Music of the Day, 15 July 2023
... and the killing carried on
My son was exposed to my eclectic musical tastes in utero. Once he was older and able to understand music a bit, he began to resonate with the harder side of my collection; Black Sabbath and Judas Priest were early and enduring favorites, and later, we both added Avenged Sevenfold to our collections.
He very generously repaid the favor of that early music exposure by introducing me to Sabaton. The Swedish heavy metal band focuses on history—and war in particular—which is another of my son’s enduring passions. As the war in Ukraine continues, I find my thoughts turning to Sabaton’s music more frequently.
With the Ukrainian counteroffensive under way, the song “The Price of a Mile” from Sabaton’s The Art of War album came to mind. As the album title suggests, it’s built around Sun Tzu’s military work of the same name. “The Price of a Mile” focuses on the WWI Battle of Passchendaele, which began in July 1917.
If you’ve not heard Sabaton before, get ready to be impressed. Lead vocalist Joakim Brodén has an impressive set of pipes that can easily range from straightforward singing to the growling so popular in today’s metal. Although the band has had a number of guitarists over the years, the sound has stayed steady—to my ear, a welcome callback to the virtuosic shredding of the 1980s. From their ballads to the heaviest of rock, Sabaton’s sound deeply satisfies both my son and me.
It isn’t currently “mud season” in Ukraine, but for me the song still relates well to the senseless destruction of lives and land, all due to one man’s vainglorious effort to recreate a history that never really was. I’m not a Ukraine scholar by any means, but the bits of regional history I picked up while studying the Russian language clearly identified Kyiv as an important population center long before Moscow existed.
I’ve been fortunate enough to have traveled to several former Soviet-bloc nations, and to talk with many university students who wanted and were willing to work for greater political and economic liberty. While I didn’t get to Ukraine, several Ukrainian students were among those I met in Lithuania, along with many Belarusians. (Belarus is a Communist dictatorship under Lukashenko, and back then it was exceedingly difficult for Belarusians to travel to Western countries… and for Americans to travel to Belarus. Even under better conditions around 20 years ago, it was rather harrowing to enter the country.)
Those eager, energetic students are now approaching middle age. All of their lives have been thrown into uncertainty with the onset of this war, but none more so than the Ukrainians. It’s been hard to get word of their status, even though I do know a couple of people with deeper connections to Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, and Russia. Some of the former students are known to have died early on; others have worked to support the Ukrainian military in whatever way they can.
It’s a truism that “today is different, and tomorrow’s the same”1; but it’s hard to know how much difference there might be from one day to the next. Under war, there’s even less ability to predict the course of one’s future. Russia’s attack created a fork in the path of so many lives… one that cannot be retraced to explore a different branch. I hope that for those who survive the war, their futures will be gentler than these days are.
Слава Україні.
From Rush’s song “Open Secrets,” from the 1987 album Hold Your Fire