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Pop music’s struggle with an unpopular war

John Mayer starts his 2006 album, “Continuum,” with “Waiting on the World to Change,” a pop-soul ballad defining his generation as one that feels passive because it’s helpless: “If we had the power to bring our neighbors home from war,” he sings, “They would never have missed a Christmas / No more ribbons on the door.” The best he and they can do, he muses, is to wait until “our generation is gonna rule the population.”

There is more rage in the guitar onslaught of albums like Pearl Jam’s politically charged, self-titled 2006 album. Contemplating the death of a soldier in “World Wide Suicide,” the song lashes out at a president “writing checks that others pay,” but ends up wondering, “What does it mean when a war has taken over?” The righteousness of old protest songs has been replaced by sorrow and malaise.

After three years of war, bluster has toned down, even in country music. Merle Haggard, a populist who was always skeptical of the war, tersely insists, “Let’s get out of Iraq, get back on the track, and let’s rebuild America first,” on his most recent solo album, “Chicago Wind.” In another song on the album, Toby Keith, whose “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American)” was one of the most bellicose songs in 2002, joins Haggard for a duet, suggesting a reconsideration.

Like the electorate, all pop can agree on across political lines is sympathy for the troops. Bruce Springsteen’s “We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions” included an old song, “Mrs. McGrath,” about a soldier crippled in battle; the album’s expanded edition added an updated version of a blunt Pete Seeger song from 1966, “Bring ‘Em Home.”

While I try to keep up this article was something of an eye opener. Despite Bruce Springsteen and Pearl Jam there seemed to me at least a kind of bitter resignation on the part of pop music in general. Resignation might be part of the new discontent. While we have some heated arguments on the net, for the most part there has been little public hostilities. Traditional Eisenhower type conservatives ( the handful that don’t have nationalistic neocon fever) and moderate Americans have learned that public arguments aren’t very productive in the Bill O’Reilly whoever yells the loudest era of political discourse. Until the 2006 election cycle moderates kept things to themselves, maybe playing it safe to see how things played out who knows. While better late then never it is unfortunate that they gave the current crop of zealots so much rope to play with. Maybe performers in general saw the ambiguity and more then during Vietnam they would have been trying to galvanize people rather then being part of an already fired up movement. That is something of a burden for a song writer to put all the complexity of an issue into a few refrains and rally everyday people. Those like The Dixie Chicks, Haggard and Springsteen that tried deserve credit.

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