How is it {that a} catchy melody, stable groove, or infectious hook could make you need to dance to even the darkest and most nihilistic of ideas? Prince’s “1999” is a licensed banger that simply so occurs to be set on the sting of nuclear armageddon. “Everyone’s received a bomb / We may all die any day,” he sings. However, he’s nonetheless going to bounce his life away with the assistance of some funky guitar licks.

Fashionable English’s “I Soften With You” is likely one of the best-known new wave hits from the ‘80s, a lot in order that it as soon as appeared in a Burger King industrial. In accordance with singer Robbie Gray, nevertheless, the tune is definitely a couple of couple having intercourse in the course of a nuclear battle. 

Discover a sample? Not surprisingly, the ’80s had been replete with songs influenced by nuclear anxiousness.

Any such nihilism can include echoes of a craving for a world and an existence that actually do imply one thing, for a universe that isn’t huge and random.

Nihilistic impulses are nothing new in pop music, to say nothing of extra outré genres like goth, industrial, and heavy steel’s numerous offshoots. Who can neglect Robert Smith wailing “It doesn’t matter if all of us die” within the opening moments of The Treatment’s Pornography or Depeche Mode’s Dave Gahan intoning “Demise is all over the place” on Black Celebration? However I noticed this anew by way of two current singles that exist at reverse ends of the musical spectrum.

Someday in late 2023, Instagram’s algorithms selected to inundate my feed with clips from Juliet Ivy’s “We’re All Consuming Every Different.” Launched on Ivy’s playpen EP, it would simply be probably the most joyous ode to nihilism I’ve ever heard.

The tune is undeniably catchy due to its dreamy textures and Ivy’s breathy vocals, however it’s additionally shot by means of with such sentiments as “We validate our fantasies to really feel like we’re particular inside” and “We don’t know the best way to settle for we’re only a product of an opportunity.” After which there’s the refrain, which Ivy sings with pure jubilation and wild abandon:

However we’re all gonna die
Decompose into daffodils and dandelions
The bees will use our flowers for no matter they like
Make the honey that our grandkids will put inside their morning tea
It’s the factor of life

A lot of Ivy’s lyrics oppose the Christian view. Even so, her tune just isn’t with out some fact. When she sings, “We paint our face with mind / Pretending we’re not curious,” she nails our trendy tendency to rationalize the wild world round us to make it safer and extra manageable. And although the Christian ought to undeniably reject Ivy’s assertion that we’re all simply merchandise of random likelihood who’re “much less like gods however extra like vegetation / Who can’t cease making up causes we’re alive,” she hits a nerve there, as nicely. Particularly, our determined scramble to seek out some semblance of which means in our lives, an impulse that always leads us to seek out solace in intercourse, relationships, cash, careers, and materials possessions—all good issues, however hardly able to offering any true sense of which means or objective. (It’s not for nothing that Qohelet tells us in Ecclesiastes that God “has put eternity into man’s coronary heart.”)

As for the tune’s refrain—which will get catchier the extra I hear it—I discover it humbling as soon as I push by means of the nihilism. Whether or not this was Ivy’s intent or not, her flowery (no pun meant) lyrics are a reminder that I don’t dwell a singular, atomistic, autonomous existence. I’m not disconnected from the world, however fairly, am topic to its cycles, to entropy and decay, identical to all of my fellow creatures—on this aspect of eternity, anyway. I’ll die sometime, and my physique will decompose. And although I could not turn into the honey for my grandkids’ morning tea, my hope is that I’ll nonetheless be related to them even lengthy after I’m gone.

Whereas Juliet Ivy finds a way of launch, even euphoria, in embracing life’s meaninglessness, Beth Gibbons adopts a extra somber perspective. Gibbons is best-known because the vocalist for Portishead, one of many main lights of the ’90s trip-hop scene due to their haunting mix of hip-hop, jazz, digital music, and cinematic soundscapes. And naturally, by means of Gibbons’ personal world-weary voice, which continuously feels like she’s on the snapping point and may imbue any lyric with an ocean of emotion with little greater than a whisper.

Portishead has solely launched three studio albums within the final 30 years, all of them masterpieces, however Gibbons is poised to launch her first correct solo album, Lives Outgrown, later this 12 months. (2002’s Out of Season was really a collaboration with Rustin Man, aka Paul Webb of Speak Speak fame.) A decade within the making, Lives Outgrown contains ten songs impressed by Gibbons’ experiences with getting old, motherhood, menopause, and bidding farewell to associates and family members who’ve handed on.

These experiences manifest themselves within the album’s pastoral first single, “Floating on a Second,” with Gibbons realizing and in the end embracing the frailty of existence. She sings of being “a passenger on no abnormal journey” and “touring on a voyage the place the residing / They’ve by no means been.” As for the tune’s refrain, it’s nowhere close to as ebullient as “We’re All Consuming Every Different,” however nonetheless conveys an identical outlook:

I’m floating on a second
Don’t understand how lengthy
Nobody is aware of
Nobody can keep
All going to nowhere
All going, make no mistake

Because the tune fades out, Gibbons leaves the listener with a remaining thought that’s half lamentation and half acceptance: “It’s not that I don’t need to return … It simply reminds us that each one we now have is right here and now.”

As with Ivy’s tune, Gibbons’ “Floating on a Second” could also be discomfiting for the Christian. In any case, her assertion that “all we now have is right here and now” appears to contradict any perception in an everlasting life. However that interpretation could also be too simplistic. Once more, Gibbons’ tune appears to speak a fact, albeit a partial one.

As a result of we imagine in heaven, Christians usually face the temptation to denigrate this world: as the good Larry Norman famously stated on 1972’s Solely Visiting This Planet, “This world just isn’t my dwelling / I’m simply passing by means of.” However doing so dangers dismissing the dear earthly existence that God has given us as a part of his good creation, an existence the place—due to our everlasting nature—each single second counts.

These phrases usually attributed to Nineteenth-century Quaker missionary Stephen Grellet had been behind my thoughts as I listened to Gibbons’ single: “I shall go by means of this world however as soon as. Any good due to this fact, that I can do or any kindness I can present to any human being, let me do it now. Let me not defer or neglect it, for I shall not go this fashion once more.”

There’s nothing nihilistic in these phrases, however fairly, an admonition to acknowledge the significance of our lives on this world and act accordingly. Not as a result of this world is all there may be for us, however the precise reverse—and it’s towards that backdrop of eternity that our lives in the end have any which means or significance.

Maybe as a result of I’m nearing fifty myself, Gibbons’ somber tune resonates with me on a a lot deeper degree than Ivy’s upbeat pop. I can really feel my very own physique (and metabolism) slowing down; I really feel extra aches and listen to extra cracks and pops then I did even this time final 12 months. And my spouse and I are keenly conscious that we’re coming into the stage of life that entails seeing time catch as much as our dad and mom and their technology. The dissonance of Ivy’s tune, then again, as a result of its seamless mix of nihilistic absurdism and irrepressibly cheery tone, is simply doable to take care of—and solely sounds applicable—once you nonetheless have your complete life, with all of its desires and prospects, forward of you.

Nihilistic impulses in music, be they from Prince and Fashionable English or Juliet Ivy and Beth Gibbons, don’t upset or scare me. Nor do they signify harmful challenges to my religion. Relatively, I discover them useful, even illuminating. And dare I say, inspiring. And never simply because the songs themselves are nice. Any such nihilism can include echoes of a craving for a world and an existence that actually do imply one thing, for a universe that isn’t huge and random. Which is exactly the form of existence—and universe—which were given to us.