Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Introduction
- Songs of fate, hope and oblivion: Bob Dylan's dystopianism and apocalyticism
- End of the world music: is extreme metal the sound of the apocalypse?
- Babylon's burning: reggae, Rastafari and millenarianism
- Apocalypse at the Millennium
- “The days are numbered”: the romance of death, doom, and deferral in contemporary apocalypse films
- Making things new: regeneration and transcendence in Anime
- Selling faith without selling out: reading the Left Behind novels in the context of popular culture
- “The shadow of the end”: the appeal of apocalypse in literary science fiction
- An end times virtual “Ekklesia”: ritual deliberation in participatory media
- Index
Babylon's burning: reggae, Rastafari and millenarianism
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Introduction
- Songs of fate, hope and oblivion: Bob Dylan's dystopianism and apocalyticism
- End of the world music: is extreme metal the sound of the apocalypse?
- Babylon's burning: reggae, Rastafari and millenarianism
- Apocalypse at the Millennium
- “The days are numbered”: the romance of death, doom, and deferral in contemporary apocalypse films
- Making things new: regeneration and transcendence in Anime
- Selling faith without selling out: reading the Left Behind novels in the context of popular culture
- “The shadow of the end”: the appeal of apocalypse in literary science fiction
- An end times virtual “Ekklesia”: ritual deliberation in participatory media
- Index
Summary
Introduction
With a keen focus on societal reform at all levels, Rastafarianism has a conspicuous millenarian orientation. Certainly, during the period within which classic reggae evolved out of ska and rocksteady in the late-1960s up until the early 1980s, most Rastas expressed a strident millenarian liberation theology. Nathaniel Murrell notes the principal beliefs of that period:
belief in the beauty of black people's African heritage; belief that Ras Tafari Haile Selassie I, emperor of Ethiopia, is the living God and black Messiah; belief in repatriation to Ethiopia, qua Africa, the true home and redemption of black people, as “having been foretold and … soon to occur”; the view that “the ways of the white men are evil, especially for the black” race; belief in “the apocalyptic fall of Jamaica as Babylon, the corrupt world of the white man”, and that “once the white man's world crumbles, the current master/slave pattern [of existence] will be reversed”. Jah Ras Tafari will overthrow or destroy the present order, and Rastafarians and other Blacks will be the benefactors of that destruction; they will reign with Jah in the new kingdom. (1998: 5)
It is hardly surprising, therefore, that reggae, which is fundamentally related to Rastafari, articulates millenarian themes. The aim of this study is to provide an introduction to this discourse within reggae. That said, without some understanding of the roots and history of Rastafarianism, it will be difficult to make sense of such ideas.
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- Information
- The End All Around UsThe Apocalypse and Popular Culture, pp. 43 - 70Publisher: Acumen PublishingPrint publication year: 2009