How Post-Modernism Ends the World as We Know It

Reading Anderson's Postmodern World combined with reading Baudrillard's The Precession of  Simulcara, the ability to identify postmodern ideologies within songs was relatively easy to pick up. The integration of what the authors were writing about is within many different songs that have been written throughout the changes in music over recent decades.  The first song that came to my mind was "It's the end of the world as we know it..." by R.E.M.

Anderson discusses how postmodernism is a "breakdown of the old ways of belief".  This idea is one that is consistently played with throughout the song, the chorus contains the name of the song "it's the end of the world as we know it..." is clearly a sign of changing times, but the other lyrics support the idea that the old ways of thinking are changing into something new.  The line "a government for hire and a combat site" addresses fully the idea that the country is changing, as well as people's thoughts about it at the time.

The postmodernist idea that Anderson discusses about every truth being viable is one that R.E.M. plays with throughout this song as well.  The song hurls an immense amount of information at the listener, in a similar manner to Billy Joel's "We didn't start the fire" R.E.M. lists an incredible amount of information and forces the listener to digest it in order to understand what the song is really about.

The writer's of the song use the idea of all truths being viable in order to get the reader to accept what they are speaking about is possible and that the world may in fact be ending because of the cataclysm of events that have occurred.   The song makes the listener feel as though Armageddon has happened, and that the result of it are the constant changes happening in the world.

Anderson plays with a final idea of struggling to find one's identity in his writing about post-modernism.  In the section titled "collapse of belief" Anderson speaks about how "people everywhere struggle in unprecedented ways to find out who they are".  This idea is carried into "It's the end of the world as we know it..." by the songwriters.  The song forces the listener to think about what they think the world is becoming and has already become.  This compilation of ideas not only gives the reader a sense for what the composer was thinking about, but forces the listener to think about what they believe in, and why.  This is directly connected with Anderson's writing about post-modernism and his idea about a collapse of belief and a struggle to find out who individuals are to themselves.