Five songs inspired by George Orwell’s ‘1984’
No other work of fiction has embedded itself into the popular lexicon as much as George Orwell‘s defining 1949 classic. Big Brother, Room 101, thoughtcrime—1984‘s satirical vision of a futuristic UK turned totalitarian superstate filled with propaganda and constant surveillance has gifted the English language with many Orwellian adjectives, including the term itself.
The dystopian tale of the ‘Ministry of Truth’ administrator Winston Smith’s private loathing of the oppressive regime for which he censors and alters historical records, and his clandestine efforts to seek rebellion, has proved an enduring examination of state overreach, political indoctrination, and the deep human need for agency and self-determination.
The genesis of Orwell’s novel was forged during the Second World War’s turn toward an Allied victory. From 1943, the various conferences held by the ‘Big Three’—Joseph Stalin’s USSR, Franklin D Roosevelt’s and later Harry Truman’s USA, and Winston Churchill’s UK—sparked an anticipation for a then yet-to-be-defined geopolitical landscape divided into Soviet and ‘Western’ spheres of influence. This planted the seed of 1984‘s world dominated by three warring superstates. Having already touched on Stalinist allegories with Animal Farm, Orwell poured into his final work all feelings of his alienation from socialism due to the Soviet Union’s authoritarian clampdown on civil rights, and the perceived betrayal of the 1917 Russian Revolution’s original emancipatory aims.
Naturally, such a meaty political and philosophical subject inspired many pop songs. 1984‘s stark and universal science-fiction plot informed a conceptual collaboration between Rick Wakeman and Tim Rice, boasting Chaka Khan and Cockney Rebel’s Steve Harley among its guest stars. The seminal work also inspired an opera composed by American conductor Lorin Maazel in 2005, and Michael Radford’s 1984 film featuring John Hurt, with The Eurythmics slapping a stodgy electro-soundtrack to an otherwise bleak but faithful cinematic adaptation.
“I do not believe that the kind of society I describe will necessarily arrive,” Orwell wrote to American trade unionist leader Francis A Hanson, “But I believe that something resembling it could arrive…”
A slide into ideological uniformity and brutal state measures to enforce it feels less farfetched in an age where the US Executive is enmeshed with Silicon Valley billionaires, leading to collapses in public education and social provisions with compliant zeal. Music and the arts will forever remain tools to foster empathy and imagination to counter blinkered conservative hegemony, so let’s look at five songs that have successfully channelled 1984‘s cautionary tale.
Five songs inspired by George Orwell’s 1984:
Stevie Wonder – ‘Big Brother’
‘Little’ Stevie Wonder was well and truly behind him by the time of 1972’s Talking Book, his 15th album and third for Motown sub-label Tamla. The work being conjured away from label boss Berry Gordy’s commercial scrutiny saw Wonder flourish into one of the era’s most successful stars, marrying social and political critique with joyous pop appeal. He evolved sonically too, readily embracing the emerging ARP and Moog synthesisers to create that special funk sound that would shine across his 1970s output.
Lifting Orwell’s pervasive personification of Ingsoc rule, ‘Big Brother’ thrusts the totalitarian symbol away from the fictitious Oceania and deep into America’s Black community. Slapping Uncle Sam’s ‘Stars and Stripes’ hat onto the onerous figure, the song explores white America’s heritage of colonial violence meted out to the nation’s minorities. Wonder posits that like all empires, the USA imperial machine will crumble, tearing asunder all the mythos and national narratives along with it.
In the age of COINTELPRO’s illegal FBI intelligence gathering from among the Black Panthers and other left-wing groups, the track’s lyrical vision of an imploding society was grounded in an all-too-real period of federal paranoia and state abuse straight from the pages of 1984.
Dead Kennedys – ‘California Über Alles’
The late 1960s ‘Summer of Love’ that flowered from the Haight-Ashbury free-love zenith felt like ancient history a decade later. City council assassinations and the ‘White Night’ riots that tore through liberal San Francisco fuelled Dead Kennedys‘ frontman Jello Biafra’s violent and sardonic lyrical spits against American political failure and the bitter death of the hippy dream. Taking potshots at corporate Democrats as much as GOP dinosaurs, the ‘Bay Area’ hardcore punks attacked former Californian governor Ronald Reagan and future Democratic senator Diane Feinstein—or ‘Frankenfeinstein’ as Biafra affectionately called her—with equal venom.
