“Once You Hear This, Act Fast”

During the 1950s and 1960s, the Federal Civil Defense Administration (FCDA), in cooperation with the Ad Council, featured television commercials that served as public service announcements and fifteen-minute television civil defense advertisements that educated the public about civil defense protocols. Part of its mission was to educate the public in the event of the detonation of a nuclear bomb. This chapter surveys the styles of music used in the televised civil defense advertisements from the early Cold War. The music is distinctly different from what was normally heard on television at the time, often featuring distinct moments of atonality or musical stylings of “us versus them,” that is, American political songs alternating with distinctly Soviet-style music to convey the origin of the threat without directly naming it. These musical oppositions were employed to persuade people to pay attention to the important message onscreen, underscore the potential destruction of the bomb, and relay the importance of civil defense.

Pie laika … Now is the time. The singing revolution on Latvian radio and television

In the Soviet Union, song competitions had an important role in presenting new artists and songs. The Mikrofona aptauja contest of Latvian radio (1968–1994) was the main forum for new Latvian pop music. It had a reputation for expressing nationalist feelings within the limits of Soviet censorship. In 1988, with the rise of new political movements in the Soviet Union, the competition became a venue for the Latvian independence movement. The winning song of 1988 was a demand for ‘freedom to the fatherland’. The competition also played a part in the rehabilitation of pre-war popular music which had been forbidden in Soviet Latvia. The paper discusses the role of journalists, politicians and songwriters in this process. After the privatisation of the economy, the song competition was taken over by private entrepreneurs, as public interest in political songs waned.

Yorùbá Primary School Songs: Issues and Lessons for the Younger Generation

Song is a worldwide phenomenon. It is a short metrical composition intended or adapted for singing, especially in rhymed stanzas. It can be a lyric or ballad. The usage of songs cannot be over emphasized among the people of Yoruba society. There are various ways in which the Yoruba make use of various songs and their society; such songs include festival songs, folktale, political songs, songs of mother of twins, satirical songs among others. In this paper, primary school Yoruba songs will be looked into. It is noted that there are songs that can be categorized as school children songs. These songs are sung during school hours like assembly time, break time, closing hour, and playtime among others. These songs are composed in a way to teach the school children morals, encourage them in their academics and to pass instructional lessons across to them. These songs have gone a long way in building the characters of the pupils.

Tajik Migrant Religious Poetry

Today there are hundreds of papers published on the problem of labor migration from Central Asian countries, its political, social and economic aspects, as well as on the problem of integration and adaptation of migrants in the Russian society. However, the topic of migrant poetry is still poorly studied in Russia. At least there is no such research on Tajik labor migrants. The genres of Tajik migrant poetry vary significantly and include such forms as love poems, political songs, songs about migration hardships, religious poems. This paper is based on the results of monitoring social networks «Odnoklassniki», «Facebook», as well as on the results of personal communication and interviews with poets. In the paper we use the poems of three authors written in Tajik, Russian and Shugnani languages. The semantic translation from Tajik and Shugnani was done by the author of this paper

Transcending the moment

Our paper argues that British singer Billy Bragg performs protest songs that cleverly draw upon musical forms underpinning his positioning as a voice of, and for, the ordinary person, ultimately disenfranchised by governmental adherence to neoliberal policies. While political songs are a product of their time, many of them can also transcend that historical moment and have a longer shelf-life in terms of their capacity to inform political thinking and action. Our song(s) of choice in this paper do so not just in terms of the relevance of their ‘literal’ message but also in how they draw upon traditional structures of feeling and generic elements of folk song to underpin this sense of ‘grass-roots’ critique via a modified, acoustic ballad form and a performance style. This serves to authenticate and legitimate the singer and his message and, in turn, allows Bragg to accumulate political and cultural capital.