The song feels like registering a catastrophe still to come

Evidence

The first season of The Americans (recently broadcast in the UK on ITV) ended with a sequence soundtracked by Peter Gabriel’s “Games Without Frontiers”. The series has rightly been praised for its intelligent use of music, and “Games Without Frontiers”, which was released in 1980, the year in which the series begins, was a perfect choice of track for the climax of the first season. Atmospherically, the song is somehow both anxious and fatalistic: drained of emotional inflection, Gabriel’s vocals sound catatonic; the production is cold and forbidding. “Games Without Frontiers” feels not so much post-traumatic as pre-traumatic: as if Gabriel is registering the impact of a catastrophe that is yet to come. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 715

Categorization

• DEFINE: Coins and defines ‘pre-traumatic’ feeling — music registering a catastrophe yet to come.
• XREF: connects to: Passive drift toward disaster can feel seductive rather than frightening — Julien Gracq, Balcony in the Forest, 293; Apocalypse is contemporary when the catastrophe is felt as already underway rather than imminent — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 556; Being alive feels like existing within a nightmare. — Crews, Harry, A childhood the biography of a place, 651 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• People can simultaneously dread and desire the catastrophic events they anticipate #expands (0.85) — Julien Gracq, Balcony in the Forest, 509
• Passive drift toward disaster can feel seductive rather than frightening #corroborates (0.80) — Julien Gracq, Balcony in the Forest, 293
• Apocalypse is contemporary when the catastrophe is felt as already underway rather than imminent #qualifies (0.75) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 556
• Being alive feels like existing within a nightmare. #expands (0.70) — Crews, Harry, A childhood the biography of a place, 651