Tag: War songs

Hard to believe I’ve only written about music nine times since starting Time Now, but so it is the case. Honestly, there just doesn’t seem that many songs about Iraq and Afghanistan out there, although the list here names a few of which I wasn’t previously aware, and I’m sure there are others. Whatever, I enjoy writing about music and several of the posts below rank among my favorites. Some of them speak more personally of my own deployment than the typical Time Now post. The songs I loved were vitally important to me while I was in Afghanistan. I’m sure it was the same for most of the soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines with whom I deployed, and remained so in the jangled-up years after return.

Can You Take a Five Finger Death Punch? November 26, 2018. Artist featured: Five Finger Death Punch.

Two Songs, Ten Years: Music, Memories, and Going to War, October 6, 2018. Artists featured: Thao Nguyen, The Walkmen.

Khost, Afghanistan in the Western Musical Imagination, July 10, 2016. Artists featured: Three bands, each named “Khost.”

Where Have All the War Songs Gone? February 7, 2015. Artists featured: Old Crow Medicine Show, Jason Isbell, The Offspring, Josh Ritter.

Newsted’s Heavy Metal Tribute to Pat Tillman, January 3, 2014. Artist featured: Jason Newsted.

A War Music Sampler: Country, Folk, Hip-Hop, July 11, 2013. Artists featured: Jimmy Rose, Zac Charles, Jason Moon, Emily Yates, Chamillionaire, Soldier Hard.

Jason Everman, July 4, 2013. Artist featured: Jason Everman.

Daniel Somers, June 29, 2013. Artist featured: Daniel Somers.

Mike Doughty, June 22, 2013. Artists featured: Mike Doughty, Linkin Park, Adele.

A couple of nights before flying from Fort Riley, Kansas, to Afghanistan in August 2008, I saw the folk-rock artist Thao Nguyen and her band The Get Down Stay Down in a bar on Massachusetts Avenue in Lawrence, Kansas. I already knew Nguyen’s music a little, and a little about her biography, which interested me as much as her music. Raised in the Vietnamese immigrant neighborhoods that surrounded my parents’ house in northern Virginia, Nguyen in an early publicity shot appears wearing a jersey adorned with the logo of the “Arlington Cubs,” a sports club for whom my brothers and I played on countless baseball, basketball, and football teams in our youth. Later, Nguyen attended William and Mary college, which is a very good school but not one known for producing rock stars. By 2008, though, she had a couple of albums out and a hit—a girl-power anthem titled “Swimming Pools”—playing frequently on my local indie-alt station.

The pre-flight concert in Lawrence was just what the doctor ordered in terms of a night out before heading into the unknown. The Get Down Stay Down were tight-and-rocking, and all the songs, even the ones I didn’t know, were accessible and engaging. While singing, Nguyen appears possessed to the point of being spastic, and her voice sometimes hits atonal notes as if her Vietnamese were in contest with her English. It’s all good, though, and in-between songs, she charmed with funny anecdotes and quips delivered in the mid-Atlantic-coast tones and cadences I knew growing up. Before she went on, Nguyen ordered whiskey at the bar and watched the warm-up band play a couple of songs, and then wandered out to the sidewalk to hang with the smokers for a while. After the show, at the merch table, I don’t think I said anything to Nguyen about Afghanistan—I mean, I hope I didn’t, it would have been too obvious—but I do remember asking her where she went to high school. She told me she had attended Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology—a northern Virginia magnet-school for super-smarties. I thought about asking her if she had known the baseball coach, who was one of my best friends growing up, but that seemed kind of insipid. This inconsequential exchange brought our interaction to a close, save for my purchase of her second album, Like the Linen, which I listened to often on the long flight to Afghanistan and in the year that followed.

Like the Linen is good, but it was the album that Thao & The Get Down Stay Down released next that spoke to me personally. Called Know Better, Learn Faster, it’s the post-deployment record I’ve probably listened to more than any other, and certainly more often start-to-finish than any other. For me, it’s a unique swirl of appealing sound, beat, voice, and words, never more so than in the title song, whose chorus beguiles like a mantra reflecting something of my own sense of self-reproach, felt sharply in the two-to-three years just after deployment and only somewhat diminished now.

