Atomic Tunes

Joanna Smolko, Tim Smolko

Description

Explore Tim and Joanna Smolko's website. Atomic Tunes: Doris Day! Atomic Tunes: Springsteen! Atomic Tunes: Tom Lehrer! Extra Stuff #1 - From East Germany to the World: U2 and the Trabant Extra Stuff #2 - Burl Ives: Beloved Snowman or Despised Stool Pigeon Extra Stuff #3 - Scolding Stalin and Poking Fun at Khrushchev Extra Stuff #4 - Billy Joel Didn't Start the Fire

What is the soundtrack for a nuclear war?

During the Cold War, over 500 songs were written about nuclear weapons, fear of the Soviet Union, civil defense, bomb shelters, McCarthyism, uranium mining, the space race, espionage, the Berlin Wall, and glasnost. This music uncovers aspects of these world-changing events that documentaries and history books cannot. In Atomic Tunes, Tim and Joanna Smolko explore everything from the serious to the comical, the morbid to the crude, showing the widespread concern among musicians coping with the effect of communism on American society and the threat of a nuclear conflict of global proportions.

Atomic Tunes presents a musical history of the Cold War, analyzing the songs that capture the fear of those who lived under the shadow of Stalin, Sputnik, mushroom clouds, and missiles.

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Cold War History in Music and Lyrics
1. Folk: From Paul Robeson to Bob Dylan
2. Folk: Women's Voices
3. Country: The Conservative Stance
4. Novelty and Comedy Songs: The Cold War as a Big Joke
5. Early Rock and Other Styles: Rocking the Bomb
6. Mainstream Rock: Bowie, U2, Sting, Billy Joel, and Springsteen
7. Hard Rock and Heavy Metal: The Electric Guitar as the Bomb
8. Punk Rock: Three Chords and the Apocalypse
9. Electronic and New Wave: The Cold War in a Synthesizer
10. Wind of Change: The Fall of the Wall and the End of the Cold War
Conclusion
Bibliography, Discography, Videography
Index

Sujets

• Musique
• Histoire de la musique
• Europe
• Pop (musique)
• Music
• Rock
• United States
• Pop music
• History of classical music traditions
• Cold War
• Multiple signal classification
• Popular music
• HISTORY
• Social History
• Genres
• Styles

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 11 mai 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 2
• EAN13: 9780253056184
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.org
2021 by Tim and Joanna Smolko
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
First printing 2021
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Smolko, Tim, author. | Smolko, Joanna R., author.
Title: Atomic tunes : the Cold War in American and British popular music / Tim Smolko, Joanna Smolko.
Description: Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020042418 (print) | LCCN 2020042419 (ebook) | ISBN 9780253056160 (hardback) | ISBN 9780253024466 (paperback) | ISBN 9780253056177 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Popular music-United States-History and criticism. | Popular music-Great Britain-History and criticism. | Cold War-Music and the war. | Popular music-Political aspects-United States-History-20th century. | Popular music-Political aspects-Great Britain-History-20th century.
Classification: LCC ML3477 .S67 2021 (print) | LCC ML3477 (ebook) | DDC 782.4216409/045-dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020042418
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020042419
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Cold War History in Music and Lyrics
1 Folk: From Paul Robeson to Bob Dylan
2 Folk: Women s Voices
3 Country: The Conservative Stance
4 Novelty and Comedy Songs: The Cold War as a Big Joke
5 Early Rock and Other Styles: Rocking the Bomb
6 Mainstream Rock: Bowie, U2, Sting, Billy Joel, and Springsteen
7 Hard Rock and Heavy Metal: The Electric Guitar as the Bomb
8 Punk Rock: Three Chords and the Apocalypse
9 Electronic and New Wave: The Cold War in a Synthesizer
10 Wind of Change: The Fall of the Wall and the End of the Cold War
Conclusion
Bibliography, Discography, Videography
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
WE D LIKE TO THANK THOSE who read portions of the manuscript, gave encouragement, provided us with precious writing time, or simply educated us in subtle but invaluable ways: Dan and Doris Cush, Deane Root, Mariana Whitmer, Kathryn Miller Haines, Julie Darken, Kelly Holt, Rachel Cabaniss, Erin Leach, Simon Hunt, Bart Lemahieu, Neil and Marty Hughes, Greg Kelso, Jimmy Brown, Susan Clay, Jen Wolf, Stacey Piotrowski, Lora and Solomon Smothers, Taryn and Myles Magloire, David and Nicole Bryan, Lee and Amy Moody, Hillary and Mike Thompson, Ana and David Durling, Jim Kenaston, Adelle and Parker James, Beth and Brett Jamieson, Emily and Bradley Shadrix, Betsy and Kevin Weinrich, Wayne Crotts, Craig Duncan, Joel Doerfel, David Haas, David Schiller, Christy Desmet, Jean Kidula, Susan Thomas, Sujata Iyengar, Richard Menke, Josh and Corazon Bedford, Steve Valdez, Carolyn Brunelle, Reba Wissner, Russell Reising, Lisa Kraus, and Jeannette and Chris Jones.
Thanks to our family members for the encouragement and support.
Thanks to Susan, Jessica, Cindy, and others in the UGA Interlibrary Loan department, who procured dozens of books and articles for us.
Thanks to the committee of the Hampsong Fellowship in American Song for awarding us the 2016 grant, which helped us pay for research materials and song licenses.
Thanks to Felicia Miyakawa and Andrew Dell Antonio for publishing portions of the book on The Avid Listener .
Thanks to Thierry Noir, John Holmstrom, Paul Research, Peggy Seeger and Nancy Schimmel for interviews and correspondence.
Thanks to David Miller, Rachel Rosolina, Allison Chaplin, Janice Frisch, and Kate Schramm, and to all the fine people at Indiana University Press. Thanks to Carol McGillivray for overseeing an excellent copy edit.
Thanks to Ian and Elanor and Ringo and Buster for love and laughter.

