Anti-War and Protest Music in the 60s and Today

Following the development of rock and roll and youth rebellion in the 50s, the 60s were a time of musicians using their art to express the counterculture's opinions on what the US government was doing in Vietnam. Civil rights and anti-war activists had a lot of crossovers, which created counter-culture movements much like what we discussed with the "Make Love, Not War" documentary.
Protest music in the United States has been around since the Revolutionary War when it was largely used to place blame on the British rather than dispute the existence of the war itself because those who were most negatively affected by the fighting were more easily silenced due to the analog nature of the time. Anti-war music as we would know it today truly began leading up to World War One, with songs like "I Didn't Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier," made popular by the isolationists. The growing popularity of record players and radios allowed many more musicians to make their voices heard in the time following the Great Depression, but World War Two managed to avoid heavy dissent due to the attack on Pearl Harbor, and general enthusiasm to retaliate and gain freedom around the world.
When television became widespread across America, American citizens once again had cause to protest war. The introduction of the horrors of war into everyone's living rooms was a wake-up call to what was actually happening, so the counterculture movement of the 60s evolved from acoustic folk music to rock-based tunes. The youth that had grown up on rock-and-roll used their passion and energy to protest the burden of war that was being placed unfairly on them, and that, in their opinion, wasn't necessary at all. As the toll of the war increased, the boldness of the songs increased as well, with the best-remembered song being “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag” by Country Joe, a Navy veteran himself, who wrote "Send your sons off before it’s too late./Be the first one on your block/To have your boy come home in a box.".



Closer to the present, in the 2000s, during the war in Iraq, bands like Green Day and Bright Eyes wrote songs directly attacking the president for his choices, like "Both Sides of the Gun" by Ben Harper which refers to Bush as a "One-dimensional fool in a three-dimensional world," and more general songs, like 21 Guns by Green Day, which criticized the war on terror in a broader sense.
As long as there are choices to be made in government, there will be people opposing it and using whatever medium they can to get those messages out into the world. Much like how television gave people a window into what was happening, this music gave people a way to see a point of view on war that wasn't widely supported, and attempted to bring America back to a more democratic state after the quasi-autocratic takeover of the Vietnam War.

Sources:
https://ap.gilderlehrman.org/history-by-era/sixties/essays/protest-music-1960s
https://www.shsu.edu/~lis_fwh/book/american_renaissance/Protest%20Music2.htm
https://harvardpolitics.com/covers/songs-of-war-the-evolution-of-protest-music-in-the-united-states/
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/10/opinion/country-joe-vietnam-woodstock.html
https://www.liveabout.com/iraq-war-protest-songs-1322766