Doves Used to Coo

As a cusper born just before the turn of the century, I was too young to know anything about domestic politics or global affairs at the outset of the Iraq War.

I remember passively catching news clips on the boxy tube TV in my childhood home. I remember seeing the Black Hawks, the Humvees, and the jarheads.  I remember seeing footage of explosions and kevlar-clad correspondents… And I remember having virtually no idea what was going on.  In those first few years, I wasn’t nearly old enough to truly grapple with the meaning of it all.

But I was old enough to listen to music.

And I vividly remember what the listening experience was like throughout the aughts, first with a Sony Walkman; then with a screenless iPod shuffle; then with a click-wheeled Nano; and finally, with a Touch.

I remember burning CDs and torrenting MP3s. 

I remember the iTunes visualizer and the sluggish chore of syncing devices, percent by painstaking percent.

I remember wearing the perfectly circular Apple earbuds — the original ones that were featured in television ads with black silhouettes dancing against brightly colored backgrounds.

But more than anything, I remember the music itself. I remember how gritty it was. 

I remember the contempt, the angst, the indignation, and the cutting cynicism that could be felt both through the irreverent lyrics and the aggressive sonic texture.

I remember that many of the artists who I found most compelling were furious at the American government for what was being done in the Middle East, with antiwar sentiment being most zealous in the aesthetically transgressive genres that were so popular throughout the mid-2000s: punk, alt-rock, and increasingly, rap.

There are too many examples to list exhaustively, but a few cases really stand out.

“Holiday”, for instance, is an iconic song that has been permanently etched into the minds of most Americans my age, and its gist is not at all unclear.

Hear the dogs howling out of key

To a hymn called "Faith and Misery" (hey!)

And bleed, the company lost the war today

Green Day’s frontman Billie Joe Armstong even went as far as saying, “Seig Heil to the President Gasman, bombs away is your punishment,” a bold pronouncement given the contemporaneous political climate and the genre’s massive suburban consumer base.

Remember Sum 41?

“I just don't know how he's gotten away with everything he's done,” castigated the group’s lead singer Deryck Whibley while being interviewed about “Still Waiting”, an explicitly antiwar single that came out in November of 2002, a time when Bush’s approval rating was still well above 60%.

“Hands Held High” on Linkin Park’s Minutes to Midnight offers a similar example.

Sick of the dark ways we march to the drumming

Jump when they tell us that they wanna see jumping

Fuck that, I wanna see some fists pumping

Like this war's really just a different brand of war

Like it doesn't cater to the rich and abandon the poor

“Dirty Harry” by Gorillaz, paired with its memorably avant-garde music video, is another direct repudiation of the Western war effort.

"The war is over"

So said the speaker

With the flight suit on

Maybe to him, I'm just a pawn

Here, Damon Albarn derisively references President Bush’s ‘Mission Accomplished’ speech, which he famously delivered after arriving aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln in a full naval aviator flight suit.

But perhaps no single artist was more expressive or widely received in their opposition to the Iraq War than Eminem. In 2002, just months before the coalition invasion, Mathers released “Square Dance”.

The boogie monster of rap

Yeah the man's back

With a plan to ambush this Bush administration

Mush the Senate's face and push this generation

Of kids to stand and fight for the right to say something you might not like

Yeah you laugh 'til your motherfuckin' ass gets drafted

While you're at band camp thinkin' that crap can't happen

All this terror America demands action

Next thing you know you've got Uncle Sam's ass askin'

To join the army or what you'll do for their Navy

You just a baby

Gettin' recruited at eighteen

Crazy insane or insane crazy?

When I say “Hussein,” you say, “Shady”

Then, in 2004, the rapper released “Mosh”, a piece that was even more sharply worded.

Maybe we can reach Al-Qaeda through my speech

Let the president answer a higher anarchy

Strap him with an AK-47, let him go fight his own war

Let him impress daddy that way

No more blood for oil, we got our own battles to fight on our own soil

No more psychological warfare, to trick us into thinking we ain't loyal

But it wasn’t just specific counter-cultural segments of the music industry that were vocally opposed to the war; there was also a wide range of mainstream pop artists who leveraged their platforms to speak out against perceived excesses of American foreign policy. Madonna made “American Life”. John Mayer made “Waiting on the World to Change”. David Bowie made “Fall Dog Bombs the Moon”.  Again, there really are too many examples to list.

Major artists used to wield their immense cultural power as pacifists. In previous decades, there was a large segment of the creative class whose messaging was reliably and unambiguously anti-interventionist — and in some critical sense, completely anti-establishment.

This is no longer the case.

Twenty years ago today, on October 16th, 2002, President Bush signed the Iraq Resolution, a piece of legislation that formally authorized the use of military force against the government of Saddam Hussein, effectively greenlighting the invasion that would be carried out the following spring. And it was largely a bipartisan affair. Nearly half of House Democrats gave their support, as did a majority of those in the Senate — including Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Diane Feinstein, Chuck Schumer, and John Kerry. 

Everyone who mattered wanted war, and their media allies were all too willing to cooperate.

I was too young to appreciate it at the time, but musicians were some of the only people in the public sphere to express dissident attitudes toward the breathless jingoism that characterized both sides of the political divide. They were willing to stand up to the war hawks in Washington, even if it meant alienating portions of their audience.

What happened?

This type of dissent simply doesn’t exist today…       

AND I CAN’T EVEN IMAGINE IT EXISTING TODAY.

I can’t imagine Travis Scott coming out on stage to rap about how fucked up it is that America directly facilitates air raids against Yemeni civilians. 

I can’t imagine Taylor Swift sitting down at NPR’s Tiny Desk with an acoustic guitar while melodically begging Joe Biden to stop selling arms to Saudi Arabia.

I can’t imagine Ariana Grande prancing around a stage at Coachella while bemoaning the State Department’s unwavering support for violently expansionist governments in Israel.

I can’t imagine Harry Styles crooning to a sold-out crowd at Madison Square about the tens of billions of dollars worth of weapons being thrown, hand over fist, at the most damaged, dysfunctional, and directionless country in Europe.

Given the reach of streaming platforms, the mass adoption of social media, and the global nature of modern celebrity, today’s musicians have never had an opportunity to be so loud.

And yet, it feels like they’ve never been so quiet.

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