'these games you play, they're going to end in more tears someday' means that the more we experiment with so destructable weapons, the more destructable we wil become and will cause even more suffering. He then goes on to say that 'words cant describe the feeling in the way you lied' I believe 'the way you lied' refers to the fact that the war was more or less finished (already peace in Europe) and even though war was'nt officially over between America and Japan, it must have been a big surprise when war was probably thought to have finished. This also tells us that the narrator is telling this story of how he regrets the dropping of the bomb, straight after it he knows the actual effects, only the day after.
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'Enola Gay' was the name of the plane that dropped the bomb.įrom the start we know the narrator disagrees with the bomb dropped because he says 'Enola Gay, you should have stayed at home yesterday' and should'nt have gone out on the mission. Its about the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hirosima, Japan by America in 1945 and the wrongness of it. Song MeaningIt is well known what this song means. But the disconsolate lyrics and eerie tune of "Enola Gay" still evoke the anxiety, fear, and determination of that strange era.
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Many people living at the time truly believed that the Cold War would still be going on long after they were no longer alive - if the world was not destroyed first - yet because of "Enola Gay" and many other forms of popular expression that reminded people of these issues and gave them a way to articulate their fears (and hopes), popular movements around the world eventually forced a change of heart by political leaders.īy the early 1990s, America has begun extensive nuclear disarmament and Soviet Russia had completely collapsed.
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(The melancholy, bittersweet yet strangely kicky tune of the original song also expresses that feeling - for young people at the time a song that they could dance to in the shadow of their own impending destruction seemed perfectly appropriate.) In many places throughout popular culture, not just song lyrics,īut in saying, "It shouldn't ever have to end this way," the song is also making a tacit plea to change the direction of world events, challenging just a tiny bit the idea that nuclear destruction was completely inevitable. The motif of the clock stopped at 8:15, the indelible kiss (of the heat flash from the bomb blast), and the call of "conditions normal," all reference that sense of history frozen on the precipice of armageddon. The song looks back almost wistfully to the point in history when that state of existence was brought into being. The song is even more specific - it is about living in the 1980s under the shadow of Cold War fears of atomic war and nuclear annihilation, which many people at the time viewed as inevitable given the way world events seemed to be going. The other posters who point out the obvious reference to the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima ("Little Boy"), and the evocation of the imagery of a mother and her child as an ironic metaphor for the relationship between the bomber and the bomb, are all correct. General CommentThe Cold War was the subject of many 80s synthpop songs, among which "Enola Gay" is one of the best known.