Name That Tune

Four songs. Still on playlists. Still in content. Still being used as sound beds for things that have nothing to do with why they were written.

Santayana said those who do not confront the past are condemned to repeat it. We're going to talk about what happens when the confrontation gets turned into a vibe.

SHOW NOTES / REFERENCES

Songs discussed in this episode:

War Pigs — Black Sabbath (1970). Album: Paranoid.

Fortunate Son — Creedence Clearwater Revival (1969). Album: Willy and the Poor Boys.

Ohio — Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (1970).

For What It's Worth — Buffalo Springfield (1967).

On the history:

Geezer Butler on War Pigs — Mojo, 2017; Songfacts, 2024

Neil Young on Ohio — Decade liner notes; Rolling Stone

John Fogerty on Fortunate Son — multiple interviews; NPR

Stephen Stills on For What It's Worth — NPR American Anthem series https://www.npr.org/2017/09/19/551766018/for-what-its-worth-the-story-of-a-protest-song-that-almost-wasnt

Kent State, May 4, 1970 — May 4 Visitors Center, Kent State University https://www.kent.edu/may-4-visitors-center

On collective memory:

Santayana, G. (1905). The Life of Reason: Reason in Common Sense. Scribner's.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Someone's pantry clean out video. War pigs playing in the background. And that's where this episode starts. If you spend any time on social media, you know what I mean. Someone's bathroom glow-up, a t-shirt with a raccoon on it, gym motivation reel, backing up the trailer at a boat launch, real estate listing. And in the background, unmistakably, one of the most politically charged pieces of music ever recorded. War Pigs, Fortunate Sun, Ohio, for what it's worth. Used as vibes. Now, I'm not here to provide moral censorship. Knowing what something is and what it was made to do is not censorship. It's literacy. There's a specific thing that happens when a song written to document atrocity, to indict power, to name the names of the people who sent poor kids to die in wars, they profited from. When that song becomes the audio backdrop for your spice drawer organization system. Something is lost. Something specific. And this episode is about what that something is. Today we're gonna review four songs. We're gonna talk about what they are, what they were made to do, and what it costs what it is. Before we get into the songs, let me name the thing that's happening because it's not just carelessness, though carelessness is part of it. The algorithm doesn't know what a song means, it knows what it sounds like, how long people listen, and whether it drives engagement. A song with a memorable opening riff that makes people stop scrolling is a good song, by the algorithm's definition. What the song is saying is irrelevant to that calculation. Short form content compounds this. When you have 15 seconds of audio to establish a vibe, you're reaching for the hook. The hook of war pigs is one of the most recognizable openings in rock history. It sounds heavy and urgent and a little dangerous. That's useful for content. The fact that it was written by four working class men who were terrified of being conscripted into a war being run by people who would never face that risk themselves, that doesn't fit in the caption. And then there's the generational transmission problem. If you grew up hearing Fortunate Sun in Vietnam War movie soundtracks rather than understanding it as a specific indictment of a particular class-based injustice, you absorbed it as a period vibe. The era, not the argument, the aesthetic of protest with the content of it. What gets lost in that process is memory, not personal memory, collective memory. The songs were carrying something on behalf of the people who lived through the events that produced them. When the songs get severed from the context, the memory doesn't just fade, it gets replaced by pantry organization, by feral raccoon t-shirts, and by content. So let's talk about what was being carried by each of these songs and the artists at the time. Black Sabbath was not a band of occultists. I know that's their reputation, and they leaned into that imagery, and we all know that the satanic panic definitely exploited that. But the origin story of War Pigs tells you everything you need to know about what the song actually is. The song was originally named after Witches Sabbath. The label made them change it partly out of concern about the optics following the Manson murders. So Geyser Butler, the band's bassist and primary lyricist, rewrote the lyrics. And what he wrote was a direct indictment of the people who start wars without fighting in them. He said it very clearly in 2017. Britain was on the verge of being dragged into Vietnam. There were protests in the streets, he was dreading being called up, and what he saw looking at the architecture of that war was the same thing working class people always see when wars happen. The generals gathered, the politicians hiding, and the poor sent to do the dying. War is the real Satanism, he said. Politicians are the real Satanists. That's what I was trying to say, according to him. The song opens with air raid sirens in a riff that sounds like machinery of war being cranked to life. Butler's opening image places the generals in their masses, equating them directly to witches at black masses. From there, the song names exactly what they do: treating people like pawns and chess, making war for their own purposes, hiding behind power while others do the dying. It doesn't end in triumph. It ends in judgment. The war pigs on their knees begging mercy, as Butler's lyric places Satan laughing over them. The condemnation is total. This is a song about accountability, about the specific named evil of sending other people's children to die for your interests while facing no personal consequence. It was written by a man who was afraid he would be one of those children. Geezer Butler was asked in 2024 which Black Sabbath song remained most relevant. He said war pigs, because it never goes away. The war pigs are always gathering, and the poor are always sent. And somewhere right now, that song is playing behind a video of someone showing you their pantry before and after. The cognitive dissonance required to get there is not small, but it happens in increments. The hook gets separated from the verse, the verse gets separated from the history, and the history stops being transmitted. And eventually the song is just a sound