I mentioned on 15 March that I was surprised it had taken that long before Vietnam got a mention here. That changes from today: the death by shooting of four students at Kent State University in Ohio, and the wounding of several others, rippled all around the world, but most especially around other university and college campuses in the US.
The facts of the case are summarised on Wikipedia (and see here from the Kent University site) and there’s no need to rehearse them here, Nor should the shootings have come as a complete surprise; as I remarked here back in early February, Antonioni foresaw their likelihood in Zabriski Point.
There’s a certain bathetic conceit in discussing the deaths of the students in terms of their impact on popular music in 350-or so words on a blog post, but impact there was. On the anniversary, Twitter lots of versions of Neil Young’s Ohio, written in the immediate aftermath, were posted; the music papers through the remainder of 1970 tell a wider story. All through the months afterwards, major artists cancelled concerts scheduled at Universities and Colleges right across the USA because of ongoing protests, and, of course, people made movies, wrote books and composed songs in response, including, Yesfans will know, Long Distance Runaround by Yes (hot colour, melting the anger to stone…)
It seems to me that something else changed though. It is trite to say that an innocence was lost, but I think it is also true. Don Henley and Bruce Hornsby wrote End of the Innocence in 1989 about Reagan era, but I think they were 29 years too late.
Meanwhile, in Cambridge, UK, a young Australian on the make also tapped into the idea, contrasting the deaths with a Hollywood portrait of America
Four students never guessed that they were through
Their history had them covered like a gun
It hit them like a bolt out of the blue
Too quick to grasp and far too late to runThey crashed and died together in the sun
They were driving through mythical America
Providing the title track for Pete Atkin’s Driving Through Mythical America (1971)
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