Forty years have passed and nothing changed for the better-as we know from experience and from another accusatory British song: Faithless’ “Mass Destruction.” The title comes from the World War II BBC radio signal. The title track of this 1979 punk rock landmark has been written as a mockery of contemporary media and their exploitation of the human fear of death. The key line: “Oh-oh, atomic” (not much of a choice here) The Clash, “London Calling” (1979) According to the group it’s just a dance workout with a striking title but the post-nuclear apocalypse tones of the video seem to disagree. It was already their third number one in the UK. No better way to start the party but with the band that ruled the Earth in that era. Two 1979 hits are included because no serious examination of this trope would be complete without them.
Some of those more or less veiled protest songs are classics in the Anglo-Saxon world, some are perennials in my country. A lot of this legitimate anger and fear seeped into the best pop and rock music of the time. The Westerners were probably angrier than the Easterners, because their information wasn’t filtered through censorship. People on both sides of Atlantic Ocean thought: “our politicians are crazy!” but they were thinking of different power brokers. I’m aware that the Northern American attitude towards the nuclear arms race was the same as in Poland, yet different. Furthermore, they had another threat hanging over their heads: the danger of nuclear annihilation. Just think about Palestinian nationalists or IRA in Northern Ireland. The line went more or less like this: You people think that terrorism is a modern phenomenon but people in the ’80s were as scared of it as much we are. There was a good point in the analysis of the lyrics of the Polish 1983 rock song “Zamki na piasku” (Castles in the Sand) published by the monthly Teraz Rock in the early aughts.