Fight Songs for the Anti-Pro-American (2022)

Xander Haselmann

America From the Jazz Age to the MTV Age

14 December 2022

In the grand scheme of American history, one could split up the different eras into a number of meaningful sections. Post-revolution, pre-Civil War, Reconstruction, The Depression, etc. When talking about 20th century American history however, perhaps the only two sections worth splitting up are pre-60’s and post 60’s. The 1960’s saw the youth dramatically change American culture in nearly every way. Civil rights, protests, a bloody pointless war, hair was longer, music was weirder, drugs and love were as liberal as the politics of the motivated and loud youth. Everything that happened in the USA after the tumultuous 1960s were in some way shape or form, a reaction to the 1960s. The aesthetic directions taken by artists of these eras directly reflected the new frames of mind that were sweeping young people across the country. From the incendiary revolutionary uncertainty of the 60s, to the narcissism and mainstream drivel of the 70s, to the postmodernism and various tendrils of Reagan's revitalized brand of republicanism in the 80s, the music from these three decades are portals back in time to places that all seem oddly familiar in today’s day and age.

The 1960s saw the youth of America take to the streets in an attempt to be the change they wanted to see in the world. While Vietnam raged on, Chicago, UC Berkeley, and various other colleges and cities were overrun with young people voicing their demands for Civil Rights and the end of the war. Oftentimes these peaceful protesters were met with stark violence from police, like at the Chicago Democratic National Convention in 1968, or tragically, on May 4th 1970, when the Ohio National Guard opened fire on a crowd of peacefully protesting students at Kent University. While police violence against protesters did not start under Nixon, he did prioritize a “war on crime” as he called it, and doubled funds for police after his election in 1969 (Anderson 13). Disgusted by photos of the events at Kent, Neil Young wrote Ohio, and released it just a month after the shooting. Ohio is perhaps the most famous counterculture protest songs of this era, it’s folk rock style carried it’s message far, and the poignancy of the song’s lyrics detail the rage and horror of this event in 4 simple lines.

“Tin soldiers and Nixon coming

We're finally on our own

This summer, I hear the drumming

Four dead in Ohio”

This verse expresses the clear “us and them” mentality that the police had brought upon protesters for the past few years. Clearly, those who opposed the war and fought for civil rights were not supported by the government whatsoever, and are now “on their own”. A similar yet more broad approach to the same feelings stirred up by events like the Kent Massacre can be found in Marvin Gaye’s 1971 hit What’s Going On, from the album of the same name. Gaye’s lyrics are perhaps less outright angry than Young’s, yet they express the same confusion and pain that was felt by all Americans by the end of the 60’s. 

“Picket lines and picket signs

Don't punish me with brutality

Talk to me

So you can see

what's going on”

Originally, Motown did not want to release this single, as they thought it was too inflammatory and would split audiences who did not want to hear the pain and suffering they got from the news translated into their music. They were wrong, as this song along with the album it’s from, sold brilliantly. It is important to note that by 1971, Nixon was nearly at the end of his first term, Vietnam was still going on, MLK was dead, Both the Kennedy brothers were dead, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix were dead, and the protests had been raging on for a few years now. The bleakness of the 1960s reached a tipping point that Marvin Gaye had captured with just his voice, let alone the thoughtfulness of his poetry. The red hot insanity of the 60s would eventually give way into a decade of depressions, boredom, and anger in a brand new form.

The 60s transition into the 70s mimics the 20s transition into the 30s in a way. Whereas the 20s was a rich thriving culture of liberation and new ideas for the youth to sink their teeth into, the 30s came with a dose of reality and a great big economic depression. The 70s had their own economic depression, under Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter, two presidents who were remarkable in how unremarkable they were. The 70s were the time of the growing Baby Boomers, who at the time were sometimes referred to as the “Me Generation”, dubbed this way because of their narcissistic tendencies and vast array of health and food crazes of the time. One album that hits upon this “self-help” attitude is one that has no lyrics, but was marketed in an interestingly new-age way. Mort Garson’s album Mother Earth’s Plantasia is an entirely instrumental electronic record made on a moog synthesizer, originally sold at a plant shop with the purchase of plants. The front cover of the album has the following tagline,

“Warm earth music for plants…

and the people who love them.”

Despite the lack of lyrical content, this whole album’s existence and means of promotion could not have come from any other generation. Music cannot help your plants grow, it just can’t, but the naive fitness-crazed youth of the 70s would eat this stuff up. Combined with that, the solely electronic nature of the album was very unique for the time, but still reflected a new-age attitude that came along with the new-age way of thinking about lifestyle habits and exercise. This widespread self-absorption could only last so long before people would get sick of it, and sick of it they got. By the end of the 70s, yuppie culture started to take off; It would peak in the 80s, but the same sort of “perfect white conservative life” attitude would start in the late 70s. In direct response to this, Punk music came from the underground and sought to disrupt this phony way of life. The Dead Kennedy’s Holiday in Cambodia takes direct aim at college students of the late 70s and early 80s, exposing their hypocritical and fake worldliness by comparing their lifestyles to those of the youth in Cambodia, who at the time were undergoing a brutal genocidal dictatorship.