That first flight to Afghanistan was part of an Army-thing called a “Pre-Deployment Site Survey,” or, in words barely more comprehensible, a brief leaders’ reconnaissance of the area to which we would later bring our troops. In November 2008 I began the first leg of the journey that would take my advisor team and me to Afghanistan for a year. Catching a plane at LaGuardia in NYC back to Kansas I stood in the early-morning TSA line next to a scruffy dude whose mussed hair and road-worn attire proclaimed a rock-and-roll lifer. I don’t remember who started the conversation, but the guy was a gabby type who told me that he was the sound tech for a group called The Walkmen and he had come straight to the airport from a gig. I gulped, because The Walkmen, a band I already knew, play the kind of literate rock music that’s catnip to me—something like a combination of two other bands I like a lot, The Strokes and Interpol. Thanks to the slow-moving long line, we had plenty of time to talk and our conversation ranged wide-and-far. After I told him I was in the Army, he told me that he had grown up in Arlington, where his father had been a two-star Special Forces general at the Pentagon. Well damn, I thought then and now, and I suppose, since we exchanged emails and he still appears in my Facebook and LinkedIn feeds as a suggested contact, I could find out if he was pulling my leg or not. The Walkmen, I’ve since learned, are from DC, so maybe it checks out. Whatever, I like the story as is, especially since I enjoy The Walkmen’s music so much, and, like Thao Ngueyn and her band, they are bound to my memories of going to war. Below’s a good one by them. It’s my favorite kind of song, a fast-sad one, about friends, remembering, and fighting for things that are worth fighting for.

Literary historians tell us that during the Civil War, World War I, and World War II odes, ballads, and other popular and folk forms of expression related to the wars often appeared in newspapers, magazines, and other venues of wide-spread public dissemination. Though the offerings did not shy from describing battlefield death and destruction, they also paid homage to fallen heroes and attempted to galvanize patriotism and a spirit of sacrifice on the part of the nation’s citizenry. It was against such popular effusions, the historians claim, that more complex and brooding artists, such as Walt Whitman and Wilfred Owen, wrought artful takes on war that eventually made the popular war literature of their time appear simplistic, naïve, and old-fashioned.

By Vietnam, so goes this line of historical retrospective, the elevated literary tone and anti-war politics had practically driven popular styles and themes out of existence. Today, even a Hollywood commercial blockbuster such as American Sniper gussies itself up in the mannerisms of critique, rather than celebration, even if celebrating American war prowess is its (unstated) intent. One exception could be the realm of music, because music unabashedly makes plays on the hearts of listeners and thus might seek to channel the intense emotions generated by war in search of popularity. But even there the record is scant. As far as I can tell, popular hit radio has left the wars untouched. So too have modern or contemporary rock and the club, urban, and dance scene. Metal and punk I don’t know too much about, but country has more to show for itself, though flag-wavers such as Toby Keith’s “Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue” seem to be isolated cases that prove the rule rather than common fare.

All of which is funny, because music remains vitally important in the lived lives of soldiers at war. Every soldier since 2001 I’m thinking has gone to war with a playback device full of songs and their heads full of many more. I’ll bet there’s few, for example, who haven’t sung along to the Killers as they chant “I’ve got soul, but I’m not a soldier” and not thought about the implications for their own identities as fighting men and women. But as much as music shapes their actual lives, men and women in the military might listen long and hard for representations of war and soldiers.

And yet I have come today to praise war music, not bury it. Below is a sampler of songs from the popular idiom that illustrate that at least once-in-a-while our nation’s musicians have referenced Iraq and Afghanistan in ways old and sometimes new.

