Feeling Helpless: Recent Attempts to Explore War in Pop Music

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/02/arts/music/02songs.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print&oref=slogin

In the article, Pop Music and the War: The Sound of Resignation Jon Pareles of the New York Times explores how pop artists are dealing with their feelings about war today.

“The war songs of the 21st century have become sober and earnest, pragmatic rather than fanciful.”

Pareles talks about how our present time is unique in that it doesn’t have an exact parallel in history. There is no generationwide appreciable response to the war in Iraq and Pareles suggests that not having a draft is a possibility of why youth aren’t banding together. The combination of a war on terrorism and war in Iraq are causing new cultural responses from all of us and are showing up in the tone and lyrics of popular music – we are feeling exhausted.

When 9/11 happened, the responses from artists were more familiar – “The Price of Oil” by Billy Bragg considered oil profiteers, Eminem with “Mosh” and Outkast with “Bombs Over Baghdad” attacked the President outright, but by 2006 things started sounding a little different.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmY4FnxcN9E

More recently John Legend and John Mayer, both more folk-y love song artists began infusing their music with themes of war. One of the most familiar may be, “Waiting on the World to Change.” The helpless feeling of this song comes out in the lyrics:

If we had the power to bring our neighbors home from war
They would never have missed a Christmas/No more ribbons on the door

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXWXQeHCWpo

Pareles says, “The righteousness of old protest songs has been replaced by sorrow and malaise.”

Toby Keith, who penned “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American)” in 2002 recently joined Merle Haggard, a skeptic of the war in Iraq for a duet which Pareles said, “…suggested a reconsideration.”

I don’t know much about Toby Keith other than his extreme support of the Iraq war, but my instinct says that cultural shifts have and are happening if he has reconsidered his position. Extreme views, pro-war and anti-war have seemed to converge closer to the middle in a hopeless space and music seems to mirror those feelings.

Pareles writes, “The 2000s are not the 1960s, culturally or ideologically, but the musical repercussions of the Vietnam War may hint at what comes next. As the war dragged on, the delirious late 1960s gave way to not only the sodden early 1970s of technique-obsessed rock and self-absorbed singer-songwriters, but also to a flowering of socially conscious, musically innovative soul, the music that John Legend and John Mayer now deliberately invoke. It’s as if this wartime era has simply skipped the giddy phase – which didn’t, in the end, turn bombers into butterflies – and gone directly to the brooding. The end of the Vietnam War in 1975 was quickly followed by the rejuvenating energy of punk and hip-hop; there’s not telling what disengagement from Iraq might spark.”

I think Pareles makes an interesting statement here, and upon reflection I think in general, he’s right. Maybe we’ve experienced too many broken or empty promises as a generation and we feel too cynical about the ideology behind flower-power. Music seems to be one of the best mirrors when put in front of society and the songs being written and played on the radio today are reflecting the hopelessness that many are feeling amidst a seemingly never-ending war…