4/5/2023 0 Comments Get lyrical helpBob Dylan, “Talkin’ World War III Blues”īob Dylan released his sophomore album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan in 1963-one of the heaviest years of the Cold War era that saw the implementation of the Moscow-Washington hotline (directly connecting the Pentagon and the Kremlin), the murder of South Vietnamese Prime Minister Ngo Dinh Diem during a CIA-backed coup and the shocking assassination of U.S. With our country’s list of enemies growing at an alarming rate and our current list of allies dwindling by the day, here’s a soundtrack to try and help make some sense of it all.ġ. With that in mind, here are 17 songs that call out World War III for what it is or could be. That list of songs gets even smaller after removing the ones that just use the term metaphorically to describe things like strained family relationships (Pink’s “Family Portrait”), offhand figures of speech (Frank Sinatra’s “What A Funny Girl You Used to Be”), romantic woes (Jonas Brothers’ “World War III”), fighting group factions (The Stray Cats’ “Rumble in Brighton” and Ruff Ryders’ “WW III”) and whatever Prince was talking about in “Moonbeam Levels.” While many songs have dealt with these topics over the decades, very few actually so far as to use the term “World War III” explicitly. Over the years, the frequency of these types of songs usually ebb and flow directly with times of war (or threat of war), which makes many of them seem regrettably relevant again in our current adversarial political climate. and Russia played a game of chicken that teetered on igniting an all-out war on multiple occasions. Since that time, sentiments about World War III and all of its trappings (Cold War terminology, fear of nuclear war, mutually assured destruction, call outs of specific political players, etc.) have been a mainstay in popular music, reaching a feverish pitch in the 1980s, as the U.S. It didn’t take much longer for World War III terminology to start showing up in music, with its first outcroppings naturally occurring in the politically charged early-‘60s folk revival movement. In fact, Cold War paranoia was so prevalent that as early as 1951 we had the sci-fi parable The Day The Earth Stood Still in theaters and Collier’s Preview of the War We Do Not Want issue on newsstands. As soon as Germany and Japan signed their own treaties of surrender in 1945 to end World War II, the term “World War III” almost immediately became pop cultural fodder.
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