An exhibition from the archive
Even before it ended, the Vietnam War had become a word for something else: a war that could not be won, a quagmire, a lost generation, a massacre. Singers around the world used it as a yardstick for the events of their own time, and asked whether the next war would be “another Vietnam”.
This exhibition follows the comparison from the war years to the Gulf War: Ghana, Chile, Cuba and Northern Ireland; the Iranian hostages; Central America in the 1980s; and the desert in 1990. It is drawn from the collection Vietnam as Comparison.
Beyond the gallery
The collection gathers 127 songs and spoken-word recordings that use Vietnam as a point of comparison, from 1968 to the present: Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan, the My Lai Massacre as a byword for other massacres, and, in hip hop and metal, the city street as a war zone.
Explore the full collection →