White Boots Marching in a Yellow Land – Phil Ochs

I had never really heard any Phil Ochs songs before we started studying his music in the Music and Politics LC, but from the start I found him and his music to be extremely interesting.  I am really fascinated by the way he is able to make straightforward political songs so aesthetically pleasing.  “White Boots Marching in a Yellow Land” is an example of that.  The song is a strict Vietnam War protest song, and it is speaking to the fact that the United States was at war for no reason, and in doing so, destroying a country and killing people.  One of the verses of the song that really speaks to Ochs’ feelings on the war says ” It’s written in the ashes of the village towns we burn / It’s written in the empty bed of the fathers unreturned / And the chocolate in the children’s eyes will never understand / When you’re white boots marching in a yellow land.”  The lyrics are powerful and make a statement about the war in a musically pleasing way, and that is why Phil Ochs is such a successful topical artist.

GT

Hank Williams Jr. – Keep The Change

Hank Jr. has written many amazing songs in his career many about our country. But when he wrote this song it brought on much hate and dislike because many believed it to be very poor done and not thought through. This song came after he compared Hitler to Obama which caused a large scene around him. this song was written in a reaction to what was going on in the world and what happened to him. Many of the lyrics of the songs contradict and others don’t make any sense. In his history he has always made political comments and songs, but this one was just not thought through well enough. For him this song is hopefully just put away out of our minds with how it didn’t work out at all for him and was made out of a flurry of emotions and was done well.

DJ

Lynard Skynard and Sweet Home Alabama

One of the classical songs of the 70’s, Sweet Home Alabama is a special song that shows the connection between a person and the land that they call home, no matter where you are from sweet home Alabama makes you feel something. But this summer time anthem has a more political message that is easily glossed over in favor of the highly catchy chorus and down home appeal. It features both the entertaining appeal of the music while having hints of social commentary. One political message mentioned is that of former governor, George Wallace. we see this in the sections:

” In Birmingham, they love the governor (boo boo boo)
Now we all did what we could do”

“Sweet home Alabama, oh, sweet home baby
Where the skies are so blue and the governor’s true”

while some in the past interpret this as an endorsement, it was meant as a way to voice the disposal for what Wallace did regarding segregation and his treatment of Blacks in Alabama. Another political point that they bring up within the song is the mention of Watergate and Richard Nixon in the section,

“Now Watergate does not bother me
Does your conscience bother you?
Tell the truth”

This use of juxtaposition shows how the band feels about the issue of Watergate and there interpretation of it from a southern perspective as Watergate unfolded. They approach Watergate with a more laid back political  appeal as they as the question in the lines. Sweet Home Alabama is one of those songs that can easily misinterpreted when we ignore the lyrics in favor of its value of entertainment. Politically it speaks to its time and the perspective of those living in the deep south.

-Ow

Eric Church- “Why Not Me”

I remember waking up the morning of October 2, 2017, checking my phone as I often do and I was immediately lost for words and taken back by the events that had taken place in Las Vegas the night before. A 64-year-old, Stephen Paddock opened fire onto the audience of the Route 91 Music Festival from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Hotel. He killed 58 and wounded 489 people. It was the deadliest mass shooting in United States history.

It was a tragic and emotional event, one that will never be forgotten. Eric Church who was the headliner of the festival and performed on Friday night. Three days later Eric Church performed at the Grand Ole Opry and debuted his new song “Why Not Me”, dedicated to the victims of the shooting and also to Heather Melton, who is a survivor of the shooting. Erich Church mentions how he didn’t want to play at the Gran Ole Opry due to the aftermath of the shooting. It wasn’t until he saw an Anderson Cooper CNN interview with Heather Melton. Her husband Sonny was a big fan of Erich Church, “that was his guy”, and the two made the trip to Las Vegas to see him perform. The couple also had tickets to see Church perform at the Grand Ole Opry just three days later. Sonny and Heather didn’t end up making Church’s performance at the Grand Ole Opry. Sonny was one of the 48 people who were killed during the shooting.

Heather Melton’s interview inspired Eric Church to write his song “Why Not Me”. In the song Church questions God, “My God with whom I trust/But I’ll never know why the wicked/Gets to prey on the best of us” (Why Not Me). He doesn’t understand why the good have to die young and why so many innocent lives have to be lost? These are questions that nobody knows the answers to, only God does. In situations like these it is very hard to comprehend why horrific things like this have to happen. The only thing we can do is to pray for all of the victims, their family members, friends, the first responders and everyone affected by this horrific event.

I recommend watching Erich Church’s performance at the Grand Ole Opry. Link is below.

