Silent Treatment: Anti-War Songs Fall Flat
Rock stars frustrated Iraq War is not advancing their aging careers, blood and others’ sacrifice not increasing their bank accounts…
Politico:
“Yo George,” sneers Tori Amos, outrage flowing from her lyrics. “Is this just the madness of King George?”
“Yo George,” follows the next verse. “Well you have the whole nation on all fours.”
Amos’ bitter indictment of President Bush in “Yo George” is a clear sign of the times.
But so is the fact that — if you are not part of the songwriter-pianist’s loyal cadre of fans — you probably have never heard the song.
An unpopular president, an unpopular war, a restless young generation eager for change — all the elements of a mass protest culture would seem to be present in this election year.
One thing is missing: a mass culture.
The Vietnam era produced an entire genre of anti-war and cultural protest songs, the best-known of which became anthems of the age.
Iraq and the Bush presidency have inspired lots of music in this tradition — but nothing that has gained a large popular audience or is vying to be a generational anthem.
Music, say some sociologists, is just one manifestation of a more fundamental trend. Opposition to the Iraq war, which commands strong majorities in the polls, has not produced mass marches on the Pentagon or shut down college campuses.
The reasons are varied, including the lack of a military draft and much lower casualty figures than were suffered in Southeast Asia 40 years ago. But another big factor is the fragmented nature of how Americans live and communicate — with no clearer example than how we listen to music.
The trend was highlighted this month when Warner Music’s Sire Records issued a 30-song soundtrack for the anti-war documentary “Body of War,” the release timed for the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. The album includes musical heavyweights like Bruce Springsteen, Eddie Vedder and 62-year-old Neil Young, who has contributed to the anti-war songbook for both Vietnam and Iraq.
Despite the project’s star power and its appeal to multiple generations, its format — the concept album — has, for the most part, been left for dead. People today download their favorite songs from multiple albums at a time, unlike in the ’60s, when an iPod would have looked like something from the set of Star Trek.
Back then, says Robert Thompson, founder of the Institute on Popular Culture at Syracuse University, protest music was inescapable.
“Those songs, whether you were listening to them in your dorm room or whether parents were upset that their kids were listening to them in the basement, you were hearing them,” Thompson said. “Those songs were the soundtrack of that period. They were in the air literally, and people had to come to grips with them.”
In today’s culture, Thompson added, music consumption tends to take place in a narrow channel.
“Now it’s completely possible for songs that are getting huge distribution one way or another amidst their core fan base to remain completely unnoticed to a fully intelligent and aware American,” Thompson said. “Back in the pre-digital, network era, we all fed from the same culture trough, whether you liked it or not .”
The biggest reason why today’s protest music is failing to echo broadly, some cultural critics believe, is not just a shortened attention span on the part of music fans, but the move to an all-volunteer military. Compulsory military service during Vietnam meant millions more families felt they had a stake in the debate.
“If you’re at risk of going to a foreign country and getting your head blown off, then you take a very personal interest in what’s going on around you,” said David Fricke, senior editor at Rolling Stone.
“Let’s face it, people are distracted, they are distracted by reality shows, none of which have anything to do with reality,” Fricke added. “They spend more time watching ‘American Idol’ than they do voting in the last couple of elections.”
Without a draft, it’s easy for the public to lose sight of the war, especially when the media and presidential candidates turn their focus to the economy and other issues. The mission of rock activists against the war, then, becomes part of the subculture straining to reach the masses.
“Just because we’re not hearing as much about [Iraq] in the first 10 minutes of every news broadcast doesn’t mean that antipathy and that feeling of protest against the war has gone away,” Thompson said. “A lot of people out there still feel as strongly as they did before.”
For the activist group Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW), who will be receiving the proceeds of the “Body of War” album sales, the disconnect between mass culture and the war is particularly frustrating.
Tomas Young, who enlisted in the Army two days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, had been in Iraq for less than a year in April 2004 when a bullet severed his spine and left him paralyzed. He later joined IVAW. It was the degree to which protest songs helped him deal with his rehabilitation and constant frustration that inspired the album’s title “Body of War: Songs That Inspired an Iraq War Veteran.”