that means heavy and intense, available for any use that needs heavy and intense. That's not what that song is. Fortunate Sun might be the most misread song in the American canon. And the misreadings have been so consequential, so publicly documented, that John Fogarty has had to explain what his own song means on multiple occasions across multiple decades. Let's start with what it is. Fogarty wrote it in 1969 at the height of the Vietnam War. He had been drafted into the Army Reserve himself, and what he was watching with barely contained rage was a draft system that was doing exactly what draft systems have always done, landing disproportionately on people who couldn't get out of it. The specific trigger was the news that President Nixon's daughter was marrying President Eisenhower's grandson, both of them from families so embedded in political power that the war was something that happened to other people. Meanwhile, 11,000 Americans had already died in the Vietnam War that year. Most of them were poor, and a disproportionate number of them were black. Fogarty himself was precise about this. The song speaks more to the unfairness of class than to the war itself. His narrator explicitly refuses the flags, the red, white, and blue, the patriotic performance demanded of people who have no power in the system demanding it of them. He names who he is not. He's not a senator's son, he's not a millionaire's son, he's not someone born with the inheritance that exempts you from showing up. It was not an anti-soldier song. It was never an anti-soldier song. It was an anti-system song about who bears the cost of decisions made by people who face no cost themselves. It was licensed roughly 70 times for film and television. It became the shorthand for Vietnam War atmosphere. Play Fortunate Sun, and the audience knows we're in the late 1960s, things are bad, helicopters are probably involved. The song stopped being an argument and became an era, a set piece, a vibe. And then the misuse went somewhere genuinely surreal. In 2020, a political campaign used it as a walk-on song for a candidate. A candidate who had received a medical deferment from the very draft the song was written about. Fogarty went public. He said he found it, and this was his word, confounding. He noted that the person using his song was, in the most literal sense, the fortunate son the song was indicting. That's not a subtle misread. That's not a generational gap in understanding. That's someone using a song as an aesthetic choice without doing the minimum work of finding out what it means. And the reason that's possible is because the song had already been divorced from its meaning so thoroughly through so many movie soundtracks and content uses and ambient deployments that the argument inside it had become inaudible. The song still sounds like defiance, it just doesn't always know what it's defying anymore. Ohio is different from the other songs in this episode, and it's not because it's better or more important, but because the timeline of its creation is so compressed that it functions less like a song and more like a wound that got set to music before it could close. May 4, 1970, Kent State University. Students had gathered to protest Nixon's announcement that the United States was invading Cambodia, an expansion of a war that was already tearing the country apart. The Ohio National Guard opened fire, not on combatants, on students on an American campus. Sixty rounds in 13 seconds. Four students died, nine were wounded. Some of them weren't even part of the protest. They were just nearby. David Crosby gave Neil Young a copy of Life magazine. It had run the photos. Young disappeared into the woods, and he came back with a finished song. The recording was done in a few takes. The song was rushed to radio stations. Some refused to play it. It was too explicitly anti-Nixon, too raw, too recent. It reached number 14 on the charts anyway. And it became, in Young's own words, probably the most important lesson ever learned at an American place of learning. He also wrote with that specific honesty that made him one of the great ones, it's still hard to believe I had to write this song. It's ironic that I capitalized on the deaths of these American students. That line matters because Young understood that there is something uncomfortable about art made from atrocity, that the song both honors and uses the event, and that the process of making meaning from grief is never entirely clean. David Crosby said that Young keeping Nixon's name in the lyrics was the bravest thing he ever heard. Because naming the name is the thing that makes it accountable rather than atmospheric. The song opens with four words that land like a door kicked in. Tin soldiers and Nixon, not the government, not the establishment, Nixon. And then the line that follows, the recognition that they are finally on their own, that the country is not what it claimed to be, that the people in charge are not on the side of the people paying the price. For dead in Ohio, not several students, not protesters, for dead in Ohio. The specificity is the argument. What if you knew her? The song asks, and found her dead on the ground. That question is doing something specific. It's asking the listener to move from the abstraction of political event to the reality of a particular person, someone's daughter, someone's friend, dead on the ground of a campus where she was exercising a constitutional right. Ohio is not a vibe. Ohio is a document, it's a record of a specific day, a specific decision, and a specific cost. And when it gets used as background audio for content that has nothing to do with any of that, what gets lost isn't just the song's meaning. What gets lost is the memory of those four students, the specific, named, irreducible fact of what happened to them. That's who those song that song is about. For what it's worth, has the most interesting origin story of the four songs in this episode, partly because the misreading of it is so well established that most people would be surprised to learn what it was actually about. It is almost universally understood as a Vietnam War protest song. But it isn't. Steven Stills wrote it in 15 minutes in late 1966 about something much more local: the Sunset Strip curfew riots in Los Angeles. Local businesses on the Sunset Strip had complained that the youth culture congregating outside their establishments was bad for commerce. The city responded with curfew