Ditties About Destruction, vol. 1: Bombs Away

Q: What do Don Draper and Homer Simpson have in common?
A: Satire. The much-lauded Mad Men is a jaundiced commentary on an impression, a tainted recollection. By highlighting the excesses of marketing executives in a time of license, the show calls up the moral laxity tolerated among the upper crust.

 

Similarly, The Simpsons was part of a new wave of popular comedy that skewered the lingering impressions of the “normal”, nuclear American family.

Both of these shows build drama by exploiting a disconnect between popular ideas of normalcy with the lived experience of the protagonists which, it is supposed, we share. Dissonance can be a very powerful way for an artist to highlight the strangeness, irony, or cruelty of the world. The pop art movement (without which we might not have either of the aforementioned TV shows) took images from mass-produced sources and placed them in unusual settings or combinations to subtly call out the disorder that lay beneath the surface of a supposedly placid consumer culture.

Juxtaposition in Pop Art

Take, for example, I Was a Rich Man’s Plaything, possibly the first example of the genre (and certainly the first to actually contain the word “pop,” for whatever that’s worth.) The juxtaposition of some soft-core smut next to a firing gun highlights the inhumanity of a person being a plaything, while simultaneously showcasing the dissonance that such a violent concept is offered up as entertainment. This connection of objectification-as-violence is reinforced by the association with an ad for Coca-Cola, and a patriotic “Keep ‘Em Flying!” banner, as though it were a patriotic duty to subjugate women and maintain the existing social order.
Now, this image is nearly 70 years old, so I won’t pretend that I have anything new to say about it. I mention it because it provides a nice illustration of the theme I want to touch on today: dissonance in art.

The Song: Bombs Away, by the Police

My first example is “Bombs Away” by the Police. Written by drummer Stewart Copeland, the song is about the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. It opens with a frenetic cymbal over some cacophonous synth that drones between two tones, almost like a siren. Then the song resolves into something slightly more conventional, but with cynical lyrics:

The general scratches his belly and thinks
His pay is good but his officers stink
Guerrilla girl, hard and sweet
A military man would love to meet


The only 2 characters in this song, the general and the President, are both powerful men who are completely removed from the gravity of their respective situations; the President’s “shirts are clean but his country reeks.” The general, for his part, can think only of the “guerilla girl.” And throughout it all is the droning, impossibly bouncy chorus: “Bombs away, but we’re okay.” So long as the reality of bombing missions happens over there, we’re fine over here.

This song has so much to say about the vagaries and ironies of war that I don’t have time to delve into here (if you’re intrigued by the prosaic side of a war, please allow me to recommend “The Sword of Honor” trilogy of novels by the wonderful English writer Evelyn Waugh) but it does point out the hypocrisy of sending others to fight: go ahead and bomb the other guys, bomb them back to the paleolithic if you must, just keep the fighting foreign.

 

And that, for me, is one of the concerns I have with the breadth of current US military ventures. I don’t think we’re doing a good enough job of caring for our veterans; millions of them are homeless, and many of them suffering from ailments, both physical and mental. These people laid their lives on the line for our country, but once they returned from their service, we found that we were unprepared to care for them. This disconnect between a long-term goal we think we’re prepared to work for, versus the high price of actually achieving it, echoes in the clanging guitar of this song.

The verdict

To return to the questions of art: this song pulls elements of the quotidian (in this instance, the day-to-day of an admittedly esoteric demographic), elements we expect to be addressed in Sousa-like pomp or deadpan seriousness, and instead shoehorns these themes into a cheerful melody. The resulting medium is, I propose, the message. The self-aware sweetness of the song contrasts with the violence of the lyrics to underscore the cognitive dissonance a people must adopt in order to send young women and men to die in order to preserve a way of life, especially a way of life enjoyed most deeply by those in the least danger.

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