Wednesday, August 22, 2012

Just an old song




Through most of last week, for no apparent reason, I listened to a lot of 70s music on youtube. Or should that read watched music on youtube.  Videos of songs that I had grown up on, but was only really properly seeing, in many cases for the first time ever, people whose familiar voices I'd often heard on the radio or on music cassettes. Now I don't know if it's just me and if it's because I'm no singer or am particularly musical but I tend to never really pay much attention to song lyrics. I just catch bits and pieces and sing those or just vaguely hum along and then sing out the instrumental solo bits. This is why last week when I watched an old song that I'd played often without really noting any of the lyrics, it brought up something I had long, long forgotten.

The song was Ohio by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, and it turned out to be a song about an incident I had read about and seen pictures of in Life magazine years ago. On May 4th 1970 in Ohio, America, there had been a huge stand-off between students of Kent State University protesting against the Vietnam war and the government, which ended with soldiers shooting the unarmed college students, leaving 4 dead and several wounded. Of course, being on the other side of the world at a time when there was yet none of the instant media we have today, I think I got to see this issue of Life only around 1975/6. My sister and I were full of childish shock and fascination by the pictures (and Life carried only really great pictures) and I remember we felt especially sad for one of the victims who seemed particularly good-looking. The magazine with all the pictures was around for a while but over time, it disappeared, as did my memories of it. Until last week. 


What an amazing invention the Internet is, I keep thinking as I follow links around of the story. It had apparently been a huge, traumatic moment in the nation's history. Plenty of books have been written on it, there are lots of videos online with people still arguing bitterly over it, lots of articles, blogs et al. How could a government kill its young? How could it just shoot into a crowd of unarmed students? As a teacher, I know students, especially collegiate-aged ones, can be infuriatingly difficult to deal with. Late teens, early twenties. They're not so young and impressionable anymore as school children, they've read a bit more, know a bit more but they're not quite adults either and can be impossibly idealistic and stubborn. A real force to reckon with. Case in point, the student movement of South Korea in the '80s. But to shoot into a crowd of your own young? When the '89 Tiananmen Square massacre took place in Beijing, I had long forgotten the Life pictures but I wonder now as I write this, what people then who remembered the Kent State shootings had to say about it.  I remember my mother trying to rationalize the Tiananmen incident by attributing it to the Malthusian theory which was totally new to us and I remember us scolding Mum for being so callous. What a pity we had all forgotten about the Life/KSU incident then. I wonder what my mother would've made of it. For now, I'm still following around and reading up on this story that was evoked by an old song. 

Tin soldiers and Nixon coming,
We're finally on our own.
This summer I hear the drumming,
Four dead in Ohio.



8 comments:

  1. I have this book called "33 Revolutions per minute: history of protest songs". There were so many songs that were inspired by events that made me despair of the human race. This song and this event was one of them.
    Nixon was an S.O.B.
    Youtubed the song, finally got what these lines meant:
    "When words no longer seem adequate, the wrenching guitar solo incarnates all the rage and grief of the subject at hand"

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    1. Googled your book and it sounds like a great read, ku2. The 33 rpm title itself makes me nostalgic - all those precious black vinyl records with their scratchy sound. I hadn't realised there were so many protest songs but it did wake me up to the fact that pop songs can be a pretty effective means of rattling the cages of the powers that be. Plus being a fun but excellent way of highlighting and preserving crucial moments in human history.

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  2. Kent State was huge and that picture on top was really an iconic image of the time. Growing up with much older cousins and seeing anti war hippies here in Kathmandu, one sort of connected with the anti Vietnam war movement even though we were too small to appreciate what was really happening in Vietnam. Or USA for that matter.

    But we humans have this uncanny ability of not being able to learn from history. War and violence never seems to go out of fashion.

    Life magazine was really something wasn't it? Used to spend countless hours going over the amazing images in it. Simple life. Simple pleasures.

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    1. Yep, Loch, great timing for the photographer up there. Although it does look like the girl had been impaled by a spear on the head. No wonder it was retouched :) Likewise, I didn't know anything about American politics then either but I sensed the Vietnam thing was something big and deeply troubling. And callous as it sounds, I have to confess being fascinated by the movies, books and soul searching that resulted of that time.

      And oh yes, Life magazine was great. With my late interest in photography, I still often think back on those wonderful images in the mag. Such a great pity they closed it down.

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  3. Interesting. I must confess I'd never even heard of this incident before. And what I find equally interesting is you had access to and were actually reading Life way back then! And your mom... amazing that she discussed that stuff with her young daughters. Missy, now I know where all the brilliance comes from!

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    1. Lol brilliance, that made me guffaw! But you could say my Mum was a brilliant mother. She was more often than not genuinely interested in things that interested us, and the dining table and TV watching times were animated discussion places and times. And about Kent State, I probably wouldn't have heard about it either had it not been for aforementioned Life issue. But I do think the late 60s and early 70s were wildly interesting/fascinating years.

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  4. Sawi belh vak tur hriatloh, tha tih si hian, fb-style hian comments hi "like" tawp theih se. A theih tak si lovah chuan, "like"!

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