Remember the good old days of daily nightmares of nuclear armageddon?
They’re back! Yippee!
So let’s replay some golden oldies of the atomic age!
Stanley Kubrick’s Cold War satire “Dr. Strangelove or How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” famously ends with nuclear armageddon being rung in to the strains of “We’ll meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when”. Ever since the movie’s release that warm World War Two era chestnut has taken on an additional tinge of Cold War cool.
But what of songs that dealt with nuclear war directly, from their inception? Now that the narcissistic blustering of two Dear Leaders with the impulse control of toddlers (minus toddlers’ instincts for empathy) have quickly resurrected the specter of imminent nuclear confrontation that we all thought had faded since 1989, perhaps it would be fun (fun???) to revisit some of the pop music classics of nuclear annihilation.
Tom Lehrer
I must start with two classics of comedy songs, both from Tom Lehrer, who twinklingly skewered 1950’s and 1960’s society as America’s premiere lounge singer court jester. “So Long, Mom” perfectly transplants the “Over There” jingoism and “Send a salami to your boy in the army” boosterism of WW1 and WW2 into the era of WW3 (an era which will last only 90 minutes). Its musical sibling is the even blacker humored “survival revival hymn”: “We Will All Go Together When We Go”:
So Long, Mom (A Song for World War III) – Tom Lehrer
We Will All Go Together When We Go – Tom Lehrer
Kate Bush in the “Breathing” video
For some reason, the 1970’s produced almost no songs about nuclear war. But moving into the 1980s we find many popular songs that treat nuclear war in all earnestness. The perhaps lyrically and musically most successful, and devastating, is Kate Bush’s epic “Breathing”, which evokes an apocalyptic landscape of doomed survivors, including a fetus inside its mother’s womb, breathing in the fall-out of a nuclear winter.
Breathing – Kate Bush
Clip from the “Dancing…” video
Also deadly earnest, but set to a bopping beat, Ultravox’s “Dancing with Tears in My Eyes” recounts the melodramatic tale of a man hearing on the car radio that nuclear war is imminent and racing home to make love to his wife one last time. Yep, we danced to this in the 1980’s. Fun times at the disco!
Dancing with Tears in My Eyes – Ultravox
Sometimes this research took me into even earlier times, for need of greater context. Which is how I learned about the “female friendships” of the 19th century. These would be intense relationships between two women, in school or college, that could be as deeply bonded as any traditionally romantic or familial bond. Publicly these “female friendships” could exhibit all the hallmarks of romance: physical affection, love letters, lavishing gifts on another, intense jealousies, sharing beds, displays of devastating heartbreak when relationships dissolved. Society approved and encouraged these “female friendships” as a way for young women to exercise romantic proclivities within the safety of sorority, away from male temptation. That these friendships could become sexual was not imagined. That doesn’t mean however that some of these female friendships didn’t become sexual.
Times were different in the 1800’s. Men sharing beds with men and women sharing beds with women was common. The terms heterosexual and homosexual weren’t even coined until the end of the 19th century. But once coined, their usage and the greater awareness of homosexual identity and activity seeped into society by the early 20th century. Intense “female friendships”, as practiced and encouraged in middle class society in the 19th century, now became tainted and suspect. Suspicion and fear of lesbianism made something once deemed a normal rite of passage for young women now appear unhealthy and dangerous.
It wouldn’t be a visit to the botanic garden without the obligatory “Ed sniffs a flower” picture, as my Facebook Friends have already learned to expect from us with seasonal regularly.
To get to the unicorn one must find the meadow in the sky. A wizard helps the knight get to the meadow in the sky by magically creating a rainbow up to the clouds. The knight climbs up the rainbow. So far so complicated (and unromantic). But we are not there yet.
I was introduced to BJ and her writings that would eventually become “The Oriole’s Song” during a weekend visit to Philadelphia over 23 years ago. While Ed, Dave, BJ and other family members were leaving the house to attend Quaker Meeting, BJ handed me sheets of paper containing two short stories she had written for her writing group. She insisted I read them and tell her what I thought, as I was “an artist”. I felt a little trepidation. Ed and I had been dating for only half a year and I was meeting many of his relatives, including BJ, for the first time that weekend, and now I was being asked to read and judge her writing? What if I didn’t care for it? Already imagining devising diplomatic responses, I sat down to read in the empty house. By the time the family returned from Meeting, I was flush with the excitement of having encountered a thing of beauty.
BJ and I spent much of the rest of the day talking about her short stories, and how she planned writing more, vignettes that would eventually form the chapters of her memoir. She told me about her girlhood in China, her experiences of the war, of being one of the only Caucasian children in Yuanling, and feeling even more like a stranger as a teenager in the United States. She told me about returning to China in the 1970’s during the height of the Cultural Revolution with Dave and the two China born daughters they’d adopted in the 1960’s. She told me about returning again in the 1990’s, and floating high over Yuanling in a boat, now that the city of her childhood was drowned by the raised waters of the Yuan River Dam. She told me how her father was one of the last Americans left in China when the Communists took over in 1948, how he was denounced and put on trial and convicted as a spy, marked for execution.
Notes from a Composer 