Tyler Cowen: On the Sound of Patriotism - A Musical History

**Tyler Cowen** (0:24)
Sometimes you just do better by looking at music, or sometimes the visual arts, rather than talking those things through directly. So I thought that is what we would do today. We would look at the history of patriotism in music, mostly sticking to pieces I actually like and I hope you like.
And that's the basic theme of what we're up to.

**Rick Rubin** (0:44)
I think it's interesting to look at patriotism from a global standpoint. We tend to look at America as the center of the world.
Countries all over the world have their patriotism. It's beautiful to look at.

**Tyler Cowen** (0:56)
That's right. We are going to start with America, but we will wander far and wide. And I think we cannot have a world without patriotism, but at the margin one should always be a bit skeptical of patriotism because it doesn't make complete sense.
This is as classic a piece as I could come up with. And I think it's an important place to start. It's John Philip Sousa, Stars and Stripes Forever, which he wrote in the 1890s. It's very famous, everyone knows it, and I think it sums up the potential problem with patriotic music. In essence, you can think of our entire session as me trying to avoid repeating the same kind of piece over and over again. Because the Philip Sousa piece, it's quite rousing. You could think of it as a kind of cumulative exhilaration. And if all we did was to play Sousa marches again and again and again, everyone would be bored.
But let's start with what classic patriotism sounds like. Major key, themes re-emphasized. You know, you pull back and then you come forward with even more musical forces. Big climax at the end. It's classic patriotic music.
Now, John Philip Sousa, he was director of the US. Marine Band when he wrote this. It's a little bit before the Spanish-American War. The song rose to prominence during the Spanish-American War of 1898 It was seen as the patriotic song. Even though most of that war was about the Philippines, to some extent Hawaii, Puerto Rico, we almost took Cuba as well. It was quite an imperialistic war about other places in some ways more than the United States. And it involved us taking a place, the Philippines, where stars and stripes really did not last forever, other than our military base there. But they won back their independence.
This is about a little shorter than 5 minutes, but I think it's a classic case for patriotic music, and also why patriotic music to many of us can be a bit repellent or dangerous. Are we ready to listen?

**Rick Rubin** (3:03)
Let's listen.

**Tyler Cowen** (6:29)
Do you feel properly roused? Excited.

**Rick Rubin** (6:32)
It brings up images of parades and fairgrounds and people celebrating.

**Tyler Cowen** (6:39)
Each time I hear it, which is not so often, it does sound fresh to me, which is a sign of its power, but I also feel quite manipulated.

**Rick Rubin** (6:48)
It's got a lot of energy, and it also reminds me of cartoons from childhood.

**Tyler Cowen** (6:52)
And, you know, this song often was used in movie theaters. If there was a fire or some kind of emergency, they would start playing this tune to signal to people this time to leave.
That's a very funny use for a patriotic song, but I think they thought it was something people would notice and feel a need to get up and do something. But the point is that patriotic songs, if they're effective, they start being used for other things as well. And that gets at the complexity of the patriotism idea, because patriotism starts being used for other things as well, to impose your view of religion or whatever. The patriotism, once it's in place, it grows of its own logic in ways you may or may not like.

**Rick Rubin** (7:32)
You said that this song was essentially the theme song for the Spanish-American war.

**Tyler Cowen** (7:36)
Yes, it was, which we won, quote unquote.

**Rick Rubin** (7:39)
Are patriotic songs always associated with war?

**Tyler Cowen** (7:43)
Not at all. And we will get to that.
But the other side of the spectrum is a critical patriotic song, which is also associated with war. And this is Country Joe and the Fish from the 1960s. This came out, I think, 1967 And it's called Fixen to Die Rag. He was not a communist, but his parents were Stalinists. So they called him Joe after Joseph Stalin.
And Country Joe, naming the group that is a reference to Stalin, tongue-in-cheek. And the fish refers to a quotation from Chairman Mao that revolutionaries are fish swimming in the ocean. So he was poking fun at the notion of, you know, his group, Country Joe and the Fish, were they really revolutionaries or were they just a musical group? And he was playing around with that idea. I think of him as patriotic in the Woody Guthrie sort of way. He leaned much further to the left than many people today would be comfortable with. But he was strongly opposed to the Vietnam War, I would say essentially correct in that view.