1.  Old Crow Medicine Show, “Levi.” Written in honor of Lieutenant Leevi Barnard, US Army, KIA in Iraq in 2009. OCMS can do no wrong, in my opinion, and the sight of these young Virginia men singing and playing their hearts out live makes me go mushy inside.

2.  Jason Isbell, “Dress Blues.” Written in honor of Corporal Matthew Conley, USMC, KIA in Iraq in 2006. Country-rock megastars Zac Brown Band have taken to covering this song, which is cool.

3.  The Offspring, “Hammerhead.” Nothing subtle about this, but if you think songs about post-war rage should be as aggressively loud as post-war rage itself, or if you just love punk-rock power-chording like I do, then the Offspring have you covered.

4.  Josh Ritter, “Girl in the War.” The lyrics are enigmatic and might be interpreted as other than a commentary on women on the battlefield, but why make it hard? The title alone suggests how the times-have-a-changed.

I’m sure there’s more out there, so if I’ve overlooked one of your favorites, send it to me, and if we ever meet, let’s listen to it together. Who knows how any of this works in the minds of impressionable young men and women? I’m old enough to have listened to both Bob Dylan’s “Blowing in the Wind” and Barry Sandler’s “The Ballad of the Green Berets” in the 1960s. I love Dylan way more than I do Sandler, but later I joined the Army and though I wasn’t Special Forces, I served alongside Green Berets in Afghanistan, so which artist ultimately had the most influence on me?

Marine Corps Iraq vet Jimmie Rose tore it up on America’s Got Talent the other night.  Pure country from the coalfields of Kentucky–“Four days after high school graduation, I went underground” he puts it–Rose sang a song that didn’t mention the war, but in the accompanying interview he related that he joined the Marines because it couldn’t possibly be more dangerous than work in the mines.  Here’s to him, for he’s got a charming “aw shucks” demeanor and a voice to die for.  His song, “Coal Keeps the Lights On,” won’t win any kudos from eco-warriors, but amply illustrates the perspective of a demographic that doesn’t have the luxury of picking-and-choosing its means of making a living.

Country is the music of choice for huge swaths of the American military and acoustic guitars by the thousands manage to survive the rigors of travel to help country-loving soldiers while away their deployments.  A good example is the following video by Zac Charles, filmed live from a FOB in Paktika Province, Afghanistan.  It’s called “Until I Get Home.”

Neither Rose’s nor Charles’ politics are confrontational, but other vets use their music to channel their misgivings about the war, express the pain of their service, and plea for the cause of wounded and damaged fellow soldiers.  A good example is Jason Moon’s “Trying to Find My Way Home”:

Some ex-soldiers put their military experience as far in the rear-view mirror as they possibly can.  The music they make betrays few traces of their past lives in the military and overseas.  Emily Yates, for example, after six years in the Army and two tours in Iraq, moved to San Francisco, hippy-fied herself, and now has filled up YouTube with music videos extolling the greatness of marijuana.  We’ll pass on those and post one that actually does have her looking back:  her rendition of the 3rd Infantry Division’s great fight song “Dogface Soldier,” done here in an anti-war mode:

After a lifetime of music listening, I can probably name five songs combined by Tupac, Biggie, Jay-Z, and Kanye.  That’s nothing to be proud of, but I don’t feel like I’m actually all that unknowing about hip-hop music and culture.  That’s because on all my deployments, I’ve been witness to many amazing freestyle spoken-word battles among young (mostly) black soldiers and played plenty of basketball in makeshift gyms with the throbbing beats and ominous lyrical flow of the inner city musical idiom blasting over the sound system.  An example of how hip-hop permeates the everyday life of deployed soldiers can be found in the video below.  Hip-hop artist Chamillionaire on a tour of Iraq invites Specialist “Rap” Myers to join him in an impromptu performance in a FOB gym or morale, welfare, and recreation center:

The ex-soldier I know of making the most determined effort to turn his deployment experience into a hip-hop career is Soldier Hard.  Here’s his most watched video on YouTube, “Combat Veteran.”

To all the soldiers who are also music-makers:  Don’t stop.