Living With War

Via HuffPo, I find a nice NY Times write-up about how the War has begun to make its way into music.

Songs that touched on the war in 2006 were suffused with the mournful and resentful knowledge that — as Neil Young titled the album he made and rush-released in the spring — we are “Living With War,” and will be for some time. Awareness of the war throbs like a chronic headache behind more pleasant distractions.

The cultural response to war in Iraq and the war on terrorism — one protracted, the other possibly endless — doesn’t have an exact historical parallel. Unlike World War II, the current situation has brought little national unity; unlike the Vietnam era, ours has no appreciable domestic support for America’s opponents. Iraq may be turning into a quagmire and civil war like Vietnam, but the current war has not inspired talk of generationwide rebellion (perhaps because there’s no draft to pit young against old) or any colorful, psychedelically defiant counterculture. The war songs of the 21st century have been sober and earnest, pragmatic rather than fanciful.

You expect Pearl Jam and Dixie Chicks and Ben Harper and Billy Bragg to sing anti-war songs or protest songs, but John Legend or Eminem or John Mayer are joining in, you know a shift in culture has long taken place. And when Merle Haggard is joining in...well...

Meanwhile, Jon Pareles does a solid job of trying to see what can be presumed about music's (and culture's) next few years as well. Granted, his conclusion is "Who knows?", but it's definitely an interesting thing to think about.

The 2000s are not the late 1960s, culturally or ideologically, but the musical repercussions of the Vietnam War may hint at what comes next. As that war dragged on, the delirious late 1960s gave way to not only the sodden early 1970s of technique-obsessed rock and self-absorbed singer-songwriters, but also to a flowering of socially conscious, musically innovative soul, the music that John Legend and John Mayer now deliberately invoke. It’s as if this wartime era has simply skipped the giddy phase — which didn’t, in the end, turn bombers into butterflies — and gone directly to the brooding. The end of the Vietnam War in 1975 was quickly followed by the rejuvenating energy of punk and hip-hop; there’s no telling what disengagement from Iraq might spark.

I didn't intend to do it this way, but I realized after I had posted my Best Songs of 2006 list that 7 of the Top 10 ("Right in the Head," "World Wide Suicide," "The W.A.N.D.," "Black Rain," "The Long Way Around," "Better Way," "Severed Hand") were protest songs or songs about taking power back for yourself. There were some fantastic topical songs written, and while I think the mood for future songs will be more sad/plaintive and less angry/excited, there is a lot more good topical music to be made.