Whatever happened to propaganda music?

Where did all the foot-tapping numbers that make you want to whip on a uniform and march down the street go?

Where did all the foot-tapping numbers that make you want to whip on a uniform and march down the street go?

The only recent attempt at a propaganda number I can recall was the dirge of One Britain One Nation a few years back. To call it excruciating would to be overly kind, no matter how well intentioned it may have been:

Our nation survived through many storms and many wars
We’ve opened our doors, and widened our island’s shores
We celebrate our differences with love in our hearts
United forever, never apart.

Whether we opened our doors or whether they were forced apart on our behalf is another question, and, given modern society’s predilection for loathing one another based on immutable characteristics, whether we ‘celebrate’ such differences with ‘love in our hearts’ is another.

Still, the number is so average in every way – melody, lyrics, intent – that it passed quickly into the annals of the forgotten past, as most things do. Propaganda songs, it seems, are hard to get right.

No doubt many would object this song being tarred with the propaganda brush, lacking as it does an obvious touch of the Goebbels. Nevertheless, if we define propaganda as merely the attempt to propagate an ideology through media, it undoubtedly is just that.

Other times and places have made cracking tunes. Who, upon hearing the rousing melody of 没有共产党，就没有新中国 (Without the Communist Party there would be no new China) does not feel a sudden urge to collectivise the farms and set up a smelter in the back garden?

Or how about the East Germans? One quick listen to some of the tunes out of the land of workers and farmers is enough to make one feel like rounding up a few NATO ministers and signing up to a 30-year waiting list for a Trabant.

Not that it is just the swinish Reds who can write a good number. Their brown-shirted rivals could write ditties exciting enough to make you want to invade Poland. To avoid being put on another watchlist, however, I will refrain from linking to anything auf Deutsch, but the Petain regime was able to produce some songs of note:

Yet it needn’t be just the maniacs of twentieth century political extremism, thankfully. The tsarist anthem of the Russian Empire is stunning in its beauty and, again, makes one firmly believe in the God-given right of the Tsar to rule over the Orthodox realms of eastern Europe:

Never mind - given the current climate I’ve probably ended up on a watchlist or another now. No matter. The slave-freeing, Union-loving number, Battle Cry of Freedom should be enough to set the matter right:

Closer to our times there are the overly optimistic words of Rhodesians Never Die. Sadly, it turned out that they did, as did their country, but the songs it produced (‘Here’s the story of Rhodesia…’) live on far beyond the fall of Salisbury and the murderousness of Mugabe’s vile thugs. Quixotic to the n-th degree, it is enough to make you want to don very short-shorts and sling a FN-FAL.

By now you perhaps appreciate my point: there was a point in time – one which has clearly disappeared – where music was used as a means of bolstering ideology.

Today, music seems a dead art. Infinitely reproducible by computer code, it can be accessed instantly and has been called upon to fill every quiet moment in our day. Each car journey is stuffed with blaring speakers, and each trip to the shop accompanied by an x-rated rap song as we try and buy some socks.

It has, to an extent, become little more than noise. While this is not to say good music is not made (I assume it must be: I stopped listening to most new music about fifteen years ago), the music that one hears day-to-day is universally horrific. One almost longs for the days of Muzak (mass made, easily consumed music designed to be pumped into shopping malls and factories). One much maligned, it now evokes thoughts of a gentler, less degenerate past.

Perhaps that is modern music’s propagandistic intent. It reflects our modern consumerist society, in which everything is to be ingested and forgotten, replaced by the next instantly forgettable product. This extends not merely to things we buy everyday – white goods, music, cars – but also our perspective to relationships (don’t like it? Swipe right and find another) and ‘deeply held’ beliefs (the day before yesterday BLM, yesterday the climate, today gender-bending).

To make any good propaganda music today would require numerous things. Firstly, we would actually have to believe in something – a deed society seems sadly incapable of, as it flits between schizophrenic obsession with the irrelevant and scornful mockery of all that, in fact, matters.

Nor is music the only art form to have withered. As our society degenerates, so does its capacity to produce artistic authenticity: what is made becomes derivative, pale imitations of what went before. Behold the absurdity of modern art, the banality of most modern poetry, and the hackneyed attempts at modern theatre - all hold originality as more important than quality.

Maybe there will come a day when Westerners start writing songs promoting a cause again.

If that day comes we will be living in a very different world to the present.