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The “Volunteers of America” in Both the Past and the Present: A Song Analysis

Rose Harmon
The Rise to Fame
Published in
10 min readJan 18, 2021

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A Song Analysis of Jefferson Airplane’s Song, “Volunteers.”

Photo Credit: Amazon.com

Author’s Note:

The following essay is something that I turned into my English teacher for my last assignment of the fall semester. I am working on a Lynyrd Skynyrd article at the moment but will not finish for a few more days, and I want to have something posted for last week. I hope you like it.

The “Volunteers of America” in Both the Past and the Present

“Volunteers,” one of Jefferson Airplane’s most infamous songs, was released during an era of revolutionized thinking (the 1960s) when counterculture, war, and movements were all simultaneously waging across America.
Released in 1969 under “the band’s fifth studio album,” (“Volunteers (Bonus Track Version)”) the tenth song, named after the album where it appears, Volunteers, includes powerful political messages within its lyrics, discussing the controversial decade of the 1960s.

Marty Balin described the song best when he was talking about his inspirations for the song. He states that one morning, he was awakened by a Volunteers of America truck making loud noises outside his house while taking away the band’s trash (Greene). Even though this actually occurred and is not just metaphorical, it is symbolic of the noise that the two sides of America made during the 1960s, whether this represents the clash between the Hawks and Doves, Hippies and Fundamentalists, or Democrats and Republicans.

War is a recurring event in human history, but war is not defined as just physical acts of violence, but also conflict between ideologies. Throughout “Volunteers,” Jefferson Airplane recognizes the battling ideas circulating the United States during the 1960s through their lyrics. The division that they sing about still applies today, only, in new forms.

The song begins by relaying the wishes of the reformists (typically younger people) in the 1960s in lines one through nine, showing the birth of the counterculture movement. Jefferson Airplane writes, “One generation got old/One generation got soul” (“Volunteers by Jefferson” 7–8). Cultural revolutions decide how people should work, learn, and relax, and the 1960s was a period of reform, which those who wanted to honor traditional American values protested against. For instance, one trend during the 1960s was the hippy lifestyle. “Some moved to communes, away from the turbulence that had come to define everyday life in the 1960s” (Onion). This was not amusing to the traditionalists.

The entire song is expressed in a back and forth dance between the two groups of people, as you can note in lines ten through twelve that the older generation is speaking. Airplane writes, “Pick up the cry/ it’s time for you and me/ got a revolution” (“Volunteers by Jefferson” 10–11).
The fundamentalists (typically the older generation) saw it as their duty to lead the volatile and vulnerable youth out of their hippy culture. This also shows that divisiveness has always existed- that an Us versus Them scenario will always erupt. In the 1960s, an American had to pick a side: black or white, democracy or communism, democrat or republican, or in this case, traditionalist or reformist.

As the Black Lives Matter movement, the 2020 election, and different ideas about who deserves healthcare in the United States circulate our nation, it could not be more evident that these same ideas are the ones that Americans have been fighting over for decades.

It is clear that America has always been divided; common examples are in the 1960s, but a new topic has surfaced now, and two groups have become opposed to one another- large tech companies and the public.

“Volunteers” includes the line “Hey, I’m dancing down the streets,” (“Volunteers by Jefferson” 3). The quote relates to the protests that have been raging through the United States, spreading the words of the Black Lives Matter movement that is a different hashtag with the same goals as the Civil Rights movement. The George Floyd video and the Black Lives Matter movement is largely online.

Although there are still protests, people are posting and sharing their words instead of going out into the streets. People are retreating into their phones, working to change issues by posting and sharing (Rosenblatt). NBCN writes, “Over the summer, social media was awash with different forms of protest.” (Rosenblatt). They discuss how movements have been transferred online from the streets, and the different forms of social media activism.

Another line that speaks to both the 1960s and the 2010s is “Who will take it from you, we will, and who are we?” (“Volunteers by Jefferson” 15). The line could be interpreted, in today’s terms, as large tech companies competing for your attention- they will take away your time, and people are not even aware of this ongoing problem, or who the problem is.

Cyberculture, a term coined by Fred Turner, is when people turn “away from political action and toward technology…as the primary sources of social change” (Turner). Counterculture is not just an idea of the 1960s, it mimics the same revival of the Civil Rights Movement in the form of the Black Lives Matter Movement.This cultural revolution is the type of change as counterculture, only, it is called cyberculture. A different hashtag, same conflict.

As technology has advanced, this leads to a problem that both the 1960s and modern day America share- fake news. “We live in a world where attention is power,” P.W. Singer says, “and not just online power, but real-world power” (Deutch). In The Social Delima, a Netflix documentary, it is described how the more time a person spends on their phone or electronic device in certain apps, the more that a company is paid because of the advertisements that that person sees (Harris). Essentially, “one of the main goals is to command people’s attention.” (Deutch) This is achieved through “fake news..often written sensationally and captures readers’ interest” (Goethe).

