> "Born in the USA" was popular because few people actually listened to the lyrics
I hear this repeated often, but is it even true? Couldn’t also be true that the song is popular because people can relate it to their negative feelings about “the system” and a weird sense of patriotism they feel regardless? It’s pretty common to have mixed feelings about one’s country.
Assuming the song is only popular because of ignorance seems far fetched.
And it wasn't the only one. I remember a short snippet of Fortunate Son was used to imply it was a patriotic song in a TV ad (Wrangler jeans I think?). The line being "Some folks were made to wave the flag, ooh the red, white, and blue"
The song, released in 1969, is quite clearly a criticism of the US's Vietnam policy. It's not likely to be mistaken for anything else (the way Born in the USA occasionally is), but still was aggressively misused.
The words and meanings of songs have never been important so long as the tune was good. Yankee Doodle was essentially a dis track, but Americans liked the tune, so it was adopted as a patriotic song anyway. Stadiums of homophobes will happily stomp and clap to We Will Rock You.
Ha! Good point. Sorry, when I think of anyone having any opinion on country and the topic coming up in conversation my mind went straight to the US, but of course it's huge all over the place so that was dumb.
I do agree that knee-jerk dislike of country may be rooted in ignorance—but as far as social influence, I'd class that as being good at determining which bad music people like (I like plenty, and it's mostly for those reasons) or dislike, and the country on the radio in the US is, for the most part, firmly of the "you'll only like it if it's part of your scene" sort, so people with a blanket "I don't like country" opinion have very likely only been exposed to the equivalent of its Tenacious D or, at best, Styx (to expose some of my own sub-par likes). It's not their fault they assumed the genre was putting its best foot forward.
And hey, Elton John made Tumbleweed Connection, so there's that. :-)
Same with Neil Young's "Keep on rockin' in the free world", Dire Straits' "Money for nothing", and other songs even in other languages.
Personally, I've soured on the idea of being ironic in songs. Most people will miss the irony, they only listen to the catchy chorus, and more often than not, the lines you meant as absurd will be proudly paraded by the same people you were mocking. Take the recent "We the people" by A Tribe Called Quest: the chorus, taken alone, is a bigots' anthem on a catchy tune; I bet it will soon become a mainstay at neonazi rallies and the likes.
I wonder how much popular culture has to do with it. For example, when you sincerely listen to rap lyrics, a lot of it (and from the biggest names too) sound like a deranged, narcissistic, and sometimes violent, rants. When people hear that around them from the youngest age, they get the understandsting that such outlook on life is within the accepted norms (or, more likely, the music tells them to don't care about any norms at all, because it's all about the benjamins or whatever), especially when they don't have parents or other authority figures to correct them. Smart people from decent backgrounds can see through this filth or even use it as harmless entertainment - but, for other people, it can instill antisocial behaviour.
(Like 90% of the people in the entire world would agree with the above statement and find the omission from the list above perplexing. During the Cold War, Sting actually had a song about how kids was one of the things Americans and Soviets can are on. The fact that people are downvoting it here is an indication of the outsized cultural influence of a set of views that are held by an extreme minority.)
Short explanation: the music industry has discovered that capturing the teenage market pays dividends and teenagers are emotional.
Unrelated anecdote with a different explanation:
I had a fascinating conversation with my parents recently. They are both children of the 60s and grew up in San Francisco. We often share music just to talk about it. I was playing some heavier (dubsteppy-metal) music to them, and wanted to dig into why they didn't like it.
The reason that I like heavy music (especially at shows) is because it is very rare that I get to cut my rage loose, and let it flow. Mosh pits are the only place I can think of where this is an acceptable form of self expression. This feeling is sometimes a good gateway to making me feel like I can win (aka, be alright) when I'm feeling down.
I asked them if what I just described, and the feelings that the music engendered made intuitive emotional sense to them. Regardless of whether they agree that it's positive or negative, does that emotional drive resonate with them. And the answer was, shockingly to me, "No".
Through our conversation, we settled on a convenient narrative (with absolutely no research or sources to back it).
In the 60s and 70s, the rebellion was not against the machine, it was for betterment. They saw the moon landings, and went to concerts in Golden Gate Park that sang about love and freedom for all, and they said that there was a feeling that anything was possible. You just had to do it. And there were lots of problems, but we made progress, it just took doing.
While there is likely some rose-tinted-ness about this recollection, I found it interesting that this was not the way I grew up seeing the world. I grew up with the narrative that everything was wrong, everyone was wrong, and so fuck everything - tear it down.
A short list:
Rage Against the Machine
Eminem
System of a Down
Our convenient narrative was that when our leaders act in bad faith, the result is generations of damage (i.e. the Vietnam war), and that this is reflected in culture. Interestingly, this polarizes both ways politically. So you get a feedback loop of culture becoming more extreme to differentiate itself while serving a polarizing society.
Aside: I'm so happy to see charts with error bars!
This. It is a little bit like talking about politics. People will agree with sufficiently generic statements along the lines of 'there should be some accountability'; they will start arguing over what that means though. If you listen to her songs, it is an equivalent of that generic statements most people can relate to.
I am aware of her and I am very detached from US pop culture. It is catchy.
I would wager it struck a chord with more than "conservative pundits". Not only judging by its popularity, but messaging. It's a song about class struggle, not party politics. There are lots of people on both sides who've been hit hard economically. And even those that are doing fine can relate to not feeling represented by politicians in DC.
If we take the premise to be true, the conclusion to be drawn is that those lyrics are NOT offensive. They way that ridiculous song has been celebrated in the media tells me that’s true.
My last sentence was intended as a satire, lyrics are obviously not uniformly distributed between writers. I completely agree with you though, the song (despite my disdain for it) is incredibly catchy, and definitely not intended to be thoughtful or thought provoking in nature.
Sometimes we have to learn to enjoy things as they are without thinking about the meta context. I think Reagan, like him or loathe him, you know, liked Springsteen's "Born in the USA", despite it being a protest song.
Beside, propaganda is not in and of itself bad. Maybe propaganda has made me more of a conservationist or environmentalist. Should I have disregarded those readings because of the inherent propaganda?
Excellent article (personal opinion).
..."The controversy surrounding these two country songs did not teach us anything new about contemporary American culture. It was yet another example of the ideological capture of our elite institutions of cultural production and dissemination. The same double standard that was observed in this debate is applied on a regular basis to academic research, news reporting, and other forms of public speech whenever the content contradicts the liberal progress narrative..."
Boom
But as I said, "cultural impact" in this case seems to really have little to with any inherent value in the song, and stems mostly from the actions of society rather than the song's author.
Why should the author reap the benefits, at the expense of society, when the author didn't actually contribute much?
> You would never expect to hear "ballad of green berets" as top song anymore.
It's very much an outlier--I suspect the "Silent Majority" deliberately pushed that to the top of the charts as a protest against all the hippie counterculture stuff that was in the charts until then.
I hear this repeated often, but is it even true? Couldn’t also be true that the song is popular because people can relate it to their negative feelings about “the system” and a weird sense of patriotism they feel regardless? It’s pretty common to have mixed feelings about one’s country.
Assuming the song is only popular because of ignorance seems far fetched.
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