David Wilcox – End Of The World (again)

by John Voorhees

I hope you’ve gotten everything done that you want to do and said everything that you intend to say. The curtain’s running down Friday on this little show we call “human existence”. I guess it’s been a pretty good run, but really, we were just getting started! Don’t we deserve at least one more season to tie up the loose ends?

Nah. Just kidding. Odds are we’re not going anywhere anytime soon, despite how many failed apocalypses have passed us by recently. Our culture just has an obsession with clean endings. After all, if everything stops abruptly, there’s no need to worry about leaving the planet livable for any future generations. It’s much tidier than trying to keep up with silly things like politics, technology or the environment.

David Wilcox may actually be a name you’ve heard before, if you’ve been listening to modern folk music over the past twenty years or so. His music tends to be compassionate, generous and uplifting … but he’s also got a keen eye for the ridiculous, and every now and then he lets some razor sharp satire fly. End Of The World (again) is compact and catchy, and calls out our eschatological tendencies for what they are: the worst kind of wishful thinking.

In Dave’s own words:

I love the idea of the arc of history bending towards justice. But there are lots of people who have given up on the future. If there is no future, then people can justify getting lazy. They can dumb down their visioning of humanity becoming more humane. The end of the world is an easy out. I believe a more satisfying alternative is to step up to the challenge of the future and open our hearts to the whole spectrum of humanity.

End Of The World (again) is the lead-off song on David’s most recent CD, Reverie, which was recorded live in concert with a cooperatively quiet audience attending. If you happen to be in Asheville, NC this weekend, I recommend that you make your way to his Concert For The End Of The World at the Grey Eagle Tavern. I expect it to be something like having dinner at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe.

See you all on the other side!

It’s the end of the world again
Got the tickets early and we’re standing in line
It’s the end of the world again
Everybody’s certain of it one more time

Tell me all about the calendar the Mayans figured out
Before they all disappeared in mystery
They didn’t have a future, but we all have no doubt
They knew the punch line of our history

It’s the end of the world again
Got the tickets early and we’re standing in line
It’s the end of the world again
Everybody’s certain of it one more time

Accurate predictions all indicate our doom
Things that eluded our detection
An age of truth and beauty, or else it goes kabloom
Fourty five days past the election

After the warning
Here comes the morning
Just a life of earthly bliss
Sun keeps burning
World keeps turning
We just can’t go on like this

All that evolution since we crawled out of the slime
Indebted to everything that made me
If this is as high as we are ever gonna climb
We can just sit back and be lazy

It’s the end of the world again
Got the tickets early and we’re standing in line
It’s the end of the world again
Everybody’s certain of it one more time

This entry was posted on December 20, 2012 at 12:19 am and is filed under Hootenanny. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.