As modern electronics have skillfully woven themselves into human lives, America can’t tell who the enemy is and can’t see who is causing many of the problems that the average person faces. At the end of the “Volunteers” song, the voices between the traditionalists and reformists are muddled and are almost indistinguishable when the lines, “Got a revolution (got to revolution)” and “We are volunteers of America (volunteers of America)” (“Jefferson Airplane” 21, 28) are sang.

Fake news is often intertwined with real news to keep people reading and active on their apps. In the 1960s, fake news was a crime of the government, now, it’s both a political and media tactic. At the beginning of the song, the protest starts with “Look what’s happening out on the streets” (“Jefferson Airplane” 1). This could be interpreted as the media trying to catch a glimpse of the many movements happening at the time.

The Vietnam War was a fight for democracy between Vietnam and America (1954–75), ending with the defeat of the United States (Campbell 178). “Vietnam is considered the “first television war”” (Goethe) and because of this, the public started to recognize the misinformation that the government was spreading- something that was unprecedented at the time.

Journalists and photojournalists, such as Malcome Wilde Brown, were in Vietnam watching the war unfold much like the journalists of today would. Brown was walking the streets of Saigon when he came across a protest in which he witnessed a monk setting himself on fire to show the South Vietnamese president his disdain of the current violence in his country (Shepherd).

This photograph shocked the American public because the war looked far from over and more damaging than previously thought. This snippet of information was a small clue that the United States was not winning the war, which they had previously been told by the government that they were.
Fake news is an ever growing problem today because even though false news stories have always existed, the average person now had the freedom to write what they want and simply click a button for the rest of the world to see, whether the information they are spreading is false or true. Social media specifically contributes to this problem.

The Pentagon Papers (“Pentagon Papers”) are some of the most prominent documents of the twentieth century for reporting the gruesome status of the Vietnam War, and revealed that America was never going to win the war, there was never hope that they would, and that men were dying to save the reputation of only a handful of politicians. Before this, the American public had been generally trusting of what the media and the government told them.

This instance of fake news is similar to the investigation into Donald Trump because of his alleged connection to Russia’s interference in the 2016 United States election (“Trump Denies Collusion after Senate Report Finds Evidence of Russia’s 2016 Election Interference”). Ever since the most recent violation of potential interference in America’s 2020 election, the public has become even more desensitized to fake news, as they are tired of this recurring problem. However, this is also allowing fake news to become normalized.
But although many said they were opposed to the war, including famous icons such as Joan Baez, a singer and political activist (“Joan Baez’’), and Daniel Berrigan, an American writer and anti war activist (“Daniel Berrigan”), few knew what the real effects of the Vietnam War had on the soldiers returning home in 1975, the year of the war’s end. Surprisingly, some of these effects can also be caused by the very screens that humans use on a daily basis.
Online Addiction, a book about the dangers and side effects of too much screen time, reports that some of the symptoms of online addiction are “chronic fatigue, little sleep…anxiety, [and] irritability” (Parks 18).

The symptoms of someone experiencing Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (or PTSD) are “insomnia, irritability, [and] anger,” (Thomas 14) which are disturbingly similar to the effects of copious amounts of screentime.
As many soldiers returned to their home from Vietnam, many carried the lingering effects of the war, most commonly, PTSD.

Jefferson Airplane’s “Volunteers” song carries a happy-go-lucky tone, with its song’s fast drum beats and loud voices. However, these emotions were the opposite of what soldiers returning home from Vietnam were feeling.
According to a survey, fifteen percent of soldiers who returned from Vietnam have been reported to have or have had PTSD (“How Common Is PTSD in Veterans”).

But as a technological revolution is moving throughout the United States, so is mental illness in teens.

According to another survey, in modern times, “20 percent of all teens experience depression before they reach adulthood…Between 10 to 15 percent suffer from symptoms at any one time” (“Why Today’s Teens Are More Depressed than Ever”).

The reason for this large percent of teenagers experiencing mental illness can be traced back to not only screens, but more “specifically to social media” (“Why Today’s Teens Are More Depressed than Ever”).

Although there is little evidence that mental illness was at high rates in the 1960s, there have been many reports on the levels of PTSD, and the symptomes are very closely related to those of today.

“Volunteers’’ also states “Hey, come on now we’re marching to the sea,” which could be interpreted as a way of talking about self demise, continuing to do something even though a person knows that it is bad for them. In the 1960s, many soldiers returning home were not welcomed with open arms because of the controversy over the war, which led to them not seeking health for many problems such as mental illness and drug addictions.

In the modern era, many are reluctant to seek help for screen addiction because they don’t want to lose their electronic devices.

In conclusion, time can only change a person’s perspective on an issue even though some factors of human existence never change: Cultural revolutions will always spark, fake news and the corruption of large companies will always linger, and mental health will always be an issue.

The time between the 1960s and the 2010s has resulted in technological advancements and progress in human ideology, and it is important to notice the good parts of humanity, but to also recognize the darker side of our existence that America’s constant divide has wrought upon its people in both the past and the present.

Works Cited

Photo Credit: Pinterest
Volunteering
Volunteers Of America
Jefferson Airplane
America
Rock Music

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Rose Harmon
The Rise to Fame

Written by Rose Harmon

23 Followers

Life is too short to be updating my Medium bio.

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