The First Great Protest Song of the Decade
New single alert! I had heard a rumor today that Massive Attack was going to release a single with Tom Waits on vocals. Less than 24 hours later, it’s here! It’s called “Boots on the Ground.”
Tom Waits is known for his impossibly gravelly voice. But combined with moody trip-hop and aggressively anti-war and anti-administration lyrics, Waits’s unmistakable voice becomes a weapon of epic proportions.
If anything, the sheer lack of meaningful and popular protest music at this juncture in American history, when things are near as bad as they’ve ever been, has been one of the greatest shocks of my life. The Bush Era had Green Day’s American Idiot, Madonna’s American Life, P!nk & Indigo Girls’s “Dear Mr. President,” Radiohead’s Hail to the Thief, and songs by Eminem, the Chicks, and System of a Down. The Vietnam era created an entire oeuvre of generational stars. But right now? There are a handful of rap songs plus some by the likes of Bruce Springsteen and Demi Lovato, which are great, but none have been very popular or well-known.
Well, I think the wait might be over. This song will, or at least should, spread like wildfire. It is excellent. But more than its musical quality, its lyrics are vicious and biting. It feels good. It feels cathartic. It feels like fighting back. It feels like it’s going to piss off some high-profile “government officials.” It’s not an anti-military song; it is a fuck-this-fucking-war song. It is pleading: get out of Iran now, you motherfuckers. Except it’s way more poetic than that. It mentions no names (except Jimmy Hoffa and Satan), no places, and no details. But you will feel this song in your bones. Tom Waits’s voice echoes through your hollow bones. It somehow sounds more desperate and pleading than it ever has.
Although Tricky hasn’t been a member of Massive Attack for many years, his influence is clear on this song. Unsettling chords, minor fifths, and offbeat drums feature throughout. My educated guess is that this was all done very intentionally, to very effectively create a sense of unease and disharmony.
Disharmony is necessary for a song like this. You are supposed to feel uncomfortable listening to an anti-war song in the middle of a very dangerous and illegal war.
Fuck Trump, fuck all his idiot cronies, divest from Israel and make Netanyahu a pariah, free Palestine, and Lebanon, and Iran, abolish ICE and all other militarized police forces, and listen to this song.
P.S. Sorry, I forgot to write about world music yesterday. I’ll resume Worldwide Wednesdays next week.