http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HqkWym3dvDI, 2.)
So my whole mindset for the album is: what are we supposed to do caught in the middle of this?
Emma Ruth Rundle & Thou – May Our Chambers Be Full, Oneohtrix Point Never – Magic Oneohtrix Point Never, 38 Essential ’80s Songs About Nuclear Anxiety, dick-measuring boasts about his nuclear button.
Right in the middle of Prince’s new-wave funk album Controversy, perhaps one of his sleekest and sexiest albums, there was “Ronnie, Talk To Russia.” A brief, synth-y rave-up, it’s a bluntly political song complete with machine gun sound effects. “Forever Young” is another one of the big iconic ’80s songs on this list, and is also both one of the main Cold War examples and one of those songs that has lived on in the popular imagination in a way that erases its Cold War elements.
Key lyric: “Us and them/And after all, we’re only ordinary men/Me and you.“, War: Bangladesh War of Independence Soon after, Partridge barks “If we get through this lot alright/ We’re due for a replay, 1998.” He might’ve been 20 years early on that one and missed one of the primary players, but he turned out to be dead-on about the cyclical nature of people losing their damn minds. This song doesn’t seem to have much to do with the main narrative, but we could all use a bit of levity at this point. The foreboding goth sounds of the Sisters Of Mercy made for a perfect pairing with blackened, late Cold War themes. era, as did the pointedly-titled “Ivan Meets G.I.
There were references like “V-2 Schneider” ( a call-out to the first ballistic missile ever created and Kraftwerk’s Florian Schneider) and there was “Heroes.” Perhaps Bowie’s most stunning and enduring composition, there’s room for interpretation in “Heroes,” but at least one of the meanings was a tale of two lovers stuck on opposite sides of the Berlin Wall. Key lyric: “The girls would fill with blood and the grass will be green again/Remember the dead, they were so great, some of them.“. Then, of course, there was “Heroes”, an album steeped in the Cold War and Berlin ethos, with its krautrock influence and its dystopian sheen tracing inspirations from WWII through its ramifications to the late ’70s. The song was based on the premise ‘they always get a working-class boy to do the killing’. The message: Robbie Robertson wrote about a fictional character in the America South as the Confederate soldiers neared defeat.
At one point, though, Hugh Cornwell gets more specific and asks “Who gets the job/ Of pushing the knob?/ That sort of responsibility, you draw straws for it if you’re mad enough.” Something about the song, relative to some other examples on this list, feels like an attempt at finding peace amidst all the darkness around them, though, the chorus working as a salve against the rest of the song’s searching. If you think a good song with bomb in the title is missing from this list, go ahead and add it so others can vote for it too. This would continue throughout the decade, with songs that referenced World War II and earlier events of the Cold War as precursors to the current moment, songs that criticized the American/Russian standoff for putting the entire world in danger of total destruction, songs that imagined what a fallout world would look like or how people would act in the moment they knew the missiles were coming. “Ronnie, talk to Russia/ Before it’s too late … Before they blow up the world,” Prince sings over and over as a straightforward litany. The Most Stellar Rock Songs About The Moon, romantic relationship between teacher and student. Any ideas for songs would be greatly appreciated!
The message: “Vietnam was not war as we knew it in the conventional sense,” Mick Jagger told Rolling Stone in 1995. Their video for “Two Tribes” opens with archival footage of Richard Nixon proclaiming “Above everything else, the American people want leaders who will keep the peace.” It isn’t any subtler who the two tribes are from there, as the video focuses on a ring match between lookalikes of Reagan and Chernenko. Across those records, there are several songs that either capture that place and time or are actually about Cold War and nuclear war themes. One of the all-time early ’80s new wave classics, and one of the foremost examples of a song being radically misunderstood over the years. For example: david bowie - space oddity (which is 136 BPM, by the way) SNAP! Franke Goes To Hollywood weren’t pulling any punches. A sinister piece of synthpop, maybe Depeche Mode’s “Two Minute Warning” doesn’t grapple with things very directly, but it’s another one of the songs from the era that plays with the common language and imagery of the times. Supposedly, it’s partially about cocaine. / Am I high? You Dropped A Bomb On Me.