INTRODUCTION
Cold War History in Music and Lyrics
FROM 1945 UNTIL 1991, THE United States and the Soviet Union engaged in a nuclear-arms race for military supremacy, an ideological battle between capitalism and communism, and a series of proxy wars that cost the lives of at least five million people. 1 Although tension between the two countries can be traced back to the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, many historians mark the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 as the beginning of the Cold War. The forty-six-year conflict vacillated between mild anxiety and rampant paranoia and introduced for the first time in history the possibility of man-made global catastrophe. The escalation of the arms race and a host of other technological, political, social, and military developments made the Cold War among the most globally si g nificant events in recent times.
Although the two superpowers never directly engaged in a full-scale military battle, the Cold War was the most ominous occurrence of brinkmanship in human history. Its disturbing legacy remains with us. In 1986, the number of nuclear weapons in the world reached a peak at over seventy thousand. 2 Over the next twenty years, the number was slowly reduced to approximately twenty-six thousand by 2006. 3 In more recent times, the number has been reduced even more to approximately thirteen thousand five hundred, with eighteen hundred of these considered to be on high alert, ready for use on short notice. 4 While this reduction is hopeful and encouraging, the effects of the Cold War continue to loom over us. We still live in its aftermath. The Cold War forged many of the ideologies and principles that shape our politics today. The conflict played a significant role in forming our current notions of what constitutes left wing or right wing in politics, liberal or conservative in ethics, communist or capitalist in economics, and universalist or Christian in religion.
As would be expected, the arts and culture of the period reflected the Cold War, especially in films ( Dr. Strangelove , Red Dawn , WarGames ); television ( The Prisoner , The Day After , Threads ); editorial cartoons (Herblock s Mr. Atom and Bert Dodson s Nuke ); and novels (George Orwell s Nineteen Eighty-Four , John le Carr s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold , and Tom Clancy s The Hunt for Red October and Red Storm Rising ). Geopolitics even affected sporting events, such as the Olympics with the American and Soviet boycotts of the 1980 and 1984 summer games. All genres of music showed the influence of the Cold War. Some of the most famous jazz musicians, such as Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman, and Dave Brubeck, made highly publicized tours in the Eastern Bloc in the 1950s and 1960s. The Texan classical pianist Van Cliburn gained worldwide fame for winning the first International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in 1958. Musicals ( Chess ) and operas about the Cold War have been composed, including two well-known works by John Adams, Nixon in China and Doctor Atomic . Among the most famous of the many classical works about the Cold War are Alfred Schnittke s oratorio Nagasaki and Krzysztof Penderecki s Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima for string orchestra.
There have been many books written on Cold War film, television, and literature and on the role that jazz and classical music played in the conflict. Scholarly studies have been published about the popular music from World War I and World War II. 5 Yet the American and British popular music written specifically about Cold War topics has yet to be fully explored. Between 1945 and 1991, well over five hundred songs were written about various aspects of the conflict: nuclear weapons, fear of the Soviets, the proxy wars, civil defense, uranium mining, the space race, McCarthyism, espionage, the Berlin Wall, and glasnost. 6 Some songs were written to bring an issue to light, some to persuade listeners to a particular point of view, still others to simply entertain and amuse. Songs ranged from the serious to the comical, to the morbid, to the tasteless and covered all points in between. Like uranium in a bomb, the songs themselves are the core element in this study, but popular musicians did much more than just write songs about the Cold War; they spoke of the conflict extensively in interviews, participated in protest movements, designed their stage shows on it, depicted it visually in their music videos, plastered it all over their album covers and T-shirts, and even named themselves after it. Some of popular music s biggest stars, such as Pete Seeger, the Rolling Stones, Elton John, ABBA, John Denver, Bruce Springsteen, and Billy Joel, played concerts in the Eastern Bloc. In some ways, as we will show, popular music played a role in ending the Cold War.
What can a study of these songs add to the ever-growing body of literature on the Cold War? These songs give deep and substantial insight into the social history of the conflict, capturing the thoughts and emotions of everyday people who lived under the shadow of Stalin, Sputnik , mushroom clouds, and missiles. They can surprise listeners by revealing and communicating aspects of these world-changing events in ways that documentaries and history books cannot. They grapple with controversial geopolitical issues of the time in concise, three-minute packages: Is the Soviet Union an evil empire? Is communism at our doorstep? Are nuclear weapons more of a danger or a deterrent? Could World War III actually take place? What constitutes a just war? Can we trust our leaders? Rarely has popular music addressed such weighty questions as the ones in these songs. Like fossils in our collective memory, they have preserved Col