“These songs are not flower-and-hugs protest music,” Young said. “It’s meant to incite anger and frustration in the listener that they need to make change.”
Along with Tomas Young, musicians featured on the “Body of War” soundtrack are confident that they still play a significant role in American culture.
“Body of War” contributor Tom Morello, a lead guitarist for the mainstream rock bands Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave thinks that politically inspired music can still inspire action.
“It was certainly the mixture of music and politics in groups like The Clash and Public Enemy that helped spur me into becoming an activist and helped me feel less alone in my ideas and convictions that ran very contrary to the ideas and convictions that I heard espoused on the nightly news,” Morello said.
“This ‘Body of War’ project is one more link in that chain of rebel music that serves on the one hand to fan the flames of discontent [and] on the other hand, provide a feeling of solidarity among those who think this is an awful and immoral war that we really want to do something about.”
Morello’s generation of activist-musicians differs from that of the Vietnam War era in another important way other than album sales.
Whether it reflects a struggle to be heard, or simply a different stylistic approach, today’s brand of anti-war music is unmistakably direct and biting when compared to most of the songs of Bob Dylan and contemporaries, which tended to take their power from metaphor and allusion rather than engaging by name with the headlines and public personalities of the day.
One of the tracks on “Body of War” is entitled “Son of Bush,” by Public Enemy. Another song on the album, by Talib Kweli and Cornel West, is called “Bushonomics.”
“[I]t’s important to sort of, to balance a more obvious statement with something that is more shadowy and metaphorical,” Morello said. “I love the music of Bob Dylan, but, frankly, he was afraid of being a topical songwriter. … He was afraid to take it to the next level.”
Indeed, Morello leaves little to the imagination about the intentions of his craft and believes activism, not political practice and endorsement, is the key to change. Despite “the eerie similarities” between him and Barack Obama — both men have Kenyan fathers and were educated at Harvard and lived in Chicago — Morello hasn’t endorsed a presidential candidate.
“How change happens is people whose name you don’t read about in the history books organizing, struggling, standing up and fighting for their rights where they live, where they work and go to school,” he said. “It doesn’t happen because one of several super-rich candidates gets in and feigns to go against their corporate backings for a brief minute so we have a respite from the nonstop drum roll of corporatism and war. It happens because of heroic acts like Tomas Young.”
For his part, Young is hopeful that people will start paying attention.
“My hope [is] that people won’t hop on iTunes and cherry-pick songs for 99 cents apiece. I hope people will buy the whole album.”
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yaaaaaaaaaawn….
March 29th, 2008 at 9:51 ami’ll never give a penny to any of these “UN-AMERICAN PUKES”.
March 29th, 2008 at 10:01 amI can’t believe I read the whole thing. I have such a fucking headache.
March 29th, 2008 at 10:12 amThe magic has gone old hippies. Go on back to your mansions and your pot plants. 1968 is over with. Woodstock is dead. Good riddence.
The only songs that seem to be popular are country songs that support the troops. “Riding with Private Malone” for example. or Aaron Tippin’s “Stars and Stripes and The Eagle Fly”.
The Dixie Chicks wore out their welcome and have been soundly rejected by officionados of that music genre. A few of us remember awhile back when Country Radio Disc Jocks were asking us to smash, burn or run over our Dixie Chicks CD’s. Naturally I did.
If you are unAmerican, hate the troops and their mission…you can go fuck off. I ain’t buying your music, your movies or your lines of shit.
If these “tards” think this country is so bad, then they can all leave the mansions and go live in a cave with OBL somewhere for all I give a shit.
But if you denigrate my flag, or my troops; you denigrate me. In person, you get a knuckle sandwhich. If not in person, you get my boycott and my sincerest “fuck you”.
March 29th, 2008 at 10:49 amSpringsteen, rich, famous and a freaking looser. And who gives a rat’s ass what you have to say?
March 29th, 2008 at 11:03 amTori Amos, who the f+ck is she?
Ignore these freaks; glad their useless careers are going nowhere.
I need a beer.
Boy, they list a bunch of excuses as to why this crap isn’t selling except the fact that the days of empty headed, uninformed masses that were manipulated by a limited source of information. ie.. the main stream media, is over. The repetitive bumper-sticker messages banged into your brain to a rock beat is hardly food for thought. More like junk food for indigestion.