“So, you've been to school for a year or two

And you know you've seen it all

In daddy's car, thinking you'll go far

Back east your type don't crawl”

“Playing ethnicky jazz to parade your snazz

On your five-grand stereo

Braggin' that you know how the niggers feel cold

And the slums got so much soul”

First and foremost, what better a band name to arouse anger in a bland obnoxious post 60’s generation than “The Dead Kennedys”. In this song, the deliberate political incorrectness of the language is clearly describing the students at university who claim to have genuine understanding of the world and empathy to people less privileged than them, but in reality don’t understand either of those things at all. The sonic qualities of the music itself is unlike anything in history before it. The speed and aggression of this band as well as bands like Bad Brains, Black Flag, and the Descendents feel like the music is trying to violently shatter the narrow and narcissistic worldviews of the Me Generation. After this point, the most successful of this generation saw great financial success under Ronald Reagan and his intense focus on corporate America, while completely turning his head on any and all under-privileged groups and letting them suffer through drugs and disease without doing much at all to help.

The climate of the mainstream in 1980s America was actually that of patriotism and hope. Reagan spoke of America with much aplomb, especially when in the context of their biggest rival at the time, the Soviet Union. The optimism was not felt by everyone, but the “Moral Majority”, or the white evangelical conservatives of the time, certainly had fun getting richer and leaving everybody else in the dust. Simultaneously to this, the postmodernist art and language movement began to take off out of the burnt remnants of the 60s generation's hopes and dreams. The former college age activists and protesters of the 60s eventually grew up to be professors at the very colleges they once attended, where they passed down much of the same ideals to the newer Generation X. This translation of ideas eventually resulted in postmodernism, which in the context of language, means the banishment of certain words and the construction of new ones in order to lead people down a “correct” path of thinking. This deconstruction of language is distinctly postmodern, as the deconstruction of aesthetic elements that are so prevalent in postmodern visual art and music reflects this very concept. A great example of both Postmodern aesthetics and a criticism of Reaganomics can be found in New York in the up and coming “No Wave” scene. New York has long now been home to avant-garde artists, and in the 80s, inspired by the filthy poor rubbing elbows with the filthy rich, it truly flourished. The band Swans and their 1985 album Greed sees the band deconstructing rock music and its lyricism into its most basic forms, while still holding on to a digestible message of criticism of Reagan's America. In the the track Money is Flesh, bandleader and lyricist Michael Gira screams out,

“Money is flesh, money means flesh in your hand (x4)

When you pay, you're a servant (x4)

You deserve it (x16)”

Obviously, this music was not popular; However, from a historical and artistic perspective, Swans and all of New York avant-garde music can be used to reflect upon all of the worst qualities that American urban life had to offer, ranging from the 50s to the present day. The musical qualities of this song exemplify postmodern art brilliantly, the repetition strips down rock music into its most essential qualities, making it hardly recognizable anymore. Lyrically, Gira makes his sentences and metaphors as simple as he can while still providing something to analyze. “Money is flesh” means that money is of the utmost importance in this country, and your money is all that you are, something that Swans and Gira seem to detest. They switch between a sarcastic agreement of Reagan’s policies and a harsh dejection of them, describing the population as “servants” but then saying that we all “deserve it”. Another brilliant use of musical sarcasm is one that seems to go over many people’s heads to this day. Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. is often the soundtrack to many a July Fourth cookout, but is really a bitter story of a Vietnam vet grappling with his trauma after the war. 

“Got in a little hometown jam

So they put a rifle in my hand

Sent me off to a foreign land

To go and kill the yellow man

Born in the U.S.A

I was born in the U.S.A

I was born in the U.S.A

I was born in the U.S.A”

Springsteen essentially pranked a nation and has been for the last 40 years with this song. The anthemic nature of the arrangement and hook has everybody seem to just remember the choruses and forget about the rest. The Moral Majority would have eaten this up on the radio on their way to work or on their Sunday drive to church. They were tired of the anti-american attitude of the 60s and wanted to just believe in their country again without thinking about it too deeply. Springsteen understood that and had them think “Born in the U.S.A.” was a proud declaration of patriotism, when in reality it was a horrified acceptance of the realities of a poor American’s luck of the draw.

In conclusion, the pain and suffering of these decades unfortunately holds over to the modern day, in the form of continued police brutality, conservative evangelicals only looking out for themselves, and perhaps an even more narcissistic youth on the rise. On the upside, we have about 50 years worth of music about each of these very topics with which to cope. As we get seemingly no closer to the answers of all these issues, we do now have historical context, which means that we now have more direction than we’ve ever previously had. And with all this direction, we can always look to the words and music of these artists before us to remember the facts, as well as the feelings of what has happened in the past, to push us forward and write our own history.