When it came time to hand in his final assignment for his seminar course, Historical Representations, Joel Bandy decided to sing its praises – quite literally.
Bandy, a student of classics, religion and history, wrote and recorded a song that encapsulated the Cold War era. They Call me the Fat Man interweaves imagery the proliferating atomic weaponry and the impact of the Gouzenko affair on the Canadian psyche with the then nascent rock and roll.
“One song by Fats Domino which was popular in 1949 was a song called The Fat Man, and it was the same year the Soviet Union detonated its first nuclear bomb,” said Bandy. “The “Fat Man” was the nickname for the Atomic bomb which fell on Nagasaki, so it was really a coincidence which inspired me.”
Bandy took a week and a half to write the five-stanza song, in his determination to capture the complexity of mass cultural and societal change brought about by the Cold War. He and a friend spent another five hours recording and mixing the final recording.
A class visit to the Diefenbunker – a fall-out shelter for government officials built at the height of the Cold War over fears of a nuclear attack, was pivotal for Bandy’s inspiration. The site houses a life-sized replica of the bomb, code-named Fat Man that was dropped on the Japanese village of Nagasaki in 1945.
“I wanted to criticize the record. Canada and the United States were very close during World War II and the Cold War; we supplied them with some of the components for the atomic bomb,” said Bandy. Yet, historical record reinforces the narrative of good and evil without examining the motives of those presenting the story, Bandy contends.
“The course really forced me to confront the blurred line between ‘bias’ and ‘perspective. It also forced me to consider alternative perspectives for interpretation, and take other sources for historical knowledge more seriously, such as art and music.”
By Nicole Findlay