![]() ![]() The guys in radiation suits dancing/dying toward the close are unexpectedly disturbing. This is agitprop that's irritating the way agitprop is supposed to be.īush shows why she's the missing link between David Bowie and Nick Cave with a musical theater glam cabaret Kurt Weill-meets-Disney number about inhaling her incinerated loved ones. Anarcho-punks Crass' "They've Got a Bomb" is all jagged-edges ranting, feedback and (literally) blank spaces. No adrenaline-junkie cheerleading for violence here. You could also see the song as a queasily prescient tribute to our drone program, with Obama humming "Look out honey 'cause I'm using technology" as he presses the button. Iggy isn't quite as convincing when he claims to be an atom bomb as Wanda Jackson was, but he still does pretty well. "Dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead," bomb explodes, the end. ![]() Some bored hipster mutters "I saw mushroom head/I was born and I was dead," against a psychedelic drone, until everybody gets tired of it. Sabbath's metal heirs would often revel in death and destruction, but Ozzy's a protest singer the bleak vision is a warning, not a celebration.īlack Sabbath's apocalyptic fantasy is gothic and vivid Can's is blank, monotonous and anticlimactic. "Robot minds of robot slaves/lead them to atomic grave." Nuclear holocaust comes with a slow doom-riff inevitability, then turns halfway through to a sluggish trashy, Vegas showstopper, like a mutant chorus line shuffling amidst the corpses. "I didn't see you around," as the doctor says. Everybody thinks the world's going to end, and everybody thinks they're the ones who will get to see it. But in its own way, Harry Belafonte's performance, complete with children's choir and vocals dripping with pathos, is just as over-the-top.ĭylan recorded a number of anti-nuclear songs, including "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall" and "Masters of War." This is the jauntiest, though a talking folk blues take on the simultaneous excesses of Cold War paranoia and Cold War optimism. The most famous version of "Come Away, Melinda" by Fred Hellerman and Frank Minkoff is probably Uriah Heep's preposterously towering prog melodrama version. The Byrds' setting of Nazim Hikmet Ran's poem " I Come and Stand At Every Door" is probably the most famous child-tugs-at-the-heartstrings-after-nuclear-holocaust song, but it's not the only entry in the genre. ![]() Half lurching parodic mimicry and half tribute, the joke is that he can squeeze so much soul out of really, sincerely not wanting them to drop, drop, be-bop that bomb. Mingus channels gospel blues, with the horns as a kind of honking spiritual moan. Penderecki's composition has appeared on a number of film scores and is much imitated, but the original is still remarkably affecting, all bleak, ominous dissonance culminating in a fractured crescendo.Ĭharles Mingus, "Oh Lord Don't Let Them Drop that Atomic Bomb on Me" 1962 Krzysztof Penderecki, "Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima" The brothers seem to think the bombs will come from some sort of spaceship, but if they're confused about that, the bulk of the tune, in which they repeat, "I'm going to run, run, run like a son of a gun/I don't know where I'm going to go but I'm really going to run," seems like an eminently reasonable reaction. Talbot Brothers of Bermuda, "Atomic Nightmare"ĭespite the bouncy calypso beat, this is the first song here that actually presents atomic war as an unambiguously negative thing. "I drank a quart of sake/smoked dynamite/I chased it with tobacci/and then shoot out the light." Inevitably, this was a huge hit in Japan. Wanda Jackson stakes a very convincing claim as an atomic bomb, complete with hiccupping detonations and glottal fallout. Charlie and Ira may say it's an "awful, awful" fate, but those high lonesome bluegrass harmonies drip with schadenfreude. The Louvin Brothers have a lot of songs warning sinners to get ready before they die and are cast into the fiery pit this one just substitutes nuclear holocaust for generic termination. Either way, that "hey, hey, hey my Lord" sounds positively lighthearted considering the subject matter. It's not quite clear whether the Travelers see the atom bomb as the hand of God or as a distraction from the upcoming, more important apocalypse. Pilgrim Travelers, "Jesus Hits Like an Atom Bomb"Īs the song says, "In nineteen hundred and 49/the USA got very wise/they found that a country across the line/had an atom bomb of the very same kind/people got worried over the land/just like the people in Japan." This song was originally a country number by Lowell Blanchard and the Valley Trio, but a number of gospel groups covered it as well. With Russian troops in Ukraine and subsequent East/West saber-rattling, it's been an uncomfortably Cold War kind of week - also, "The Americans" is back!Īs such, it seemed like a good time to revisit all those dated fears about nuclear holocaust, which seem a little less dated than they did not so long ago.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |