Tunes of Glory

ED

BETWEEN ROCK AND ROLL and military music there has always existed a clandestine kinship that neither relation would want acknowledged. The ancient Greeks prescribed the Dorian mode for their soldiers' warm-up music, but since then, the West has recognized martial music by its 4/4 march time--the same rhythm that, one way or another, propels the traditional rock song. Martial music is supposed to excite sentimental feelings of patriotism and community, then harness them to aggressive instincts; rock songs stir up adolescent anger and lust, and--depending on which side of 1970 you grew up on--either ignite or dissipate them. During the heyday of today's rock idiom, in the mid-'60s, the goals of the two types of music were identical: if you listened to the Jefferson Airplane's "Volunteers," you were supposed to get out in the street, join the volunteers of America" and fight for the revolution.

Whatever the ties between these genres, however, the essential anarchism of the rock song made it less politically potent that its patriotic cousins: a rock concert is far more likely to end in a street fight or a brawl than in a march on some contemporary Bastille. When the revolution of the '60s derailed, its music as well as its ideology having proved vulnerable to compromise and commercialization, rock and roll slunk away from the topic of war. America's popular music forgot about Vietnam long before the last helicopters left, and by the mid-'70s war appeared on disc only as tongue-in-cheek posing--the Ramones sang "Blitzkrieg Bop" in 1976--or historical ballad--Al Stewart's "Roads to Moscow."

Now, in 1980, with the world's eyes trained on Iran, Afghanistan and Ronald Reagan, the war song is returning to album-sides and radio stations in a torrent as remarkable for its suddenness as for its size. There's been no similar topical fascination in rock music since the Beatles set off the psychedelic-drug-song craze in 1967. Listen to the titles: "Generals and Majors" (XTC), "World War" (The Cure), "Cold War" (Devo), "Battleground" (Joe Jackson), "Life During Wartime" (Talking Heads). There are songs about war in the Middle East, songs about nuclear war, political songs against war, jingoist songs for war, songs that use war as a metaphor for everything from love to race relations. Our songwriters have war on the brain.

On the most vulgar and least creative level, this preoccupation has surfaced in a slew of war-fever songs, spearheaded by Charlie Daniels' trigger-happy redneck anthem, "In America," and including "Bomb Iran"--a remake of the Beach Boys' "Barbara Ann" that made the rounds of local radio stations last spring. Such songs are the contemporary analogues to the Hearst newspapers' "Remember the Maine" campaigns, somewhat less strident but equally irresponsible.

THE MORE IMPORTANT strain of military-minded popular music has cowered passively before the prospect of world war, not promoted it with a whoop and a shout. New wave music, with its hypnotic repetition, machine noises and nihilism, had always rejected a rosy view of the future in favor of visions of chaos and destruction. But "Life During Wartime," the Talking Heads' 1979 hit, was the first indication that New Wave music dealing in the particulars of war not only could be popular, but seemed to satisfy some collective hunger of the public imagination.

A cyclical song that continuously repeats the same sinister keyboard sequence behind David Byrne's neurotically high-pitched vocals, "Life During Wartime" pictures was as an inalterable given, a backdrop to the singer's life that he can no more protest against than escape:

Trouble in transit, got through the roadblock

We blended in with the crowd

We got computers, we're tapping phone lines,

I know that ain't allowed

We dress like students, we dress like housewives

Or in a suit and a tie

I changed my hair style so many times now

I don't know what I look like

This song goes nowhere, reciting the details of human inconveniences and miseries without any promise of ending them. Yet for all its gloom, "Life During Wartime" was a hit for Talking Heads, their biggest to date--proof that for the listening public (and the dancing public, which also latched onto this song), war had become a fashionable subject.

"Life During Wartime" set the pattern for the whole new generation of war songs: no protest but a whimper, no hope but many prayers. With the fatalism of a musical form that matured while protesting one war and lives today to witness the conception of another, rock and roll waits for World War III supine, recumbent. It's as though, faced with ICBMs and oil embargoes, musicians are starting at their electric guitars and drum kits and shaking their heads, paralyzed and powerless.

After "Life During Wartime," different artists picked up the now-successful theme. But the concern with war reached an obsessive pitch only with this fall's album releases--records that went into production last winter and spring, as Zbigniew Brzezinski posed in the Khyber Pass and American helicopters crashed in the sands around Tabaz. Some examples:

* Beat Crazy, Joe Jackson. Here's an example of how a basically middle-of-the-road, modestly talented songwriter picked up on the martial atmosphere in his recording studio. None of Jackson's new songs actually depicts war scenes, but tank-treads grind throughout the album. From the title track:

Kids today--they're all the same...

And if the Russians ever come

They'll all be beating bongo drums

So who'll defend--in World War III

Where could we turn--where would they be?

Tongue-in-check, yes, but still eerie to hear from the throat of a pop singer.

* More Specials, The Specials. The keynote of the new Specials album, framing it at start and finish, is their cover and reprise of an old song titled, "Enjoy Yourself--It's Later Than You Think." If that melancholy note wasn't enough, their "Man from C & A" spells the point out plainly: it opens with a shout of "Warning, Warning, Nuclear Attack," and its simple ska beat is punctuated with machine-gun fire and high explosives.

The Mickey Mouse bunch told the Ayatollah at his feet

You'll drink your oil you shmuck, we'll eat our heads of wheat

But I'm the man in grey, I'm just the man at C & A

And I don't have a say in the wargames that they play

* Black Sea, XTC. XTC's high-tech idolatry, exhibited on last year's Drums and Wires in songs like "Roads Girdle the Globe," metamorphosed in 1980 into full-scale battle hysteria; Black Sea is the best of the new war music. "Generals and Majors" overlays "Bridge Over the River Kwai"-style corps whistling on a bouncy anthem:

Generals and Majors always

Seem so unhappy 'less they got a war

Generals and Majors ah ah

Like never before are tired of being actionless

Calling Generals and Majors

Your World War III is drawing near

If "Generals and Majors," with its hummable hook and over-blunt satire, is the stuff of a hit single, "Living Through Another Cuba" is the single best song the impending hostilities have yet inspired. A rising-and-falling arpeggio of treated guitar and human wailing leads into an over-heated, pseudosalsa beat, as Andy Partridge half-talks the lyrics:

Living through another Cuba

It's 1961 again and we are piggy in the middle...

This phenomenon happens every 20 years or so

If they're not careful your watch won't be the

Only thing with a radioactive glow

I'll stick my fingers in my ears

And hope they make it up before too late

If we get through this lot all right

They're due for replay, 1998.

For so fatalist a song, "Living Through Another Cuba" has remarkable energy: an overwrought disco tune with a message, it sounds like music to accompany St, Vitus' Dance--or the Dance of Death.