I’ll be sighting in my muzzleloader on my old Springsteen albums this year while listening to Uncle Ted!!!!
March 29th, 2008 at 11:03 amI think it is because AMERICANS WANT TO DEFEAT THE ISLAMOFACISTS and WE reject their BLAME AMERICA FIRST MANTRA!
THEIR MUSIC IS EXTREME LEFF!
THE CENTER & RIGHT LOVE OUR COUNTRY, OUR TROOPS AND WE ARE GOD FEARING!
WE KNOW WHAT WE ARE UP AGAINST & WE WILL FIGHT TO THE BITTER END UNLIKE THE COWARDS ON THE LEFT!
March 29th, 2008 at 11:10 am
I have blood squirting from my ears, and now my brain hurts after reading that dribble.
March 29th, 2008 at 11:12 amNobody will buy that crybaby album because nobody cares about their unpatriotic bullshit. (singing in studio)
Guess what pastyfaced, professional libtard produced this piece of wineshit? Yep, Phil Donohue. Crybaby son in law of Danny Thomas.
March 29th, 2008 at 11:21 amThe feebleminded do not grow!
The 60’s are dead. This ain’t 1968 and this isn’t the VN war. Go back to your mansions and to your pot plants hippies.
March 29th, 2008 at 11:25 amIn 1978, I was 18 and I was front row for Bruce and Clarence, et al in Austin – The “Darkness on the Edge of Town” tour . . . It was so amazing - raw and unpretentious, I thought. I thought he was brilliant – through his music - his presence. I have seen him several times since, but never the same.
And now . . . when I hear him talk, I think, what a complete idiot . . .
Way to ruin a girls memories, Bruce! You were never what I thought you were. Thunder Road turned out to be Crackerjack Hill.
March 29th, 2008 at 11:27 amWhorey Amos (well she tries) does shock value crap and it’s never worked. Get some help Whorey. Then what Dan said…
March 29th, 2008 at 12:06 pmPitiful Rich Old Hippies. Hope they lose evry last dime trying to encourage their brain dead US hating fans.
March 29th, 2008 at 12:14 pmIMO, these idiots are going to get a big wakeup soon ‘nuf!
Maybe there should be a pro-troop, pro-american soundtrack released.., it would show these numbskulls what the real voice of america has to say…, and would be a best seller!
March 29th, 2008 at 12:23 pmI think this nation got tired of musicians and their opinions with the Dixie Chicks. I actually fell asleep at the keyboard reading this article. Liberals, and their opinions, hold no water for me. Next, please!
March 29th, 2008 at 12:43 pmShut up and don’t sing. Nobody gives a fuck about your opinion or your music.
March 29th, 2008 at 2:25 pmOf course they blame everything for the failure of their music but themselves. A great American once said, “Americans love a winner. Americans will not tolerate a loser. Americans despise cowards. Americans play to win all of the time.”
These people are losers and cowards playing to fail.
March 29th, 2008 at 5:21 pmWhile I certainly feel for wounded soldiers like Tomas Young, I think it’s terrible how they allow themselves to be used as props for these left-wing antiwar celebrities — the very people who actually oppose our country and our military, and who really don’t give a SHIT about the troops unless they can be used as poster children for their pet causes.
BTW, have you noticed that the only time you hear of Springsteen anymore is during election years, when he is trying to gain attention for whatever political publicity stunt he is trying to pull that year, since no one cares about his new music anymore? This is just the latest version for 2008.
Also ironic is how he now relies on mainstream, “establishment” outlets like “60 Minutes” and the network news shows to push his messages. So much for the “rebel outsider” taking on “The Man”…
March 29th, 2008 at 5:30 pmI’m willing to look past only Morello’s America bashing solely because he’s one the sickest guitarists ever. All the rest of these pukes can burn in hell.
March 29th, 2008 at 6:42 pmMore musical “D” students crudely demanding that socialism replace capitalism.
The more famous these liberal champions of mediocrity get,
the more guitar students I get who are dazzled by the bar-lowering exploits.
