This song goes nowhere, reciting the details of human inconveniences and miseries without any promise of ending them. Yet for all its gloom, "Life During Wartime" was a hit for Talking Heads, their biggest to date--proof that for the listening public (and the dancing public, which also latched onto this song), war had become a fashionable subject.

"Life During Wartime" set the pattern for the whole new generation of war songs: no protest but a whimper, no hope but many prayers. With the fatalism of a musical form that matured while protesting one war and lives today to witness the conception of another, rock and roll waits for World War III supine, recumbent. It's as though, faced with ICBMs and oil embargoes, musicians are starting at their electric guitars and drum kits and shaking their heads, paralyzed and powerless.

After "Life During Wartime," different artists picked up the now-successful theme. But the concern with war reached an obsessive pitch only with this fall's album releases--records that went into production last winter and spring, as Zbigniew Brzezinski posed in the Khyber Pass and American helicopters crashed in the sands around Tabaz. Some examples:

* Beat Crazy, Joe Jackson. Here's an example of how a basically middle-of-the-road, modestly talented songwriter picked up on the martial atmosphere in his recording studio. None of Jackson's new songs actually depicts war scenes, but tank-treads grind throughout the album. From the title track:

Kids today--they're all the same...

And if the Russians ever come

They'll all be beating bongo drums

So who'll defend--in World War III

Where could we turn--where would they be?

Tongue-in-check, yes, but still eerie to hear from the throat of a pop singer.

* More Specials, The Specials. The keynote of the new Specials album, framing it at start and finish, is their cover and reprise of an old song titled, "Enjoy Yourself--It's Later Than You Think." If that melancholy note wasn't enough, their "Man from C & A" spells the point out plainly: it opens with a shout of "Warning, Warning, Nuclear Attack," and its simple ska beat is punctuated with machine-gun fire and high explosives.

The Mickey Mouse bunch told the Ayatollah at his feet

You'll drink your oil you shmuck, we'll eat our heads of wheat

But I'm the man in grey, I'm just the man at C & A

And I don't have a say in the wargames that they play