Eric Church “Why Not Me”

BC

American Skin – Bruce Springsteen

Bruce Springsteen is a legend. He’s been performing for about as long as my parents have been alive and that’s a long time. He’s made so many songs that are some of the greatest of all time like “Born to Run” or “Born in the USA“. A lot of his songs however, have great political meaning behind them and there’s no song that better showcases that than “American Skin”. This song came out pretty recently actually. The original release came out in 2001, and the new version came out in 2014. This song was inspired by the police shooting of 23 year old Guinean immigrant Amadou Diallo. Amadou Diallo was an unarmed man who only pulled out his wallet on February 4, 1999 and was shot at 41 times by 4 N.Y.P.D. police officers with 19 of them striking him just outside of his apartment. This death obviously was a big problem for people at the time of this happening as you can see in the image below that it made the cover of TIME magazine.

 

Link to video: Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band – American Skin (41 Shots …

TG

Holiday – Green Day

As some of you will start to notice in my blog posts, I’m a big fan of Green Day. For a while though I stopped listening to them. Recently however, I’ve started to get back into them as I’ve started doing blog posts. This was one of the songs from my childhood that I used to listen to all the time. Back when I would listen to this song ten years ago, I really didn’t know the meaning behind this song but as I listen to it now, I can really understand the political message that they’re trying to push across.

This song was released back in 2004 with the album “American Idiot” and the purpose of this song was to talk about soldiers who die in battle. In some ways it’s a tribute to those who lost their lives fighting for this country that we live in. In other ways, it’s a protest to how we don’t show them enough respect. You can see the latter part of it when the lead singer Billie Joe Armstrong says “Can I get another Amen? (Amen!) There’s a flag wrapped around a score of men (Hey!)” which brings up two contrasts. Lots of people especially in the south made complaints about how war goes against religion as people are avoiding what’s wrong with the war and putting country values in front of religion. At other times however, people use religion to attack other countries like when Islamic terrorists created 9/11 for religious reasons. The song just continues on from there talking about how we need to show more respect for our veterans and for those who are currently putting their lives on the line.

 

TG

Ronnie Dunn- Cost of Livin’

Around the time of this song coming out the economy had hit a hard point and was in a struggle. Many factories and plants were closed down and prices for things, like gas was continuously going up. The song talks about the story of a unemployed veteran/husband trying to find a job in a struggling economy. The song also talks about the shutting down of a tire manufacturer that led to many unemployed and not being able to find another job anytime soon.At the time this was a big problem in America because many Americans were struggling with money and job problems. The song also gets to talk about the hard working needed to be done for many to help support their families especially ones worrying about their kids or elder family. In the song Dunn uses the line “three dollars and change at the pump, cost of living’s high and going up” to portrait the rough edge of the economy and how bad it was getting to be able to buy the things you may need.This song also help give voice to people who needed to be heard. While some wealthy people didn’t have this struggling problem, the song helps get the message out their to everyone, so the economy could start working to a recovery faster. The telling of a true story gave this song a strong effect in its time, making a song that could be related to by many. Even to Ronnie Dunn who has money now, it helped relate to his past when it wasn’t so easy for him growing up in trailer houses.

DJ

Billy Joel- Leningrad

I had mentioned in one of my earlier posts how Billy Joel usually stays away from politics in his songs, well I found another example. This song is based off of Joel’s experience while he was on tour in the Soviet Union. There are two characters in the song, one being Billy Joel and the other, Victor, a Russian native that he met during one of his concerts in the USSR. His lyrics offer insight on what life was life growing up in the Cold War Era both in the United States and in the Soviet Union. Joel writes, “Victor was born /The spring of ’44/ And never saw/ His father anymore /The child of sacrifice /Child of war /Another son who never had /A father after Leningrad”. Victor lost his father in the Seige of Leningrad also knows as the Blockade of Leningrad. Adolf Hitler and the Germans planned on taking over Leningrad for strategic and geographically reasons. Leningrad was the home of Soviet arms factories and Hitler wanted to capture Leningrad so he could weaken the Soviets army. It is considered the longest siege in history along with the most casualties. Life was very tough for Victor growing up without his father and in a German controlled Leningrad.

