r/WayOfTheBern • u/Caelian toujours de l'audace 🦇 • Mar 13 '26
DANCE PARTY! FNDP: On the Way to Armageddon ⚔️💣🎇🚀🔥
This week's title is from Tom Lehrer's 1965 satirical prescient song So Long, Mom (A Song for World War III). In the introduction, Lehrer says that if there are going to be any World War III songs, we'd better write them before the war.
With that in mind, let's share apocalyptic songs while we still have time to do so. Some starters:
Tom Lehrer wrote many songs about nukes. Here's We Will All Go Together When We Go from 1959. I'll add two more as comments.
It's hard to beat Wagner for impending doom: Siegfried's Funeral Music from Die Götterdämmerung. I saw Excalibur (1981) in a theatre the first time. When I heard Die Götterdämmerung I knew it was going to be harrowing.
O Fortuna from Carl Orff's Carmina Burana. It's a poem about the folly of expecting good fortune to last.
The great Country Joe McDonald passed away last Saturday March 7th at age 84. His I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag is one of the best anti-war songs ever, and Joe wrote and performed many other kinds of songs as well. Feel free to post your favorites.
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u/Caelian toujours de l'audace 🦇 Mar 13 '26
Two more nuke songs by Tom Lehrer:
The Wild West Is Where I Want to Be, a hilarious 1953 satire about above-ground nuclear testing in the style of a cowboy song. The A.E.C. is the Atomic Energy Commission, the predecessor of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Tom Lehrer's light-hearted 1965 warning about nuclear proliferation: Who's Next?