Mixtape Mondays: Tides of War

Good Morning Friends! I hope that you had a sincerely good weekend and that it was restful in the right ways. It is the start of a brand new week and I hope it is a most excellent one. Later this week Blaugust 2021 officially begins and I am looking forward to seeing all of the participants posting away. For those of you readers who might be finding my blog for the very first time welcome. Mixtape Mondays is a series that I have been doing each Monday for a few months now. As a kid, I loved making Mixtapes for my friends and now that I don’t really use physical media I was missing that experience. After getting heavily into Spotify, I realized just how well the Mixtape format translates, and as a result each Monday I post a new mix with new album art.

Tides of War

I think every generation goes through a period of time where they heavily engage with the music of their forebearers. For me, that time was late middle school and early high school and I am not entirely certain what triggered it. I do know that in 1990 when the massive Led Zeppelin Boxed Set was released I was already bought in and fully engaged. My personal musical explorations were largely contained to the genre then termed “Classic Rock”. It does make me wonder if that moniker is a sliding scale that changes meaning as the music ages. Does that mean that Nirvanna is now considered to be “Classic Rock”? Regardless this is also music that I deeply associate with Vietnam and post Vietnam era thanks to Hollywood choosing to populate the soundtracks of these films with large swaths of these songs. It has become a cliche that if you want to set a war film in the 70s, it needs to include the song “Fortunate Son”. The thing is I get it because that track is an absolute banger.

Track List

  • Immigrant Song – Led Zeppelin
  • Paranoid – Black Sabbath
  • Dream On – Aerosmith
  • Sympathy for the Devil – The Rolling Stones
  • Behind Blue Eyes – The Who
  • Limelight – Rush
  • Radar Love – Golden Earring
  • People are Strange – The Doors
  • White Room – Cream
  • Fortunate Son – Creedence Clearwater Revival
  • You Really Got Me – The Kinks
  • Revolution – The Beatles
  • Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door – Bob Dylan
  • All Along the Watchtower – Jimi Hendrix
  • Comfortably Numb – Pink Floyd

Listen On Spotify

Listen On YouTube

Listen On Tidal

Well, friends that brings to a close Mixtape number thirteen in the series. As always I would love to hear your thoughts below. If you are tuning in late to the entire series you can find the archive page linked below. I hope you have a most excellent week and if you are so inclined, check out the information about Blaugust 2021 and maybe sign up.

1 thought on “Mixtape Mondays: Tides of War”

  1. The whole “Where do you draw the lines?” thing fascinates me. Looking at that list, some of it comes from an era that, when I discovered it at the age of fourteen, seemed to me to represent the distant past. I was fourteen in 1972. The tracks in question, many of them as you say strongly associated with the Vietnam War, were five to eight years old at the time. To me, as a young teenager in the early 1970s, the 1960s were a mythical age when giants walked the land. It was history.

    Other tracks on that list, Paranoid and Radar Love specifically, I considered cutting-edge, brand new, ultra-modern teen sounds. “Paranoid” was actualy a couple of years old when I bought the album but I didn’t know that. Radar Love, however, came out in 1973 and I saw Golden Earring on their UK tour in support of it when it charted here.

    I can see all those same nuances in discussions of music (and movies and games) in any decade you care to name. When you’re in your teens, five years is as good as five decades when you’re my age now. It’s one of the primary reasons these generational generalizations make so little sense.

    As for Classic Rock, though, I tend to think of it as music made by hairy men in blue denim. That about covers it.

Comments are closed.