I’ve been listening to American Idiot after getting it from a friend recently, and I caught a lyric reference to “hear the sound of the fallin’ rain / comin’ down like an armageddon flame”. Which reminded me of Credence Clearwater Revival song “Who’ll Stop The Rain”.
Can anyone recommend some more protest-y songs that feature rain as a metaphor for war?
And more importantly, is there a reason for this trend (I know there are more out there, just can’t think of them)? Was it started in one place/poem/song or just kind of grew from other stuff?
Well, there’s A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall, which must have been tremendously influential, though I don’t know whether it was the first.
And I wonder, still I wonder, who’ll post in this thread?
Not a protest-y song recommendation, per se., and it’s been a while since I’ve listened to it, but “Bullet the Blue Sky” by U2, has some rain metaphors. It was written about the US involvement in El Salvador.
Also not a war protest song, but what the heck (and this is from memory):
From Emerson, Lake and Palmer’s “Tarkus”, part III called “Battlefield” -
“All the blades are sharp, the arrows fly
Where the victims of your armies lie.
But were the blades of grass, and arrows rain
Then there’d be no sorrow, be no pain”.
I wouldn’t call it a protest-y song, but I always assumed Peter Gabriel’s “Red Rain” was a reference to the Cold War.