I've been thinking about popular songs that call for peace, and which ones, if any, still hold a lot of cultural cache. The list is short and doesn't include much written in the 21st century. Even after 9/11, the moment where it was most likely for songs of this nature to appear, most of the music created in response to the attacks was tinged with violence and themes of revenge. Even Neil Young's "Let's Roll" is about a counterattack in both its details and broader implication. Lee Greenwood's jingoistic tripe "God Bless the U.S.A."—AKA "Proud to Be an American"—was released back in 1984 though most people now think it was written and recorded in direct response to 9/11. It reached #16 on the Billboard chart that year. Reading about the history of that particular song, I had a good laugh learning that Greenwood did a version of it called "God Bless You Canada" in 1989, completely undermining the entire premise of his original by plugging in another country into the chorus. There's a lot of loonies up for grabs up north of the border, and Greenwood has bills to pay just like the rest of us.

Even when we try to recontextualize the popular peace hits on the 1960's and 1970's, it often lands disastrously. Think Gal Godot's attempt to bring back John Lennon's "Imagine" at the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, or how Bob Dylan's "Blowin' In The Wind" appeared in a superbowl ad for Budweiser in 2019. In my opinion, there are plenty of amazing contemporary protest songs—2016's "We The People" by Tribe Called Quest comes to mind—and we still get hit with incredible anthems of empowerment and solidarity, like Beyonce's "Formation," but I am coming up blank trying to think of sincere, straight ahead calls for peace appearing in popular music in the 21st Century. It's weird, right? I'm just one listener, and no one can consume everything that's released, so if the comments section of this post become littered with contrary examples, I'll be happy to be proven wrong.

I wish I could relocate this certain video clip I saw once. It was an interview with director David Lynch where he was talking about how their was literally no existing plan for world peace, and how the notion of such a thing existing, even just a plan for it, was a joke to people. He was visibly upset about it. It was righteous and it really moved me.

So is it a joke? Is it corny or naive to wish for, or even spend time thinking of such a thing? To me, the total absence of contemporary songs with this sentiment suggests that, on some level, in the culture, yes, it is a naive, corny concept. I don't know why and I don't have a suggestion for how to change that fact; I'm just observing, noticing, and writing it down.

British songwriter Nick Lowe wrote a song in 1974 that seemed to be prescient about the impending cultural dismissal of the sincere belief in peace. He even addressed the main problem right there in his title: "(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding." (Side note: I cannot believe he cites Judee Sill's "Jesus Was a Cross Maker" as an influence on this song, that's wild and for another time). Lowe's band Brinsley Schwarz's version didn't do much of anything when it was released, but the version recorded by Elvis Costello in 1978 immediately become popular and critically acclaimed.

One of the reasons I think the song remains so relevant all these decades later is that it functions as a perfect Rorschach test. If you want to think it's a winking, sneering takedown of 60's flower-power, you can hear that. If you want to think that it's a desperate, sincere question and plea for peace, you can hear that. In either interpretation, one thing remains true: unlike most of the popular-music peace anthems that came before it in the 60's and 70's, this song, in its arrangement and recording, absolutely ripped it up, careening through its 3 and 1/2 minutes like a barely controllable vehicle rolling down a hill without ever tapping the brakes. This was such a smart move. If you believe the song is sincere, as I do, and you need something to cut the potency of that voice in your head that shouts, "isn't this concept naive and corny?", the pounding, relentless arrangement of this song does just that.

There are no shortage of covers of this song. It's just about become a standard. But what surprised me this week when I started to search for it, was that there was no slow, sparse, piano interpretations of the song (again, y'all will probably prove me wrong). Sometimes when a song stays with us for so long and is so ubiquitous, its power becomes hard to see and hear because it takes on the quality of running water or traffic lights. This is how I came to start plucking out its chords on my little piano at home this week (little as in, it's literally a piano for children and when I play it, it looks straight up comical). I was trying to reconnect with the song.

The next night I stopped by my local bar and walked in on two friends deep into a long, difficult conversation about the atrocities in Gaza. The word was that this conversation had been going on night after night after night. Apparently, I entered just as one of them hit a wall trying to truly understand just how and why humans can do such absolutely horrific things to other humans. He was yelling, "I don't want to be a human anymore. I don't want it. I can't. I wanna be a bird. <slams hands on bar> I tried. I can't be a human. I'm a bird now." He wasn't trying to be funny.

I started to imagine a scene: it's almost closing time at a bar just like this one. A person overwhelmed by the news and the world goes over to a piano and starts to play this famous song. They still believe the sentiment, but Christ it's really hard to do so right now, almost impossible, and so the song comes out of them bleak, and desperate, and on the verge of tears.

This is that version of the song.