Wars can be times of tremendous creativity. Look at all the things they’ve given us. Nuclear weapons, napalm, those ready to eat meals that you can buy in camping shops. So you might have thought that the years the British Army has spent winning Iraqi and Afghan hearts and minds would give us some memorable cultural products. Maybe an admixture of modern electronica and rhythms evoking the pummelling of an Afghan village or a musical recreation of some prisoners being kicked to death. The truth is if you’ve been looking for artistic production that says something about modern war and pushes the boundaries of contemporary music it’s been a dry period.

Actually it’s worse than a dry period. It’s a hideous musical and ideological regression. A serving sergeant, sergeant-major and lance corporal have released an album which has gone platinum in the British charts. The one thing less imaginative than their name “The Soldiers” is their material. They’ve eschewed soundscapes featuring samples of helicopter gunships blasting wedding parties for tripe like He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother by The Hollies, and Eric Clapton’s teeth-gratingly horrendous Tears In Heaven. Speaking of their choice of material Sgt Maddocks said: “They’re feel-good songs that you’d associate with the guys in the army.” There is a fine example of two clauses that don’t really fit in the same sentence.

There is a torrent of this stuff at the moment. Another example is We Will Remember Them by United Artists. Its press release says it’s “an ensemble of more than 200 stars including Michael Bolton, Mica Paris, Robin Gibb and Atomic Kitten singers Natasha Hamilton and Liz McClarnon.” If Dante were writing today he would reserve that torture for the deepest circles of Hell and only impose it once every thousand years. As with The Soldiers’ album the money will go to the Royal British Legion and the Help For Heroes charity.

Also adding to the flux is a reworked version of what one leading music pundit described as “We’ll meet a f*cking gain”, presumably the Prodigy remix of Vera Lynn’s only known song. Then there’s the Christmas release of the theme from The Great Escape by a British Army band.

Is there anyone willing to take a musical stand against this deluge of musical jingoism, some cutting edge young musician who surveys the world and wants to rage? Does Roger Taylor from Queen count?

He has released what he describes as a “protest song” called The Unblinking Eye (Everything Is Broken).

Here’s an extract from his description of it.  On first, second and third reading it seems to be a cut and paste job from UKIP, The Morning Star and The Daily Mail:

In case you hadn’t noticed.
The high street is full of holes.
We are fighting a pointless actively negative war which is killing our young soldiers and which we simply cannot afford.
This war promotes and prolongs terrorism.
This is our Vietnam. Unwinnable. Pointless.
We are taxed and retaxed while the nation is not only broke but utterly bankrupt, being propped up with tax payers money and money which is simply printed.
…As a nation we own almost nothing including “our” water, electricity, gas, airspace and major manufacturers.

If we are kind we can call this “inchoate” in its sense of imperfectly formed or developed.

The big ideological regression is that every mainstream criticism of the imperialist wars has to be prefaced with effusive praise for those conducting them and utter silence on the matter of the civilians who are doing most of the dying. But I think we can also link the musical sterility with the low level of both anti-imperialist and class consciousness. Admittedly Mullah Omar is not likely to stir the spirit of any leftward leaning radical youth or musician who hadn’t been banged over the head with a shovel a few times. But the one thing this river of bilge has in common is its lack of empathy with the victims of imperialist war and its active support for the organisations creating the victims. Few things are more tedious than someone droning on about the olden days but a comparison is useful because of the indication it gives of political consciousness on some sort of mass level. At a time when some of the most publicly reviled men and women in the British media were Irish Republican prisoners there was always a handful of bands willing to do overtly political songs and perform at explicitly anti-imperialist and radical events without feeling the need to express their admiration for the men of the Parachute Regiment. It’s hard to imagine that happening today because that understanding of imperialism is so much weaker and because there is a rupture between music and political mass movements.

(BTW – I’m a bit vague about what a clusterf*ck is but it was used a lot in Generation Kill to describe a lot of bad things happening at once and we’ll stick to that definition.)