and anti-loitering loitering ordinances, very similar to, let's say, for example, food truck restrictions on Water Street in Milwaukee, you know, just ballparking some ideas. On November 12th, 1966, roughly a thousand young people gathered to protest the closing of a nightclub called Pandora's Box. The LAPD showed up and it got ugly. Stills saw it or the aftermath and went home and wrote the song. The opening line, something is happening here, though what it is isn't exactly clear, is not about the fog of war in Southeast Asia. It's about the specific, disorienting experience of watching authority move against kids on a street in West Hollywood over a nightclub curfew. The paranoia builds. That was the strip in 1966. It has also been a lot of other things and a lot of other years, which is why the song traveled. Stills himself said it was really four things intertwined. The war was in there, the absurdity of what was happening on the strip was in there, the broader cultural tension was in there, but the primary trigger was local and specific. A confrontation between institutional authority and young people asserting a right to be somewhere. The song got absorbed into the Vietnam War narrative almost immediately, partly because the imagery was portable. It describes paranoia, surveillance, confrontation, the feeling that something is wrong and nobody is saying it clearly. Those things were true about Vietnam too. They're true about a lot of things. That's what made the song so durable. But the durability came at a cost. American Dad and Family Guy both did episodes parodying how predictably for what it's worth gets deployed in Vietnam war scenes. It has been licensed so many times, recontextualized so thoroughly that it now functions as a shorthand for something political and countercultural was happening in the 1960s, which is accurate and also almost entirely emptied of content. The song's title is actually an expression of Stills' own ambivalence about whether he had the right to be saying what he was saying for what it's worth, appears nowhere in the lyrics. It was what he said to his manager when he played it for the first time. Let me play you something for what it's worth. He was worried about the song defining the band, worried about being typecast, offering his observation with appropriate humility. That humility is now the title of one of the most overused songs in the history of licensed music. George Santayana wrote in 1905, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. The version that lands harder for me is this those who do not confront the past are condemned to repeat it. Not remember, confront. Because the problem isn't always forgetting. Sometimes we know exactly what happened. We just don't sit with it. We don't let it cost us anything. We use it as a sound bed and we keep scrolling. I'm a clinician. Everything eventually comes back to clinical relevance, and I'm not going to pretend this episode is purely a music history lesson. The severance of meaning from artifact is not just a music problem, it's a memory problem. And memory, collective memory, cultural memory, the kind that tells a community what it has been through and what it cost, is foundational to the kind of meaning making that keeps people psychologically oriented. When protest music gets stripped of its protest, what gets stripped with it is the record of why the protest was necessary, the conditions that produced the song, the specific injustice that someone felt so urgently that they had to set it to music and put it into the world before the feeling could be managed into something quieter and safer. Gazer Butler writing about working class boys being sent to die while a politician stayed home. John Fogarty watching the draft land exclusively on the people without the connections to avoid it. Neil Young looking at photos of students shot on their own campus and writing a song in an afternoon because there was nowhere else to put it. Steven Stills watching kids get confronted by police or being somewhere the commercial interests of the street didn't want them. These songs were made under pressure, real pressure. The kind that comes from watching something unjust happen and needing to say so out loud in a form that could travel, in a form that other people could carry with them. When we use them as vibes, we are not just being careless with intellectual property. We are participating in exactly what Santayana was warning about. We are diluting the resonance that protest music depends on to do its job, which is to keep the wound visible, to present the comfortable amnesia that lets the same systems run the same plays on the same populations without consequence. We are, in a small but real way, doing the work of the people the songs were written against, the people who would prefer the record not be kept, the pressure not be remembered, and the cost not be named. And Santayana's observation holds because these songs are still relevant. The war pigs are still gathering, the Fortunate Sons are still finding their deferments, there's still something happening here. And the question is whether we're paying enough attention to say what it is. Now, I'm not suggesting everyone needs a music history degree before they make a social media post. I am suggesting that when something sounds powerful, it's worth 30 seconds of curiosity about why. That the songs we reach for instinctively because they sound urgent, because they sound defiant, because they sound like something that matters, often sound that way because. Because they were made in a moment that mattered. And that moment deserves more than a pantry backdrop. Geezer Butler dreading his draft notice. John Fogarty watching the names of the dead and knowing who wasn't among them. Steven Stills watching kids get pushed off a street corner in LA and needing to say something about it. These are the origins. This is what was being carried. Not every song needs to. We don't need every song to, and actually, we need every song not to. But the ones that do deserve to have that weight acknowledged at minimum before we decide what else to use them for. The songs are still here. The history is still accessible. And the 30 seconds of curiosity and reflection is still available. Pay attention to what you're carrying. This is structure and scars. Thanks for being here. Remember to make your healing as loud as the hell that you went through to earn those scars. We'll see you next time.