The Unsung Singer - Phil Ochs

http://www.google.com/search?q=%22white+boots+marching+in+a+yellow+land%22&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~trent/ochs/lyrics/white-boots.html

In my opinion, folk singer Phil Ochs was one of the most articulate voices of the anti-Vietnam war movement. Of course, Bob Dylan was a staunch civil rights advocate and Ochs’ rival, but he abandoned his activist lyrics for those of surrealist rock and roll. I and many others are glad he did. However, Ochs’ loyalty to social and political justice resonates with me more than any other singer of the times.
While “Blowing in the Wind” and “The Times They are A-Changing” were emblematic of the evolving social discourse and an era of self-awareness, Phil Ochs’ songs and lyrics were often overlooked due to Dylan and other popular artists of the time.
Ochs’s 1968 song “White Boots Marching in a Yellow Land” unleashes a flood of images critical of America’s presence in Vietnam. It’s this inability to see nothing but vivid pictures of Ochs’ words that makes this song my favorite and his writing utterly moving.
Ochs doesn’t pull punches. His lyrics are angry and accusatory but concealed behind a veil of a major key chord progression. The song itself is an anti-hymn meant to ironically sound like a military theme march with trumpets blaring and snare drums rolling through the chorus.
The lyrics paint America as being the ethnocentric and untarnished “white boots” marching in the uncivilized “yellow land” of foreign soil. The use of yellow emphasizes bigoted ideology that color is significant and uses the derogatory nickname for Asian skin color as a symbol of ignorance. The line “The colors of a civil war are louder than commands” suggests that civil wars, both foreign and domestic are often struggles over racial supremacy.
Part of the irony of the song is its lyrical composition from the perspective of “America,” the “White boots.” The lyrics “It's written in the ashes of the village towns we burn/ It's written in the empty bed of the fathers unreturned” is laden with guilt and anger felt by Ochs for the bloody history written by his own country.
The most powerful part of the song comes in the last verse, where Orchs suggests that the politicians, “the comic and the beauty queen…dancing on the stage” have indoctrinated the minds of the recruits who “line[ed] up like coffins in a cage” to serve. In Ochs eyes, the mindset of the anti-communist, capitalist political agenda fueled the “fighting in a war we lost before the war began.”
Protest songs are composed of line after line of argument, some blatant, others subtle; some symbolic, others metaphorical. Ochs’ anger towards the war machine bred constant accusations he embodied in his song in the accessible manner of a simple sounding folksong.