Tracklist for The Not-So-Serious Era (Nuclear EP)
Electric Six, Chemical Brothers, Mos Def, Capital Cities, James Bond, and Dr. Strangelove, in Two N-Words (Two N-Bombs), Part Seven
[All chapters can be read independently, but the previous chapters are here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6]
By the turn of the millennium the Cold War seemed far away in the past. We were safe. The Clinton years were dubbed “a vacation from history” in part because the populace had settled into a contented complacency.
Of course September 11, 2001, caused every pundit to remark that Fukuyama was wrong, that we hadn’t arrived at the comfy end of history after all, that dangers still existed far across the waters, and some of them were coming for us. Even then, however, the threat wasn’t existential. Terrorism was serious business and its spectacular nature served to scare and impress us: Terrorists murdered, buildings fell, and our way of life was changed in response. But the world didn’t end. The bombs we feared were smaller ones. We began to hear about “dirty bombs”—new fearsome considerations, to be sure, but their detonation would not set off any massive chain reactions or cause all-out conflict between the great powers. Unlike widescale nuclear war, the mere targeted, almost prank-like strikes of terrorists could not bring down the entire system. Besides, nuclear war would have killed wildlife; terrorism didn’t usually affect wildlife. So it wasn’t as bad, but it was still bad. More importantly, in the early 21 century, terrorism was real. Nuclear war hadn’t been a real possibility in over a decade; its specter had finally dispersed.
Consequently, what was once our primary worry became a frivolous notion fit for reverie. In 2003 Electric Six sang of “start[ing] a nuclear war / in a gay bar”, and it was funny and kind of quaint. This facetiousness did not and could not have transpired in the prominent culture of the previous era, when nuclear destruction was staid subject matter for dystopian stories and their portentous warnings. Even the dark comedy of Dr. Strangelove retained the sense that this is important, that even if our governments destroyed us all through pettiness and incompetence, still there would be something profoundly wistful about it: the absurd narrative of Kubrick’s movie was there to teach us something serious about human nature. But “Gay Bar” by Electric Six possesses none of this; it is a proudly meaningless juxtaposition of disparate concepts, one of which happens to be the eager prospect of nuclear war. It wasn’t serious, and in 2003 it quite rightly shouldn’t have been serious anyway.
A year and a half later the Chemical Brothers released their fifth album, Push the Button. The first single, “Galvanize” (2004), featured Q-Tip rapping that “the time has come to push the button / My finger… is on the button.” There is only one such button that matters so much. The magical realism of the song equates launching atomic bombs with uniting the world’s nations. The audience deemed this logic acceptable; the blithe sentiment made for a provocative emotional core to a great dance track. By the mid-’00s pop music could present the expectation of nuclear war—once a source of paranoia and dread—as a flippant mental pose, a cool consideration to try out briefly, boldly, and a bit smugly.
People had become comfortable with this sort of thing. Even as various wars transpired across the globe, and as various “rogue” states’ nuclear programs remained concerning, these songs didn’t register as being in poor taste. Because they weren’t. The 2012 London Olympics played “Galvanize” at the opening and closing ceremonies. That was fine.—But imagine “push the button” pumping out of speakers at any of the Olympics held during the Cold War, or at any time during the second half of the 20th century. Such a lyric wouldn’t have been considered appropriate, much less promoted at the highest of levels. The lyric would not have been written in the first place. But then suddenly in the ’00s it all became perfectly fine.
These two hit songs, “Gay Bar” by Electric Six and “Galvanize” by the Chemical Brothers, are the audio equivalent of the opening James Bond “gun barrel” motif. At the start of the 007 films, Bond struts in with style, stops, turns, fires his pistol toward the camera, and a red filter trickles down. It is as if Bond has shot you, the viewer. We’ve all seen the sequence many times over, and no one—or hardly anyone—ever took offense on behalf of victims of gun violence. Likewise no one thinks Electric Six, the Chemical Brothers, or Q-Tip were insensitive in their rhetorical calls for nuclear destruction. The average Bond fan didn’t think he’d very possibly get shot to death someday—but for decades average Americans did think they’d quite possibly die under atomic fallout. And then they didn’t think that way anymore. They never would have danced to songs about nuclear war. But then they did just that.
Yes, they’re just songs, but the point is that nuclear war wasn’t weighing on anyone’s mind anymore. The Bomb had ceased to be an imposing, foreboding cultural myth. As the 2010s wore on, not even controversies over North Korean or Iranian nuclear ambitions could restart the mass anxiety—not to any lasting extent. People decried Kim Jong Il sometimes, but they didn’t lose sleep over him. The 2015 Iranian Nuclear Deal, in the minds of the US public, was more a political football than a critical measure forestalling (or ensuring) World War III. Concerns sometimes arose, especially amongst partisans and specialists, but the matters being discussed were distant, limited, hypothetical threats. No one thought that the world could end at any moment. Many of those who once lived under vague but pervasive fear forgot what it felt like. There used to be a clock ticking somewhere, and the final alarm might go off at any second, and it wouldn’t be a drill. But that clock had safely wound down years ago, and no one thought about it anymore. Nuclear war was nostalgia; it was antiquated, a figure of speech, and the very idea had become somewhat humorous. Like a gay bar.
George W. Bush didn’t even pronounce nuclear correctly—he famously kept saying “nucular”1—almost as if the word itself had become obscure, antiquated. It was something we didn’t hear about so much anymore, so maybe we weren’t sure how to say it. Sure, if we weren’t careful, someone someday might maybe misuse nuke-u-lar weapons. But for the time being it was all theoretical, and the Bushism amused the chattering classes. (Snotty college kids would say, “You know it’s actually pronounced new-clear,” and then they’d laugh really obnoxiously because none of it mattered.)
Sure, some people during those years still talked seriously about nuclear war, but it sounded old-fashioned. The people who talked that way were relics, and perhaps it was right to lampoon their fear-derived prejudice. Starting a no-no war or pushing the no-no button—for fuck’s sake, these are just words, bro. And why would anyone be afraid of a word?
To conclude:
Earlier on in this series of essays we pinned wider N-word usage to the rise of gangsta rap. Now we’ve tracked declining fears—temporarily declining fears—of nuclear war through evidence found in pop music. In the early 2000s atomic destruction became the topic of fun songs because—on sociocultural and emotional levels—we didn’t believe such a disaster could be real anymore.
But then things started to change, slowly. Under the body politic, hidden from sight, strange currents swirled and bubbled in the fates’ cauldron. Eventually, in 2022, there would emerge the suggestion that nuclear war might be possible again, but if so it wouldn’t matter. The long brewing process, during which this arcane formulation had cooked beneath a placid surface, was set to the tune of another hit record. The anodyne repetition of “Safe and Sound”, Capital Cities’ jaunty 2013 chart-burner, epitomizes the Western establishment’s current, Quixotic sense of invincibility: “Even if the sky is falling down / I know that we’ll be safe and sound.” Put plainly: Even if some nukes go off, don’t worry about it. And even if we die, it would be a cozy death: “Even if we’re six feet underground / I know that we’ll be safe and sound.”
A mainstay of normie radio ever since, someday the song might play over an Adam Curtis montage of pundits mocking Putin, Hunter Biden smoking crack, and NATO troops training Ukrainians in the summer of 2021. Six months later the world would become dangerous again.
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This ends the seventh chapter in this series. All chapters were written months ago, but the eighth chapter is longer and will take more time than usual to edit. Thanks for reading, and if you like what I’m doing, consider sharing this post, and subscribe if you haven’t.