The rhythm of the tanks

Books A new book goes searching for insight in the iPods and rap lyrics of American soldiers in Iraq. Spencer Ackerman considers the limits of scholarly playlist analysis.

Private Larry Smith of San Fernando, California listens to music while waiting for a flight at Afghanistan's Bagram Air Base in April 2002.

A new book goes searching for insight in the iPods and rap lyrics of American soldiers in Iraq. Spencer Ackerman considers the limits of scholarly playlist analysis. Sound Targets: American Soldiers and Music in the Iraq War Jonathan Pieslak Indiana University Press Dh102 There was lag time between the battle briefing and the mission, actual, boring hurry-up-and-wait lag time: the Humvees had already been loaded with gear and the equipment already spot-checked. I figured a good way to fill it would be to talk about music. It was September, and I had spent the past few days embedded with this particular US Army cavalry troop, riding along on a midnight hunt for a weapons cache in the middle of a rain-starved Paktia Province farm, but I hadn't really broken the ice. So: what music did the first platoon of Alpha Cavalry Troop, 1-61 Cavalry, which called itself the Hooligans, like to listen to?

Fierce debate ensued. A consensus emerged that the only way to get a true representation of what the platoon really used to psych itself up before riding out into the middle of nowhere in Afghanistan was to stop by the combat outpost's gym at 2am and listen to the workout mix. With that caveat out of the way, a playlist emerged. Domino by Van Morrison - yes, Van Morrison - inspires men to battle. "The End" by the Doors was another favorite, discomforting Vietnam overtones aside. "Worlds Apart" by Journey. It took a while for anyone to mention the more expected aggressive chugga-chugga guitar stuff, like the American metal band Killswitch Engage; this platoon seemed to favor classic rock. No one contradicted the platoon sergeant when he endorsed Ram Jam's classic gibberish-rock version of Lead Belly's "Black Betty".

There's no reason why it ought to be surprising that a group of mostly-white soldiers in their 20s should have a soft spot for classic rock. That's what they grew up listening to on the radio in their parents' cars, for one thing. But what do their musical tastes tell us about these men? The idea that such preferences are a revealing fact of identity is a painfully overdetermined subject of study: not all that much follows from the fact that someone likes a certain band or a particular song. Some people go for the familiar when placed in front of the karaoke microphone. Others do the same when they find themselves in a strange country, under fire, asked to confront an enemy that isn't easily distinguished from the civilian population. Anyone who wants to understand a war is wasting time by looking at a soldier's iPod.

Jonathan Pieslak, an associate professor of music at the City University of New York, doesn't exactly make that mistake, but he takes an unfortunately academic approach to the question What Are Soldiers At War Listening To, burdening it with the weight of dense theory. Much of Sound Targets is a slog to get through - which is a shame, because buried inside is the kernel of an interesting book, particularly when he turns to explore the music that soldiers make, which is a truer expression of their perspective about the war than inference-heavy analysis of the music they enjoy.

Pieslak isn't interested in a polemic about either the Iraq war or the military more broadly. He writes that his method - interviewing soldiers by email about the role of music in their wartime routines - would have been compromised if his interlocutors perceived him to push a political agenda. My own experience suggests that he may have assumed too much. When soldiers asked me during my embeds what I thought about the Iraq or Afghanistan war, I found they preferred an honest answer to a diplomatic dodge.

But the bigger problem is that the book backs away from analysis in an attempt to remain dispassionate. Pieslak is right not to draw conclusions about the morality, necessity or wisdom of invading and occupying Iraq from a soldier's fondness for an aggressive and vulgar hip-hop song. iPod analysis, in the end, can offer a glimpse of - not a verdict on - how people handle a war. But he seems to back away, to avoid passing judgment, just when he should be digging in. Nowhere is that more apparent than when he discusses 4th25, a rap group composed of Iraq veterans, led by a musician named Neal Saunders, whose very disturbing songs about the Iraq war and the experience of the men fighting it beg for more study.

4th25 (pronounced Fourth Quarter) present themselves as an apotheosis of gangster rap's obsession with gritty reality. (In truth, this subgenre of rap music is especially theatrical, but leave that aside for a moment.) Saunders flaunts his contempt for other rappers - they call themselves tough, but they haven't been hardened in combat. Pieslak cleverly calls 4th25's music "(anti)gangster rap": it employs many of the same tropes - "the survival of the fittest attitude, in which death and violence are portrayed as essential components of survival and attitudes of rebellion against repressed forces... revenge as a way to honor the dead," - but turns them against so-called "studio gangsters". The band haven't got a recording contract yet, but Saunders is convinced this is because their music is so real it would explode the pretensions of gangster rap and lead to the collapse of the entire industry: "As soon as one soldier makes it, he just made it harder for everybody else, you know, to tell the same story - the same I sell drugs on the corner s***, and I shoot people with my 45 and that crap."

