Silent treatment: Anti-war songs fall flat By: Richard T. Cullen March 28, 2008 06:22 PM EST
"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."