Earth and Sun and Moon, by Midnight Oil (1993)

Looking into the future without understanding what you're seeing

Coming of age as a GenX kid, the explosive popularity of grunge bands like Nirvana put a spotlight on our angst and anxiety.

That angst wasn’t new to us - as evidenced by the more underground punk and goth bands of the 1980s - but it felt new to our Boomer parents. Storming the radio landscape with “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” the Red Hot Chili Peppers's standard “Under the Bridge,” and several disturbing songs from Pearl Jam, led our parents’ generation to demand that we explain why we enjoyed being so miserable.

Most of us weren’t capable of articulating what was bothering us. My dad was born the year after the U.S. dropped atomic weapons on Japan, so I am part of the second generation of human beings to spend an entire lifetime under the constant threat of imminent death. How was an 18-year-old kid supposed to explain that the choices his parents’ generation made to cope with that existential threat had created a world where I didn’t feel like I had control over my own destiny? How was I supposed to tell them that the nostalgia they felt for their 1960s-era youth was different from the nostalgia I felt for the same 1960s because I could see how they let the opportunity to make huge change slip through their fingers for their chance at grabbing some of the “greed is good” pie?

I couldn’t, so I turned to the voices on the radio who could.

The sky is falling down on me tonight

The walls are closing in on me tonight

Cos I know

This is the end of the beginning of the outbreak of love

Midnight Oil was marketed to Americans in the late 1980s as part of an extended fad of exoticizing Australia that started (sort of) with the film “Crocodile Dundee” in 1986. Peter Garrett’s distinctive vocals and the band’s tight energy took their 1987 album, Diesel and Dust, to the top of the U.S. charts in 1988. The lyrics of songs like “Beds Are Burning” focused on the struggles of Indigenous Australians and environmental causes, but American consumers seemed comfortable ignoring the socially conscious words and just enjoying the music.

The 1990 follow-up, Blue Sky Mining, did marginally better on the US charts, but something began to shift in the early 1990s as audiences began to recognize that the uncomfortable call to action in the band’s music was pointed more directly at the surviving world superpower. As someone may have recently pointed out, when you protest those controlling the market, there won’t be a market for you. You might say that was the end of the beginning of the outbreak of Midnight Oil in the U.S.

But if you’re going to have one last hit record in the States, Earth and Sun and Moon is an excellent way to go out.

“Feeding Frenzy” starts with Bones Hillman’s twist on the Peter Gunn theme, soon joined by Rob Hirst on drums and Jim Moginie’s wicked organ riffs. Listening to it now, the song seems to take a hard look directly at us, thirty years in the future in 2023, calling out our “Cyclone fences in the cybernetic orchard” and “Cardboard dinners and the saints and the sinners” (Hello Fresh is not a sponsor of this Substack) before announcing:

I don't want to run and hide
I've seen it all from either side
Truth and fiction must collide someday

The successful predictions continued in “My Country” - a song that uncomfortably predates the Iraq War by a decade, yet still feels like it calls us out for that crime.

I hear you say the truth must take a beating

The flag a camouflage for your deceiving

Cause I know, (I know) I know, it's written on your soul

I know we all make mistakes

This collection of songs continues to play off a mixture of hope and apocalyptic warning, alternating rocking bangers with more thoughtful numbers like “Bushfire,” which anticipates the new day to come after the passing destruction of the night.

For me, the climax comes with “Outbreak of Love,” the first single released and played on one of those new “alternative” radio stations in Phoenix. I remember hearing it during my morning bike ride to work in the telemarketing center of a major financial corporation. The sun was rising as the sinewy bass wove through the sparkling guitar stabs, and the walls closed in on me.

My generation was at the beginning of the end of our childhood. My future felt bleak, sterile, and corporate. We were told to feel triumphant about the fall of the Soviet Union, but somehow the threat of instant death still lingered. To a twenty-something GenXer with no real career prospects and no idea if we were up to the challenges of bringing the world back from the unseen future, adulthood felt like the end.

But this song doesn’t say that. The song says it’s the end of the beginning of something - something that isn’t necessarily over. And like the band’s other predictions, I think we can hold out hope that the outbreak of love is still going.

I hope virtue brings it's own reward

And I hope the pen is mightier than any sword

I hope the kids will take it slow

I hope my country claims it's own

“In the Valley”