Comments on: Metallica in Helmand

By: Cisco E4200

Cisco E4200 — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 09:02:53 +0000

Thats an all around amazingly written post!

By: vimothy

vimothy — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 17:51:23 +0000

Iced Earth suck.

Props for quoting Dismember though!

By: UNRR

UNRR — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 14:51:57 +0000

This post has been linked for the HOT5 Daily 2/21/2010, at The Unreligious Right

By: Jack

Jack — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 11:52:06 +0000

It’s a good read, but I can’t help but feel it is limited by selecting one genre. Punk and hip-hop might not have much on the “military history” theme, but there’s plenty of disturbing lyrics and commentary on war. The Dead Kennedys recorded Holiday in Cambodia prior to Maiden’s success and the rise of the nwobhm bands and thrash metal genre. Incidentally, he cited “Wargasm” in his article which also happens to be the title of a mid 80s punk compilation.

By: Kenneth Payne

Kenneth Payne — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 09:38:12 +0000

You boys can keep your death metal – I’m with Leonard, Emmanuel and Anna:

‘When they poured across the border, I was cautioned to surrender, this I could not do’….

By: Samir Puri

Samir Puri — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 08:30:51 +0000

Thanks Thomas for the kind words. I’m glad people found it of interest! (For the record, I wrote this article as a distraction from writing painful PhD chapters…)

And finally, ‘One’ by Metallica rocks, doesn’t it?

By: Starbuck

Starbuck — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 00:42:15 +0000

This, uh, guy I know told me that one unit’s flight operations section at a base in Iraq would actually have a secure, frequency-hopping channel which blared music which pilots could listen to on their secure FM radios. Inevitably, this, uh, guy told me, the radio would be blasting Nirvana.

By: ArmitageShanks

ArmitageShanks — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 00:20:00 +0000

According to Patrick Hennessey’s The Junior Officer’s Reading Club it seems that they were by no means restricted to metal.

The music they chose to play whilst in ops in Afghanistan seemed to be a fairly major consideration..

By: Alma

Alma — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 23:04:55 +0000

Good point, David. I wonder however what sort of war would go with Serge Gainsbourg’s famous reggae version of La Marseillaise:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLq7EcvRaf0

Maybe it would work better for law enforcement than war? Boosting the morale of Gendarmes engaged in counter-narcotics operations in the Caribbean?

By: Alma

Alma — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 22:50:27 +0000

Thanks for flagging a very interesting (and enjoyable) piece of inter-disciplinary scholarship! This reminds me of a short article published in the New Yorker last Summer on the work of Jonathan Pieslak on “the role of music in military recruiting, combat, interrogations, and morale” in Iraq, with a particular focus on… the death-metal band Slayer.

One excerpt: “listening to heavy metal, with its double-pedal bass drums and tremolo-style guitars, Pieslak writes, is a good way to prepare mentally for a mission, because it “sounds considerably like the consistent discharge of bullets fired from an automatic gun.””

The article can be found at:
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2009/06/29/090629ta_talk_collins

And Pieslak’s book was published by Indiana University Press last year:
http://www.amazon.com/Sound-Targets-American-Soldiers-Music/dp/0253220874/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1266619522&sr=8-1