Keep those bland hits coming liberals,
March 29th, 2008 at 6:51 pmyou’re paying my bills.
bulldog;
March 29th, 2008 at 7:22 pmYep, that’s the “Reality Test” we need. Problem is finding non-lib artists to perform it, and non-lib studios to produce it and promote it, etc.
Tom Morello is okay.
His schtick is all the electronic gear he plugs into.
He’s what I’d call a noise maker, he dosen’t actually PLAY the guitar.
This is a world class guitarist PLAYING guitar:
March 29th, 2008 at 7:29 pmhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xwmpuvj8dSw
Two words: Well said!
Also well said! I couldn’t agree more. Tom Morello is the most overrated guitarist of all time in my opinion. He wouldn’t crack my top 500 list. I find it hysterical that some people consider him “innovative”. Hellooo, he is a poor imitation hybrid Jimi / Jimmy (as in Hendrix and Page). He took the effects experimentation of Jimi, and stole a bunch of Pagey’s licks, and melded them together in a stew of mediocrity.
Could Morello play any true virtuoso guitarists music? Even if we stayed just in the Rock genre that he mainly plays…Vinnie Moore, Steve Morse, Alejandro Silva, Joe Satriani, etc. Please, he couldn’t play even one song of theirs even if all he did for the rest of his life was practice that one song!
Not to mention so many other truly great guitarists, whether their virtuoso or not, who absolutely smoke Morello. Doug Aldrich, George Lynch, Ritchie Blackmore, Michael Schenker, on and on and on.
I’d like to see him play some country, Albert Lee style. Say “Fun Ranch Boogie”.
Anyway, I’d be here all day if I listed 1/1000 of the guitarists that smoke Morello.
Another great POD1 truism (slightly edited):
“liberals…champions of mediocrity”
March 29th, 2008 at 8:21 pmJust checked out that vid you linked to. Never heard of him, but very nice! Are you also a Django fan?
March 29th, 2008 at 8:37 pmHuge Django fan, gypsys rule.
Half a dozen of the worlds top gypsy guitarists on the same stage:
http://www.dailymotion.com/related/3577808/video/xra2z_angelo-debarre-bireli-lagrene-rosen_music
Spanish Gypsys invented Flamenco music.
Spanish Gypsy Carlos Montoya:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcR017E139k&feature=related
British jazz fusion guitar monster Allan Holdsworth:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65VqS9aqv4Y
Too many great players to list.
No offense to Tom in Co but Fuck Tom Morello.
March 29th, 2008 at 10:37 pmYep, love Django…he did more with two fingers of his fretting hand, then I can do with four. There must be some kind of magic gypsy dust across the pond.
Thanks for the vids…great stuff!
I’m not a big Holdsworth fan though. Not that he isn’t a great guitarist, I just don’t like his music a whole lot. Similar to how I fully acknowledge Yngwies chops, but I can only listen to 2-3 songs of his at any given time. Too repetitive, too many swept arpeggios one after another, not enough dynamics (he has basically one speed…hyperdrive!).
I’m definitely partial to electric. It’s more expressive in a lot of ways in my opinion. Mostly rock, metal (old school 70’s, 80’s), fusion, and blues. But I also love classical and flamenco on acoustic. Well hell, the truth is I can listen to Albert Lee all day long too. If it’s great guitar playing, and it’s melodic (not just noise), then I usually like it.
Here’s a few vids to watch / listen to…you may not like some of the music, but I think you’ll appreciate the guitar work nonetheless:
Steve Morse on electric:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mk_GMvIea6s&feature=related
Steve Morse on electric again
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-CC2jOVNSI&feature=related
Steve Morse on acoustic - classical
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIu7UA-823Y&feature=related
Alejandro Silva - metal / fusion
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXImwwoDUus&mode=related&search=
Joe Bonamassa - blues
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcSWbRZ3y5w&feature=related
Vinnie Moore when he was a kid - 80’s metal
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKBE7u7byTk
Vinnie Moore - rock / fusion (bad video and audio quality unfortunately there aren’t a lot of vids of Vinnie playing)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkYu0pKCvZ8
Albert Lee doing some country picking on electric
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqcUBdNaHq8
I’m sure you’ve seen this one before - Paco, John, and Al all together on acoustic
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9cadbYIzhqQ
March 30th, 2008 at 3:39 pm