Today in Pop Culture: The Songs of Pearl Harbor

By Jeffery X Martin

Destroyer USS Shaw exploding after her forward magazine was detonated. Image from Wikipedia.

If you’re old enough, you’ll remember that right after the Towers fell on 9/11, the American airwaves were filled with something akin to patriotic music, vowing revenge against the attackers. Toby Keith famously sang about the USA putting “a boot up their ass / It’s the American way.” Alan Jackson urged us never to forget by asking us where we were “when the world stopped turning.”

This musical call to arms after an act of war is nothing new (with the exception of the Vietnam War, which saw the birth of a new kind of protest song). As we sidle up to the 74th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, which brought the USA into World War II, it’s time to take a look at some of the popular songs of that day.

Warning: you may find some of these songs shocking. But it is important to remember that, during that time, these songs were an important part of popular culture, whether we choose to remember it or not.

Fans of old Looney Tunes cartoons might recognize this song, the relatively upbeat and jaunty, “We Did It Before (And We Can Do It Again).” I seem to recall this being the song from a commercial, too.

This song, with the excellent Eighties metal name, helped rally the troops, and kept morale high for those left behind while their sons and daughters went overseas.

Some songs went from being general war cries to pointed attacks at our enemies. This one, while using terminology that would be frowned upon in this day and age, embodied a certain amount of the American rage, felt so strongly after the Pearl Harbor attacks.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51kWDb2FDTE

Want to know what the best part about World War II was? It ended. We’ve been at war for years now, and most people have lost track of who we’re fighting, or why, or what countries in which we have a military presence. We don’t use music so much now in times of war. We bitch about things on social media, we rant on blogs, we friend and unfriend each other over nothing more than opinions.

Shit, man. We’re all at war.

Think what you want about these tunes. They deeply affected how people thought and acted in those times, before cable news networks and pundits on every corner. We’ve got new ways to communicate, and information travels around the world faster than you can blink. But even if the media for propaganda (and be it good or bad, that’s what these songs were) has changed with the times, it’s still the same old tune.