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There's no shortage of talk about pop and rock music's sexual engine (healthy or otherwise) but what about the other face of its Freudian coin — its death drive? Georgia-based academics Edward Whitelock and David Janssen set out to correct the record. In a dozen chapters ranging from vast historical surveys to extended record reviews, they try to chart doomsday fixations in American postwar pop.

U.S. culture and End Is Nigh thinking have been entangled ever since that plucky band of cultists landed at Plymouth — rock certainly not excepted, with its penchant for ecstasies and excesses.

Consider that both Charles Manson and Waco's David Koresh fell back on death-cult leadership only after music careers didn't pan out. That the world's other peoples are less concerned with the prospect of spiritual or material cataclysm may be dubious, but Whitelock and Janssen stake a fair claim that Americans monger fear in their own special way.

They are at their best in those initial chapters, interweaving tales of millenarian Second Coming movements, apocalyptic undertones in the transcendentalism of Emerson and Thoreau, parallels between prayer revivals and concert experiences, the "atomic country" sub-genre of the 1940s and 1950s, moral panic over early rock'n'roll and the prophetic subtext of brilliant bohemian Harry Smith's pivotal Anthology of American Folk Music. They write about all these subjects with a mix of scholarly rigour and enthusiasts' zeal (and a few too many puns).

There's no avoiding Bob Dylan — Janssen and Whitelock show that Armageddon may be his true muse, the black hole at the core of his mutating art, the oft-evoked and ever-implied consequence of both worldly corruption and his own insistent presence-absence. He is rhapsodist, elegist and court jester at the eye of the void. The writers are especially acute on his derided "Christian" period (his conversion was shepherded by the Vineyard Fellowship in California, a direct heir of 19th-century millenarian groups) and the subsequent, underrated album Infidels.

(This focus helps liberate them somewhat from their conspicuous debt to Greil Marcus; his various works on Dylan, the Smith anthology and the American transcendental in rock are hard to surpass, and you can feel the writers straining. Likewise in their chapter on the recently dissolved northwestern band Sleater-Kinney, another Marcus fave.)

Unfortunately, once this ground has been spaded, the authors start scattering a much more random fistful of seeds, as each chapter zooms in on a single figure or band in the Pop-alyptic tradition. Often the selections seem motivated by personal taste more than by thematic necessity. John Coltrane's soaring A Love Supreme is certainly a mind-rearranging spiritual journey, but to call it apocalyptic requires several stretches of the meanings of revelation and the sublime. If they were going to choose only one jazz artist, it should have been Sun Ra, whose cult-like Arkestra sailed under the banner, "It's after the end of the world, don't you know that yet?"

The scanting on jazz is symptomatic: Despite nods to gospel, country and blues early on, "American popular music" turns out in this volume (as in too many others) mostly to mean white folk and rock of the 1960s and on. Why is there a tedious chapter on trying to make out Michael Stipe's mumbling in early R.E.M. but nothing on soul or funk? If Leonard Cohen merits lengthy, thoughtful consideration (though the tangents on Wordsworth were unnecessary), what about Gil Scott-Heron, Marvin Gaye or Sly Stone? Prince's 1999 gets nothing but a name-check.

The terrific chapter on Devo (whose "devolution" concept was an elaborate absurdist take on modern man as post-apocalyptic trash) seems less justified when scarcely a breath is spent on the vertiginous mood of Reagan-era punk. How can a book devoted to apocalyptic music ignore heavy metal? (Metallica's Kill 'Em All, for instance.) As for doom-mindedness in hip-hop — Public Enemy's Welcome to the Terrordome, Busta Rhymes' Extinction-Level Event or the mutually-assured-destruction madness of 1990s gangster rap? Again, we seek in vain.

Whitelock and Janssen are both English professors and it shows (switch the words "popular music" for "literature" in the subtitle and you've got a plausible sounding dissertation) — most of the book ignores the musical part of popular music. While they're astute readers of lyrics and do their historical homework, you seldom feel their ears working and flatness sets in.

The final chapters on post-9/11 music — Laurie Anderson's concerts in New York the next week, Sleater-Kinney's critical-feminist rock, Green Day's American Idiot — should be a culmination but lack the vivid perspective of the opening sections. The linear approach doesn't manage to illuminate the apocalyptic zeitgeist today. Janssen and Whitelock's American nightmare tour starts with a bang, but ends, unfortunately, with a whimper.

Carl Wilson is a Globe and Mail editor, music blogger and author of Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste.