And as you have almost certainly realised, the title of it derives from W.B. Yeats’ classic poem, The Second Coming. For those of you not familiar with it, the relevant section runs:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand…

I can’t promise a revelation – but if I hear of one, I’ll be sure to let you know.

Ex-Tend, FEMFREE, NEURO and ORGASMOR

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the subject matter of popular music all too often concerns itself with historical events, whether by simply referring to them, or by actually telling the stories of particular events. The Rock ‘n’ Roll History of the World attempts to track these events, and to tell you a little bit more about each of them.

Each day, a new event that occurred on that day some years earlier is related. (On those rare occasions where a day seems to have had nothing worthy of a song occur upon it, the day’s entry may consist of a historical event for which no exact date is known.) When you look at them here, they will each be listed in chronological order, with the earliest events listed first.

The Rock ‘n’ Roll History of the World categorises each event into one or more of the following:

Crime

Which includes both the committing of crimes and the carrying out of sentencing for them, or otherwise related to crime and criminals.

Culture

All arts and popular entertainment, and anything that doesn’t fit anywhere else.

Dateless

Events which, while they did manifestly occur, have no recorded date.

Economics

Depressions, booms, legislation and important firsts.

Fictional

Events that are recounted only in works of fiction.

Future

Events projected to occur at some point in the future.

Legendary

Events of either dubious historicity or outright myth.

Politics

Including wars, which are after all, merely the continuation of politics by other means.

Religion

Including both events in religious history and in religious dogma.

Science

Discoveries, new technologies and events discovered only through the application of science.

Sport

Any and all sporting events, or events related to athletes.

All lyrics written and copyrighted by Casey Bennetto, 2004.

Annotations written by Loki Carbis, 2009.
The assistance and advice of Casey Bennetto in the
creation of these annotations is gratefully acknowledged.
This page is intended for informational purposes only.

Be warned that, if you haven’t seen the show, they contain massive massive spoilers for the plot. On the other hand, if you know your Australian political history, that shouldn’t matter much either.

Overture * My Right-Hand Man Do It In Style I Remember Kirribilli It’s Time Ruler Of The Land The Beginning Is The End On The Floor I Wanna Do You Slowly Sweet Antony Green * The Arse End Of The Earth Freaky Heavens, Mister Evans Redfern Ma(m)bo Power The Mateship Choose Me The Light On The Hill Historical Revisionism
Titles marked * have no lyrics.

Primary Sources
Selected references for the people and the politics.

Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was that man, Sarajevo was that place and July 28, 1914, was definitely the wrong time. While on a motorcade with his wife, Sophie Hollenburg, the Archduke narrowly dodged an assassination attempt by bomber Muhamed Mehmedbaši.

Muhamed’s failure led to the man who had placed him there, Danilo Ili, to send another of his team, Gavrilo Princip, to complete the job. Princip fired two shots, fatally wounding the Archduke and his wife with one shot each.

And in doing so, he set in motion a chain of events that would lead, inexorably, to the outbreak of World War One.

Referenced in:

Manuscript – Al Stewart
All For You, Sophia – Franz Ferdinand

It’s surely no coincidence, after all, and I’m about to tell you just how little a coincidence it is.

It all started with Marla’s unfortunate death. I’m not sure exactly how she died, but she did. Pointlessly and young, in fact. So pointlessly, so young, that there’s no chance of Tyler Durden’s reaction being anything less than blasting right through his earlier anti-consumerism and anti-modernism into sheerest nihilism. Durden is now a man with a serious hate-on for pretty much the entire world. And a plan.

Project Mayhem and its pranking nature are gone. The new Project Evolution is deadly serious. At its heart, the basis of Project Evolution resembles the old programming concept of Core Wars, specifically the Core War Evolver concept. Tyler’s thesis is that humanity has stopped evolving because it has (largely) freed itself from natural selection, being an apex predator species with no real competitors. Tyler aims to correct this deficiency, and to make sure that the lesson sticks, he also programs the nascent Skynet to be able to evolve its own code and processes.

Giving it Marla’s face is a gesture of sentimentality on Tyler’s part, but is motivated by his belief that she would approve of this plan.

So when Judgement Day hits, suddenly the surviving humans are in a much deadlier, much less hospitable environment, and they now have a competitor species (in the Terminators) to deal with.

It’s important to note that Tyler doesn’t want to just destroy humanity. He wants to force it to prove itself worthy of continuing. Tyler would be rooting for John Connor and Kyle Reese at the same time that he helps to plot their destruction, because the only true contest is between equals. I say would be, becasue unfortunately for Tyler, the unpredictability of Judgement Day meant that he too died, and never saw the brave new world he had created…

The guiding assumption of this proposal is that people wish to censor the internet due to the inherent offensiveness of the words themselves. A simple code of substitutions should suffice to take care of that, and since it seems unlikely that anyone in politics finds their own name offensive, I have used the names of prominent politicians as the substitutes.*

Compound words are formed in the normal way: a person can be a Bishop-kicking mother-Joycer, a complete Rudding Tuckey-hole, an Abbot-head or just a Bolter who’s off their McKews.

* I cannot claim full credit for this idea, as it is adapted from the one used by Robert Anton Wilson in his novel The Trick Top Hat- I have merely changed the names to reflect the current Australian political climate.

Related drugs: Ex-Tend, FOREVER, NEURO and ORGASMOR

An early advocate of the heliocentric theory – the idea that the Earth and the other planets revolve around the sun – Galileo Galilei was denounced for this heretical view by various members of the Catholic Church. Unfortunately for Galileo, he lived in Italy, which at the time was dominated by the power of the church. He was summoned to Rome and tried for heresy (although his true crime seems to be less his heresies and more his willingness to teach them to others).

He was convicted and placed under house arrest for the rest of his life. In addition, he was forced to publicly recant his views – although legend has it that his denial was followed by the muttered words ‘E pur si muove!’ – ‘and yet it moves’ – an explicit contradiction of the Biblical doctrine that the Earth is fixed in space. It will never be known if he actually did say the words – but it’s nice to think that he did.

Referenced in:

Bohemian Rhapsody — Queen

I know, I know, the song only mentions his name… but this is such a cool story, and it’s such a cool song…