Literary Mixtape: David Means's soundtrack for reflecting on the Vietnam War

David Means shares the music that inspired his latest book – part Vietnam War novel, part reflection on the nature of memory. From the tunes soldiers listened to, to The National, here is his playlist

By David Means for Literary Mixtapes by Electric Literature, part of the Guardian Books Network

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Certain songs seem to be addressing the future while also casting an eye back into some deep, strange history; other songs – for me – seem to be about not only the soundscape but also the landscape around the song as it relates to time and history.

Hystopia, set in my home state, Michigan, is partly a Vietnam War novel, but it’s also about the nature of memory, of trying to reclaim memory. When I was researching the novel, I became interested not only in music from the era, which I grew up on and loved anyway, but on something else – a cultural feedback loop that formed during the Vietnam War. The troops in the field listened to music – The Doors, The Rolling Stones, James Brown – and heard, somehow, a response to the war they were fighting. Then when they got home, if they were lucky enough to go home quickly, when tours of duty were finished, without transition – via airline flights – some of them fed language and intensity back into the loop. There’s an interesting book, just published, called We Gotta Get out of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam Era, in which vets write about their musical experiences in Nam. One essay in the book was written by a friend of mine, Gerald McCarthy, whom I interviewed when I was researching. He’s also a character in the book. The playlist below is relatively arbitrary, songs that that seem – sometimes retroactively – to provide foreground, or perhaps background to the work, along with songs that somehow magically touch some aspect of the thing I created.

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