There's a salient undercurrent here that has less to do with gangster rap than the unequal burdens of military service: one consequence of the US military's post-Vietnam transition to a volunteer army has been the narrowing of combat experience to a small, self-selecting cohort, which has helped spawn a mutual distrust between soldiers and civilians. Saunders' bitter attitude to the music industry is congruous with those sentiments - though perhaps 4th25 don't have a record deal because they present first-hand accounts of war that most people aren't prepared to hear, like when they rap about IEDs being placed inside animal carcasses. In a song called "24 Hours", Iraqis are portrayed as deceitful predators, who exploit the reluctance of American troops to avoid committing war crimes: 4th25 vents by imagining a single day when they could occupy Iraq without any such restrictions. What would happen?

"Light 'em up 'til they talk, if they won't talk, f*** 'em/ They too will change, when you kill enough of 'em... F*** all what's around, nothing's collateral." By the standards of most rap or heavy metal, the lyrics and imagery of "24 Hours" are standard fare, and even tame, but there is little precedent for the success of a rapper who fantasies about murdering an entire civilian population. What makes the song most disturbing is that its author really was presiding over the fates of those Iraqis he regards with evident disgust. The lyrics makes it seem as if his comrades share his impulses, and are itching to act on them.

It would be a mistake to take a song like "24 Hours" literally, Saunders' protestations of authenticity notwithstanding. But that doesn't mean the ugly implications should be left unexplored. Lots of soldiers have made music, or written poetry, that expresses their regrets over the heavy-handed or ignorant treatment meted out to Iraqis and Afghans: In one poem, "Haddock of Mass Destruction," posted at warpoetry.co.uk, a British Iraq veteran named Danny Martin writes bitterly, "We cut his cuffs, and his wife's/ And left them to their ruined stock/ I should demand commission/ From the Taliban/ For every recruit I've converted to their flock."

It means something, in other words, that Saunders would rap about killing civilians. It doesn't mean that the military is full of predators, but it does provide insight into what a command environment breeds when it doesn't emphasise protecting a population. Saunders returned from Iraq before General David Petraeus instructed his troops that their primary mission was to safeguard the Iraqi people from the insurgency, a clear order to draw the difficult, murky distinction between combatant and civilian that Saunders' verse on "24 Hours" explicitly collapses.

Another noteworthy relic of that pre-Petraeus era is an old YouTube clip of a Marine in Anbar Province strumming an acoustic guitar and singing a song he wrote called "Hajji Girl". ("Hajji," for the unfamiliar, is a widespread and derogatory military term for Iraqis and other Arabs.) The story of "Hajji Girl" goes like this: the narrator, like a Marine Joey Ramone, falls in love with an Iraqi girl who works at the Burger King on his base, but she lures him back to her parents' house, where her insurgent brother and father are waiting to attack. So he uses her little sister as a human shield and kills the whole family. Message: "They shoulda known they were f***ing with a Marine." The chorus, "durka durka Mohammed jihad,"appropriates the way the movie Team America: World Police parodies Arabic. It's a disgusting song, all the more so because the video contains the approving laughter of the songwriter's fellow Marines.

Indeed, "Hajji Girl" caused a minor incident, long since forgotten. The YouTube clip was sufficiently embarrassing to prompt a brief investigation by the Marines that quickly exonerated the songwriter, Cpl Josh Belile. Conservatives in the blogosphere, like Michelle Malkin and Little Green Footballs, defended Belile against what they called political correctness gone wild. Liberals largely ignored the incident, although the Council on American-Islamic Relations denounced the song. As a moment in the American culture wars, "Hajji Girl" came and went.

That's telling. One of the reasons that the American public is willing to support the continued dispatch of troops to war is the sense that those deployments are ultimately beneficial to the populations of Iraq and Afghanistan: songs like "24 Hours" and "Hajji Girl" undermine that support. It's noteworthy, therefore, that since Petraeus defined the protection of Iraqi civilians as the central responsibility of US troops, songs like these have dwindled from public view, if they're even being written.

Spencer Ackerman is a senior reporter at the Washington Independent, where he covers national security.