The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #163185 Message #3890115
Posted By: Jack Campin
24-Nov-17 - 09:31 AM
Thread Name: Songs about conflict from other side
Subject: RE: Songs about conflict from other side
There are a shitload of Turkish songs about losing WW1 - hours of nonstop gloom. Would that do?
A great instrumental tune about a total and almost forgotten military catastrophe is the Swedish "Karolinermarschen". The sixteenth-century song "Italia mia" (done by a lot of Renaissance music groups) seems to have been written to mark the annihilation of Italy as a nation-state in the invasion of the 1520s.
There are some very fine laments for Che Guevara - "Hasta siempre" from Latin America and "Guevara mat" from a North African Arab composer (that one will be a bastard to play if you don't know the idiom).
I posted here on the centenary of the Battle of Gorizia - there were three sides involved and arguably all of them lost. (The Slovenians definitely lost, with their city blasted to rubble, but their song isn't as interesting as the Italian and Hungarian ones).
Sometimes more indirect statements are made. One of the most popular songs among Palestinians is Fairuz's "Nassam alayna al-Hawa", but it isn't about military defeat, it's non-specifically about the nostalgia of exile (and wasn't even by a Palestinian).