“Russians,” by Sting.
Sure, it’s about the cold war, but war nonetheless.
I listened to that song a lot when I was in high school.
This has been going on for some time, mind you. It’s been speculated that 'When Johnny Comes Marching Home" was a lot more cynical/ironic than the plain lyrics would suggest.
Small town USA, North or South: the troops come home, and you can’t help but notice that a LOT fewer came home than marched off. Of those marching home, well, a number aren’t ‘marching’ as much as they’re hobbling on crutches, maybe on peg legs. Or maybe that’s why they aren’t even in the parade, but sitting on the side in a chair.
But it was a great war, wasn’t it?
I Come And Stand At Every Door (AKA Hiroshima/Little Girl) - This Mortal Coil version, there’s lots of folkier versions too (Seeger, Byrds, Baez)) but I much prefer this one.
Since you mention the Byrds, their version of “Turn! Turn! Turn!” is one of my favorite songs of any kind, and IMO anti-war enough for this thread.
Ad history is full of such flubs, but that’s the searing example that comes to mind when someone raises the matter. O deer ghod…
+1
I’ll add Don McLean’s The Grave which is devastating the way he sings it.
Would you kindly ignore the tepid George Michael version, well-meaning though it was.
Uli Roth “Enola Gay”.
And for Mister Rik, Vinushka by the Japanese band Dir En Grey.
NSFW because of some images.
“Born on the Fourth of July” has been used in some jingo militaristic contexts too.
Redgum - I was only 19
Frankie Goes to Hollywood: “Two Tribes” – which btw predates Tyson/Holyfield.
I don’t think it’s been mentioned yet, and I didn’t expect it to be, and I certainly wouldn’t call it a “favorite,” but dammit, every time I see this thread, I can’t help thinking of The War Song by Culture Club.
Oh, wow. I just thought of Pink Floyd’s “Us and Them.”
I came to mention “Us and Them”, but you beat me to it. So, I’ll mention most of the album “the Final Cut.”
And also OMD’s “Enola Gay”.
A shout out to 80’s anti-nuke-armeggeddon…
Pink Floyd - Two Suns in the Sunset
While I agree with the other Dylan choices, here are two more:
John Brown - a very early song,. done on the 1962 official bootleg and then done on Unplugged.
Tombstone Blues - which is about Vietnam if you analyze it.
[QUOTE=Mr. Zimmerman ]
The king of the Philistines his soldiers to save
Puts jawbones on their tombstones and flatters their graves
Puts the pied pipers in prison and fattens the slaves
Then sends them out to the jungle
[/QUOTE]
I was listening to the radio the other day and heard a song by Jimmy Dean called “Dear Ivan”. I was expecting it to be jingoistic, but it’s actually about peace and universal brotherhood… quite surprising to me considering it was not only a country song from 1961 but was in fact a hit (#9 on the country charts).
[quote=“kopek, post:80, topic:718699”]
Tom Lehrer – So Long Mom
This is one of his set-ups for the song
This year we’ve been celebrating the hundredth anniversary of the civil war and the fiftieth anniversary of the beginning of world war I and the twentieth anniversary of the end of world war II. All in all it’s been a good year for the war buffs and a number of lps and television specials have come out capitalizing on all this “nostalgia” with particular emphasis on the songs of
various wars. I feel that if any songs are going to come out of world war III we’d better start writing them now. I have one here. you might call it a bit of pre-nostalgia. This is the song that
all of the boys sang as they went bravely of to world war III.
+1. An untarnished-by-popular-acclaim masterpiece. Hard to believe it was fifty years ago - 1964ish, from That Was The Week That Was - David Frost, and a Python-esque skit news program that predated SNL’s Saturday Update and Stewart and all the rest.