Songs for the End of the World?

I'm not sure whether it's pessimism, media mutterings about global financial markets and climate change, or too many science fiction novels, but I have a habit of imagining the world post-apocalypse. It's not as morbid as it sounds, I swear. I pretty much imagine Little House on the Prairie - covered wagons and all - except on an unforgiving barren landscape with a backstory of nuclear war, global pandemic, or sudden and disastrous climatic shifts.

 See? Perfectly harmless. Nothing can be that bad if there are covered wagons involved.

This habit of imagination leads to trains of thought like Maybe I should judge the validity of professions by how useful they would be in the scenario of a post-apocalyptic world... (Doctors and engineers still manage to come out ahead, of course, but people like midwives and wilderness guides gain a sudden advantage and the CEO loses most of his prestige).

Part of the fun of imagining a post-apocalyptic world is that you can throw out all the normal assumptions of life as it is now (look at that positive spin: See? This world-ending disaster isn't terrible! It's a chance to challenge societal assumptions!) and one of my favourite imaginings is to think of a world without pop culture and art.
I don't really mean without art, but without the internet or iPods or books or newspapers or movies or TV. I'm not saying this in a "Oh, wasn't the world a better place in the good old days back before mass media" kind of way either. It's just that it's weird and kind of cool to think about what would happen without all the mechanisms we have at this moment in history to get information and art and stories. Because people would still need information and art and, most of all, stories in a post-apocalyptic world. They'd just have to produce all that themselves.
It's neat to think about what you'd remember. I like to imagine myself putting my grubby, post-apocalyptic children to bed by telling them garbled remixes of Harry Potter stories (yes, all my children and I survived the giant disaster that wiped out large portions of humanity. It's my imagination).

Sometimes when I'm out walking my dog in the woods I try to sing all the songs I can sing without a recording or lyrics to help me. This is my playlist for a post-apocalyptic world - and dear Lord, it has an awful lot of Disney princess songs on it. It is comforting, though, isn't it, to know that I would remember something. I have a playlist for the end of the world and so do you. It's all the weird bits and pieces and fragments of just stuff that you've accumulated over your life. I'm not really sure what to draw from that thought, except that I find it comforting. I like the idea that all the people sitting in their covered wagons on the great plain of the end of the world are sitting there telling each other stories about Elizabeth Bennet and Pikachu and this one really dramatic episode of America's Next Top Model; they're singing each other to sleep with lullabies they learned from their grandmothers and Lady Gaga songs.

Smiling at that thought and Grimacing at the idea of a global disaster,
Charlotte