Atomic Tunes: The Cold War in American and British Popular Music

by Tim Smolko

What is the soundtrack for a nuclear war? During the Cold War, over 500 songs were written about nuclear weapons, fear of the Soviet Union, civil defense, bomb shelters, McCarthyism, uranium mining, the space race, espionage, the Berlin Wall, and glasnost. This music uncovers aspects of these world-changing events that documentaries and history books cannot. In Atomic Tunes, Tim and Joanna Smolko explore everything from the serious to the comical, the morbid to the crude, showing the widespread concern among musicians coping with the effect of communism on American society and the threat of a nuclear conflict of global proportions. Atomic Tunes presents a musical history of the Cold War, analyzing the songs that capture the fear of those who lived under the shadow of Stalin, Sputnik , mushroom clouds, and missiles.

1 pages, Audio CD

First published May 11, 2021

Reviews

[Dscotthep · Rating 2 out of 5]

This could have been a really fun book. I remember MANY songs from my teen years in the '80's dealing with the cold war and the threat of nuclear annihilation. I was looking forward to hearing what the authors thought of these songs (and others I was surely ignorant of).

I realized pretty quickly that I was going to be disappointed. The Smolko's took this book WAAAYYY too seriously. It reads like a doctoral thesis. Maybe it was, I don't know. But in a book about the entertainment industry, (well, the music arm of that industry) I was expecting to find some 'entertaining' reading. I found none.

I listened to the audiobook and the authors really missed an opportunity to include audio clips of the songs they studied. I'm no copyright lawyer, but including short (<30 second) clips in a scholarly work surely counts as "fair use"... Right?

And though they claim "over 500 songs were written" about different aspects of the cold war, they only ever identify a small fraction of that number.