Duck and Cover/McCarthyism - Cold War musical number

Sen. Joe McCarthy speaks about the communist threat interspersed with comically inadequate advice about how to respond to a nuclear attack. Performed by Topology and Loops. Speech intonation as melody.

Category:

Music

Tags:

• prosody
• intonation
• linguistics
• musicology
• mccarthy
• fifties
• usa
• cold
• war
• communism
• socialism
• liberal
• mccarthyism

[AStephenHero]

Great stuff guys - what program are you using to track the pitches? Seems like you've shown screen shots of it...?

[topologyrob]

@AStephenHero Doing it all by ear (I found that pitch tracking with Melodyne etc usually gets a different sense of the pitch than what I actually perceive - ie the exactly accurate is not always the most effective). The shots are of a program (Music Animation Machine) that shows midi data graphically (having put the speech melody into midi first)

[bazookadoe]

Hey, a turtle named Burt? Why not Myrtle? That actually rhymes! Oh, wait. That'd make him a woman. Can't have that, now, can we? Ever notice how they NEVER put a woman in ANY kind of leadership role back then? Not even in cartoons!

[topologyrob]

@bazookadoe True. But I guess there's a certain rhythmic catchiness to Bert the turtle

[CASSMAN777]

How is ducking and covering suppose to protect your from a nuclear bomb?

[gravelin08]

It was a very clever ploy to induce people to think that there was something they could do, and what they could do was very simple and effective when many people were ignorant about nuclear weapons and their real effects. Just as now, people had faith in their government. Not giving people adequate information allowed the bomb building to continue without significant enough protests to stop it. Also, the bomb officially ended the war, right? Sound familiar???

[SenorZorrozzz]

The Dems gave us duck and cover! Idiot!

[SouthernWhiteTrash]

Close to accurate. If blast area of those bombs had a two mile radius, yes. There were no survivors within a mile if not by immediate death, than shortly after by radiation poisoning. People like simple solutions to problems. Duck and cover.

[Reenlightenment]

I love when people project modern knowledge on to a past era like so many of you have!

The PSA is from 1950, bombs were relatively weak, & duck & cover was the best option availible. In Japan, there were survivors in the blast area, even though the people outside became shadows on the pavement. The difference was they were covered.

Maybe a "duck & kiss your ass good bye" PSA would make you all feel better?

[isisqueenafrika]

This is foolishness. What coutry that cares about its citizes would allow these lies to be advertised?

[Engelstein69SS]

people are going to have to choose communism for it to work.

i think in about 500 years we will see worldwide communism and there will be a one world government.

Peace.

[wwwjohnjewelcom]

The phylosophy behind communism is missing something more than the suppport of our people it is missing a recognition of different psychological

elements in society that apply to education.Leveling everything off to a communism will only Stiffel social structure