E.M., Sleater-Kinney, and Green Day. In Apocalypse Jukebox, Whitelock and Janssen reveal apocalypse as a permanent and central part of the American character while establishing rock-and-roll as a true reflection of that character."From a terrifying 1833 meteor shower through the atomic bombings of 1945 and the attacks of September 11, 2001, U.S. cultural creators have often viewed the times through an apocalyptic lens. In this freewheeling and vigorously personal book, David Janssen and Edward J. Whitelock explore the pervasiveness of apocalyptic themes in American popular music, from gospel, folk, and country to jazz, rock & roll, and beyond. Performers as diverse as Presley, Coltrane, Dylan, Devo, and R.E.M. receive fresh new interpretations. Apocalyptic Jukebox should have broad appeal. --Paul Boyer, author of When Time Shall Be No MoreEd Whitelock is a professor of English at Gordon State College in Barnesville, GA, just 106 miles southwest of Philomath. He is co-author, with David Janssen, of Apocalypse Jukebox: The End of the World in American Popular Music.
David Janssen is an Associate Professor of English at Gordon College and associate editor for Studies in Popular Culture.
