As the Iraq War was going sour in 2007, I interviewed the acerbic and authoritative rock critic, Robert Christgau. I was seeking comment on what seemed like a dearth of present anti-war music compared with the past. Without exactly telling me I was an idiot kid gulled by Boomer propaganda, he corrected me. There was hardly any anti-war music in the 1960s, he said. Movies had projected the few major anti-war songs such as “Fortunate Son” backward by a few years in our collective memory. Just look at the charts; some of the California sound was coming in. But Frank Sinatra was still nabbing big hits by crooning Broadway show tunes. In 1966, the No. 1 hit on American radio was “The Ballad of the Green Berets.” Big acts such as the Dixie Chicks and Green Day had publicly turned against President George W. Bush in a much more explicit way than any similarly popular act in the 1960s went after Lyndon Johnson.
Christgau was right. Besides folkies like Pete Seeger and Phil Ochs, the culture industry mostly waited until it was Nixon’s war before turning on it. And even when it did, artists often didn’t attack the subject directly. In fact, they attacked a different war altogether.
Some of the earliest and most powerful anti-war songs of this era don’t mention Vietnam, but World War I. If World War II had already been sanctified as “the Good War,” people with misgivings about Vietnam turned to World War I as the bad one. It took almost a decade after the Great War for the literary and artistic world to fully assimilate it as a disillusioning tragedy of waste. And it was the theme of patriotism betrayed that filled up these songs. They remain probably the most powerful anti-war songs of the era, and they likely will endure the longest.
Perhaps the first of this type is “Butcher’s Tale” by the Zombies, released in 1968. Like many of these Vietnam-era songs reflecting on World War I, the songwriters opt for a crushing literalism:
And I can’t stop shaking — my hands won’t stop shaking
My arms won’t stop shaking — my mind won’t stop shaking
I want to go home — please let me go home
Go home.
That literalism would be repeated by the Kinks in “Some Mother’s Son”:
Someone has killed some mother’s son today
Head blown up by some soldier’s gun
While all the mothers stand and wait
Some mother’s son ain’t coming home today.