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Hiroshima in a song
How the purveyors of pop interpreted the atom bomb in the decades that followed 1945
On 6 August 1945—71 years ago to the date—an American B-29 heavy bomber named Enola Gay dropped a uranium gun-type atomic bomb, with the cutesy name Little Boy, on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Three days later, it would be Nagasaki’s turn, this time with a plutonium, implosion-type device called Fat Man. Estimates of the death toll range from 129,000 to over 250,000, and that’s before you factor in all the long-term effects of radiation sickness.
It was what American psychologist and writer Timothy Leary called a “fire-break in history”. Nothing would ever be the same. The shock waves of the twin explosions would reverberate around the world till the late 1980s, as the arms race and the Cold War brought the threat of nuclear annihilation to all our doorsteps.
The atomic age was upon us.
Along with it came a new form of popular culture, one more suited to a world where tomorrow could be wiped out at the press of a button. This was American youth culture, dominated by the teenager—introduced to us in 1944 by Life magazine—and their existentialist materialism. The American teenager’s focus on having a good time, on instant gratification if you will, was a calibrated response to the post-war world, and its emergent psychopathies. In them, English poet, artist and activist Jeff Nuttall saw the birth of the “generation gap” and the beginning of the war between children and elders that would decide the course of pop culture for the next few decades. In them, as he outlines in his 1968 manifesto Bomb Culture, resided the revolutionary potential of music and art as well as the possibility for its co-option into capitalism and consumerism. And they were, as much as Japan’s hibakusha (survivors), a product of the bomb.
So, in a very general sense, you could say much of, if not all, post-war pop music was a response to the A-bomb. But the bomb also inspired a series of musical responses over the course of the next few decades—some sombre, some preachy, some downright weird. The first songs about the bombings dealt heavily with themes of patriotism and religion.
One of the first examples is North Carolina country artiste Fred Kirby’s Atomic Power, written the day after Hiroshima. “Hiroshima, Nagasaki/Paid a big price for their sins,” sings Kirby, while claiming that atomic power was given to the US by the “mighty hand of God”. Similar themes of divine intervention and American patriotism run through 1946’s When The Atom Bomb Fell, sung by Karl and Harty, which claims that “the bomb that struck Hiroshima / Was the answer to our fighting boys’ prayers”.
Country music’s fascination with God and the atom would lead to a whole new subgenre dubbed “nuclear country”, well documented in a collection called Atomic Platters, dedicated to the first wave of songs about the nuclear age. It’s not just restricted to country music either. You had the gospel warning of the Golden Gate Quartet’s 1947 release Atom And Evil, which is the atomic age’s Adam and Eve story, and The Pilgrim Travelers’ Jesus Hits Like An Atom Bomb (1951), which talks about God’s promise to Elijah of a fiery apocalypse. The former song’s anxieties about the use of the atom by an unnamed evil foreshadow the US’ worries about the Soviet Union, which would soon turn into full-blown McCarthyist paranoia—leading to a succession of folk and country songs mocking or threatening Joseph Stalin and the Russians with nuclear war—best exemplified by Roy Acuff’s 1951 track Advice To Joe.
But religion and revenge aren’t the only themes in songs about the bomb. There’s also the atom bomb as sexual prowess, such as in Wanda Jackson’s bizzarre Fujiyama Mama, which features the lyrics “I’ve been to Nagasaki Hiroshima too the same I did to them baby I can do to you”. Or the Five Stars’ Atom Bomb Baby, which carries “more wallop than uranium”. Less sexy but equally tasteless is 1954’s Thirteen Women (And Only One Man In Town) by Bill Haley & His Comets, in which Haley daydreams about being the only man among 14 people to survive a nuclear apocalypse. Oh, and let’s not forget the songs about uranium mining, inspired by a sort of radioactive gold rush in the 1950s when the US government was encouraging citizens to prospect for uranium.
Nuclear country and its weirder counterparts died off around the 1950s, but the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 would bring the nuclear threat to the forefront again. The songs of this second wave, influenced by the hippies and protest folk, were concerned much more with nuclear war and fallout. Examples include Bob Dylan’s blistering A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall and The Searchers’ What Have They Done To The Rain? Special mention goes to The Byrds’ powerful I Come And Stand At Every Door, based on a poem by Turkish activist Nâzim Hikmet Ran about a seven-year-old Hiroshima victim.
As the Cold War dragged on, and the 1960s wave reached its high point and crashed, pop music became much less innocent and started to show the psychological scars of decades on the brink. Punk had arrived, and along with it you had post-apocalyptic fantasies or nihilistic exhortations to push the big red button. So you have The Stooges’ Search And Destroy or the Sex Pistols’ I Wanna Be Me, which features the line “Gimme world war three we can live again”.
Atomic music hit its dark, paranoid peak during the Ronald Reagan-Margaret Thatcher years, a time of youth militancy and global unrest. Of the several songs written then—and most of them are still fresh in memory—two stand out. One is the American hard-core freaks Minutemen’s Dream Told By Moto, about having frantic, joyous, end-of-the-world sex as the nukes fall in the background. The other is Nagasaki Nightmare by British anarcho-punks Crass, a gloriously noisy, dissonant, aggressive and eldritch song about the dangers of a nuclear apocalypse. “They’ll do it again, shower us in rain/Nagasaki nightmare, Nagasaki nightmare,” screams the vocalist in a painful and paranoid falsetto, and you start to believe they just might.
Over the past couple of decades, climate change and terrorism have overtaken nuclear fears in pop culture, and the atomic song has taken a back seat. But the ghosts of Fat Man and Little Boy will lurk forever in our collective consciousness. All it takes is one nuclear device in the wrong hands for that threat to become all too real once again. And if it happens, you could do much worse than follow this advice from The Talbot Brothers of Bermuda in their 1957 calypso hit Atomic Nightmare: “Oh, run, run, run like of a son of a gun/I don’t know where I’m going to go, but I’m really going to run.”
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First Published:4 Aug 2016, 02:33 PM IST
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