Billy Joel experienced similar difficulties growing up during the Cold War Era. There was always the threat of a nuclear attack and it put panic in Americans throughout the country. There was a lot of tension between the two countries and no one knew when the attack could come, so the schools practiced “nuclear safety”. Just like how we have fire drills in school, they had nuclear safety drills where the kids would just crouch down under there desks thinking that they would be protected from a nuclear blow, “I was born in ’49 /A cold war kid in the McCarthy times/Stop ’em at the 38th parallel /Blast those yellow reds to hell /Cold war kids were hard to kill /Under their desks in an air raid drill”. Multiple of Joel’s friends would enlist into the Korean and Vietnam War’s and Joel expresses his displeasure with the United States involement in those countries. He is very uncertain why his buddies have to go fight over seas when the wars, in his mind, don’t have any urgent objective, “And in that bright October sun /We knew our childhood days were done /I watched my friends go off to war /What do they keep on fighting for?” Americans were not sure why we keep going to war, they figured wars wouldn’t exist anymore for the US because we were the back to back World War Champs. No one saw any reason to fight anymore.

Leningrad compares the lives of two different people from different cultures growing up during the Cold War. It was a time of tension, uneasiness, worry, and hardships. Children in the US and the Soviet Union lost their fathers at a very young age and when they became teenagers lost some of their friends as well. Joel makes the statement that these wars don’t need to be fought anymore, they are not worth the anxiety or the tragic loses.

BC

Leningrad Music Video

Leningrad Lyrics

Troubled Times – Green Day

 

Green Day has been a band that I’ve followed ever since I was a little kid. If I remember correctly, they were the first band I started listening to and following. To this day, I can still remember jamming out to American Idiot, Boulevard of Broken Dreams, and many other Green Day classics.

Less than a year ago, Green Day released their newest album called Revolution Radio and one of the songs in this album is called Troubled Times. Troubled Times is a song about how we live in “Troubled Times” because of all the fighting we do and protesting, and fighting over Donald Trump becoming our president at the time of this song being released. This song also has a music video which helps viewers understand what they’re speaking out against.

For starters, the lyrics talk a lot about how we always talk about loving everyone, yet we never actually treat everyone equally. Between racism, homosexuality, and gender, there still remains a large amount of divide in the country. They also spend some time talking about how we never really learn from our mistakes and we keep on running into the same problems. Even though they say it’ll be difficult to overcome, they also mentioned how if we stop trying to overcome these things, our world will fall apart right in front of our own eyes.

Like I mentioned earlier, there was a music video to this song that helped explain what its main point was about. Troubled Times was mainly focused on showing events in our history where we mistreated black people in our country. The video also spends a portion of its time showing images of Trump and giving him this image that he’s a monster and will destroy our country. The video also spends a lot of time showing images/videos of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 60s that was lead by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.. Every time MLK’s face appeared (which was a lot) he always had tears on his face that were put in by Green Day themselves. I believe this symbolized that  if MLK were still alive today, he’d shed a couple tears with how people are being treated 50 years after he made his famous I have a Dream speech.

Overall, I really enjoyed this song as it allowed me to listen to one of my favorite bands from my childhood again. They also had a very strong message behind Troubled Times and I recommend that anyone who’s into modern day rock should give this song a try.

TG

Youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9cVJr3eQfXc

Billy Joel and We didn’t start the fire

While the song We didn’t start the Fire by Billy Joel has no political intent it could very well be one of the most politically driven songs of all time. From his acapella and vocalist background  Billy Joel uses his masterful songwriting skills to craft what some would call a history teachers favorite song, which both used history for an entertainment purpose, while also reflecting back on a crucial time in world history and how it moved forward. Joel writes within the confines of his own life, 1949 (his birth) and 1989 (when he writes the song), A reflection of history spanning from the post WWII all the way to the 80’s, We didn’t start the fire is a reminder of how far time itself has come and the changes that took place as a result of the political events throughout the world and the United States time still moves on. While it was not the intention of Joel’s, We didn’t start the Fire, retells the story of the Cold War and major political, social, and economic happenings within the same time frame. It seemed as if Joel’s own life made the song possible but yet he had no hand in any of the political events, but rather he experienced them in real time as they happened and he was able to see its impact on the world, and himself. As a song, it’s catchy melody and strange lyrics add to the uniqueness of the song which earned it a spot as the billboard #1 in 1989. The song is a constant trip through history with the course line “We didn’t start the fire, it’s been burning since the world’s been turning” showing that while important, the events are not the peak of mankind’s acts. Joel himself has never been cited for having the most politically conscious music but in reality it seems that it doesn’t take an expert to write political music, in fact it would seem that the symbolism behind this song was a mistake rather than intention. Call it genius or call it a happy mistake, We didn’t start the fire has an indirect political message about the passage of time and society, he’s not attacking a group or challenging an idea, Joel makes it simply clear that time has passed and shit that was important happened. The song itself I feel is captivating, political conscious while also being a great song in general. Links to the lyrics and and song are down below if anyone is interested.  

Song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFTLKWw542g

Lyrics: https://genius.com/Billy-joel-we-didnt-start-the-fire-lyrics

Ow