But what we deserve is the paranoid, airless qualities of the best ‘80s songs about nuclear anxiety. Elvis Costello And The Attractions – ‘Oliver’s Army’, Bright Eyes – ‘When The President Talks To God’, The Band – ‘The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down’. The list includes songs that have been performed by the entire band. It would be very easy for our generation to forget the true horror of war, without the likes of Harry to remind us.
It’s a classic for that reason, using a metaphor to illustrate the often infantile, reckless behavior of world leaders that so often threatens to bring us to the brink of disaster. “F**king Young,” one of the highlights from Cherry Bomb, is simple to decode. It all builds up to the grand finale: a caustic, maddened repetition of “Paranoia in America.”. Another perfect pop song that strides along despite the weight of its subject. One of the most famous, recognizable videos of the MTV era, it depicted the band playing, as well as various world leaders, as grotesque Splitting Image puppets. The message: The east Londoners took inspiration from the Native Americans’ battles against European settlers. “The way he talked about war had a profound effect on me,” he said. Songs with bomb in the lyrics are only allowed if that word is in the song's name as well. The Bomb (feat. Morrissey was always a morose character, so leave it to him to deploy a nuclear bomb reference off-handedly like he does in the Smiths’ non-album classic “Ask.” “If it’s not love/ Then it’s the bomb that’ll bring us together” he sings repeatedly. Key lyric: “Like my father before me, I will work the land/And like my brother above me, who took a rebel stand/He was just 18, proud and brave/But a Yankee laid him in his grave.“, War: WWI As far as the Cold War specifically goes, there’s the “nuclear era” line in “London Calling,” a lyrical allusion to the Doomsday Clock in “The Call Up,” an indictment of America’s Cold War-era international interventions in “Washington Bullets,” and the anti-nuclear “Stop The World.” The latter three came from the Sandinista! Key lyric: “I’ve got my spine, I’ve got my orange crush/I’ve had my fun and now it’s time/To serve your conscience overseas.“, War: Iraq War (The fact that Phil Collins’ “In The Air Tonight” was influenced by his divorce but often registers as one of those tense Cold War anthems is a testament to just how much the state of the world was reflected in the textures of early ‘80s pop music.)
The world's defining voice in music and pop culture since 1952. That was the decade they looked back on as their innocence, the same way we look back on the ‘80s as ours. Another one of the famed Cold War works, Sting’s “Russians” is one of those songs from a perspective between that of the Americans and that of the Russians. Key lyric: “You sent your lights, your bombs/You sent them down on our city, shock and awe/Like some crazy TV show/They’re robbing the cradle of civilisation.“, War: Gulf War
(Easy to relate to this one, these days.) Key lyric: “Blow my head off, explode my crystal guts/Lay my purple on the grass.“, War: Iraq War It’s another track that hinges on that moment that seemed so plausible day-to-day in the ’80s: that the sirens could ring out and a person would have to make peace with everything with the handful of minutes they had left. He references both Reagan and Khrushchev along the way, but the tone of it is one of struggling hope that both sides realize some kind of common humanity before destroying the entire world, continuously wrapping around to the line “I hope the Russians love their children, too.”. Thankfully, far from being a dirge, “World Destruction” is a hell of a jam, so at least it gives you something to dance to as the world comes crashing down.
Like, the future was really looking so positive. “Warning! / Who gives a f**k about they? “It was about a soldier that came back and his wife was sent a telegram to say that he was dead,” he told GQ. The message: Rancid’s Tim Armstrong wrote the track about his brother’s time serving in Iraq and the fear soldiers like him feel, not knowing if they’ll make it home. Despite being anti-world, Jeezy and August Alsina find solace in “a beautiful girl”: “When these streets is all you know / it’s hard to tell who’s a friend or a foe / all I need is a beautiful girl / so me and her, can f**k the world.”. Subscribe