[UPDATE] "Catastrophe and the Cure": The Politics of Post-9/11 Music (Deadline July 1, 2009)
In current debates about the War in Iraq, it has become commonplace for politicians and journalists to conjure the specter of the Vietnam War as a means of quantifying the impact of the current war in American culture and throughout the world. Surprisingly, though, few have scrutinized these comparisons to examine the differences between the popular music of the Vietnam era and the music of the current post-9/11 era. While the Vietnam era found countless bands and musicians responding in protest to that war, there has arguably been a significantly smaller amount of contemporary musicians who have taken overt stances, in their music, about the politics of post-9/11 life, in America and elsewhere.