I’m old enough to remember the Cold War – the arms race, the pervading paranoia, the anxiety and “The Iron Curtain”. Kinda sorta. I remember all those things, but not completely firsthand.
By the time I was becoming politically and geopolitically aware in the mid-eighties, the whole thing was largely winding down. It was all still there, but we weren’t steeped in it. Not like the Baby Boomers would have been… the ones who became politically and geopolitically aware in the sixties and seventies. They were… and they were the ones who made the music I listened to (and largely still do, really).
Why am even I thinking of this? Well… the other day, I was listening to Robbie Robertson’s 1987 eponymous album, and this came on…
“Showdown at Big Sky”. Even back then, it was clear that it was about the looming confrontation between the United States and the U.S.S.R. – “Showdown at Big Sky, darkness at high noon, kiss tomorrow goodbye, that day could be soon”… “Save this place, from the weapons race, when it’s laid to waste, I said save this place”.
It certainly wasn’t the first of the cold war songs that had an impact on me in my teens, but it certainly was one of them.
The first one that I actively remember was Sting’s “Russians”.
That was actually the first time I’d ever heard of Nikita Khrushchev, and that gloomy, menacing black and white video marked the first time that the Cold War really came into focus for me. “Mr. Khrushchev said we will bury you… I don’t subscribe to this point of view, it would be such an ignorant thing to do if the Russians love their children too”.
That song and video prompting a series of questions to my father, who was himself a boomer. About Khrushchev. About “Oppenheimer’s deadly toy”. There was no internet back then, so information was a little harder to come by in a pinch.
Later that same year we got Elton John’s “Nikita”…
The Cold War ballad all about love separated by the Berlin Wall (which, of course, opened up a whole new line of questions about East and West Germany and what the wall was all about). Of course, is it a love song? The video and most of the lyrics certainly point towards that, but the use of the name “Nikita” (Khrushchev?) open the question a little bit about whether it’s a more universal plea for reconciliation with the ideology Khrushchev both embodied and left behind.
And this, from Bruce Springsteen’s mammoth 1975-1985 live set. His intro to Edwin Starr’s “War”:
If you grew up in the 60’s
You grew up with war on TV every night
A war that your friends were involved in
And I want to do this song tonight for all the young people out there
If you’re in your teens
Because I remember a lot of my friends when they we were 17 or 18
We didn’t have much of a chance to think about how we felt about a lot of things
And the next time they’re gonna be looking at you
And you’re gonna need a lot of information to know what you’re gonna wanna do
Because in 1985, blind faith in your leaders, or in anything, will get you killed
The crowd cheered at that last line. I wonder if Bruce was a little concerned about the blind faith some of the crowd might have had in him, too. In any case, they seemed to miss the point.
Finally, there’s this favourite of mine from Billy Joel’s penultimate album…
“I was born in ’49, a cold war kid in McCarthy time… cold war kids were hard to kill, under their desks in an air raid drill… Children lived in Levittown, and hid in the shelters underground, until the Soviets turned their ships around and tore the Cuban missiles down…”
I think “Leningrad” was actually a far more potent history lesson than “We Didn’t Start The Fire”, and for me, was a rather timely musical closer to the Cold War. The Berlin Wall could start coming down the following year.
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I’m not a scholar. I don’t have a great command of all the facts and figures of the Cold War (beyond what I can now look up on the Internet at a moment’s notice). I’m just a (former) kid who came of age at the end of the Cold War and had much of his geopolitical education sparked not by school, but rather by the music he was listening to at the time. These songs, even now, bring me back to the time and place, and they’re pretty potent memories.
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These songs are, of course, hardly an exhaustive collection of songs written about the Cold War in the eighties. This webpage has a pretty impressive listing, if you’re up for a stroll down memory lane. I actually have a lot of them in my collection, but it’s the ones I’ve explored that had the biggest impact…
http://www.inthe80s.com/coldwar.shtml
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Oh, yeah, by the way. 1986 gave us this gem, with those grotesque Spitting Image puppets that make for the perfect high octane nightmare fuel. Nuke, nurse… indeed.