While liberals were celebrating Jerry Brown’s gubernatorial win in 1975, Biafra and his Dead Kennedys members only saw through to the authoritarianism wrapped in polite decorum. Dropped as their first single in 1979, ‘California Über Alles’ evokes 1984‘s creeping state police with the lines “Big Bro on white horse is near”, and “now it is 1984”. The track depicts a degraded cartoon satire of a hippy-fascist terror state, where gas chambers are organic and the secret police wear suede denim. While he later expressed some regret for his gratuitous SS Nazi analogies, ‘California Über Alles’ still stings with an acerbic bite nearly 50 years later.
Radiohead – ‘2 + 2 = 5’
Believe it or not, there was a time when Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke fiercely critiqued the political orthodoxies of the day. Long before the sight of a Palestinian flag triggered on-stage tantrums, Yorke was penning cryptic excoriations against New Labour’s corporate drift and the climate of manufactured consent precipitating the War on Terror. Fired-up polemics were reflected in the raucous sound of Hail to the Thief, opening with the sound of a plugged-in guitar over the haunted electronics of their two prior LPs.
The ‘2 + 2 = 5’ mathematical fallacy goes back centuries as a device used to explore anti-intellectualism and the abandonment of critical faculties, should social pressure or state doctrine demand it. Popularly associated with the concept of Winston Smith’s illegal diary entry pondering Doublespeak—with its demand to sincerely believe in self-evident falsity—Radiohead titled their 2003 garage rock single after a spiritual leap into self-deception struck a chord amid a collective mood of doubting official narratives.
Ministry – ‘Faith Collapsing’
According to longtime band associate and collaborator Bill Reiflin, Ministry’s Paul Barker and Reiflin used to watch movies together in the run-up to 1989’s The Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Taste, sampling any dialogue or line that caught their interest. Anyone familiar with Ministry’s run of mechanised industrial metal will know the disorientating layers of media samples saturating the racket behind frontman Al Jourgensen’s effects-ravaged growl, made possible by the battered Fairlight CMI sampler passed around the Wax Trax! Records crew during the label’s heyday.
Using audio from another dystopian classic, Fahrenheit 451, Ministry also grab from the film adaptation of 1984 its sinister Ingsoc propaganda announcements, the official state ideology and party line in the ‘Oceania’ Big Brother zone, and hammers in the brainwashing speeches to a clanging post-punk trip of acid bass grooves and programmed percussion. Fittingly forming a piece of the LP’s overarching theme of political corruption and state abuse, ‘Faith Collapsing’ exorcises 1984‘s bleak spirit at a somatic and viscerally gut-wrenching level over ponderous lyrical explanations.
David Bowie – ‘1984’
Not even two years after his glam archetype Ziggy Stardust had arrived on Earth, ‘cracked actor’ and restless artist David Bowie was already looking to new creative hinterlands. While still penning classic rock cuts like ‘Rebel, Rebel’, Bowie embraced the soul and funk that was storming the charts for 1974’s Diamond Dogs, a step toward musical theatre and exploring perennial Bowie themes of apocalyptic end times and grabbing a little of A Clockwork Orange‘s marauding street gangs with William Burroughs’ novel cut-up writing technique.
His eighth studio album was initially conceived as a rock opera adaptation of Nineteen Eighty-Four until Orwell’s widow Sonia shot down any such idea, ‘We Are the Dead’ and ‘Big Brother’ making its way into Bowie’s eventual conceptual compromise. Written as one of the conceived musical’s signature songs, ‘1984’ alludes to Smith’s interrogation at the hands of the cold and cynical O’Brien set to a disco dancefloor, Diamond Dogs‘ third single for America and Japan marked Bowie throwing a characteristically pitch-perfect aim for chart appeal and subversive thematic fodder.
