A Consumer's Guide to the Apocalypse

A Consumer's Guide to the Apocalypse
by Eduardo Velasquez

Remember Santana's late nineties return to relevance? Despite decades of pop culture prowess, he had slipped subterranean in his popularity, and there he might have remained, studded in late-life obscurity, had he and Arista Records exec Clive Davis not envisioned the album that brought Santana back like a phoenix from the flame.

Supernatural featured billboard's top charting vocalists singing over Santana's signature blend of blues and Latin grooves. The album was a risky move. Just because the world was head over heels for Rob Thomas didn't mean Santana could swing with any significance. The album's monumental success took all the players by surprise.

Eduardo Velasquez's A Consumer's Guide to the Apocalypse inadvertently explores what could have gone wrong. The book is a thesis on the pervasiveness of sacred sentiments and symbolism throughout pop culture. Sinister overtones crowd the text as insinuations about our impending apocalypse show up about as often as punctuation. A wide range of references to modern mainstream art - including music and movies - pepper the pages, and while it's initially entertaining to explore how Coldplay has subsumed secular billboard charts with melancholy musings on being and nothingness, or how Dave Matthews has orchestrated acoustic anthems against God while relying on sacred language to title his albums and tune his lyrics, or how Tori Amos has derailed the authority of Christian tradition by selling a story in song that apparently predates God and the Garden of Eden - the work always feels like a calculated bid at entertainment and popular appeal. It worked wonders for Santana. For Velasquez - not so much.

Maybe that's because Velasquez doesn't seem to possess any real passion or enthusiasm for these popular artists. He gains the most steam while he wanders through the work of academics and underground artists entirely unrelated to his mainstream thesis - like Tom Wolfe's I am Charlotte Simmons and Michael Frayn's Copenhagen - and loses the most when he makes an obligatory stab at understanding writers like Neil Gaiman or Chuck Palahnuick. It's really a shame, because when Velasquez digs into more academic realms, his writing roars to life and lifts pieces most people are probably unfamiliar with to auspicious and intriguing heights.

Imagine if Santana had hired billboard's top guns and tried to fire off a round of those artists' pop genres. What if the Rob Thomas led single Smooth had been a Matchbox Twenty power ballad or the beat-driven love croon Maria, Maria had been an urbanized R&B knockoff? Instead, Santana invited pop's powerhouses to participate in his own blend of blues based guitar lines and percussive Latin grooves, and when the smoke cleared, the result was star-studded integrity.

Likewise, if Velasquez had stuck to his academic guns, embraced the perpetual pretense of an industry that survives by breeding illusion and ambiguity (not pop - education), stayed away from artists, albums, and books he can't demonstrate delight in, and instead, surrounded what are often quite profound propositions with equally enlightened enthusiasm, his less than two hundred page book might read less like paint drying and more, far more, like a pop song.