thedrifter
07-29-06, 07:39 AM
I want my ATV
ROBERT EVERETT-GREEN
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
Corporal Henry Guevara had a little down-time in Iraq, so he called his brother Marines together and they shot some video for his rap song, Semper Fi. The blotchy footage, as posted on YouTube.com, shows MC Hank Gee and the others striking aggressive poses familiar from many other rap videos, with one big difference: The guns they're toting have been used on the field of war.
Soldiers used to write home from the front. Now they post videos, and since they grew up on MTV, their footage is often set to music.
Some make their own music, attempting to comment on the war or to provide “a ‘moto' [motivational] song to get the blood pumping and do what U.S. Marines are trained to do,” as Guevara said in an e-mail. Many more soldiers shoot first and find suitable music later, cutting and editing their work to mimic the pace and thematic coherence of what they've seen so often on MTV. Sometimes they even superimpose the song credits in a lower corner of the screen, just like on the regular music networks.
Vietnam was the first television war, and since it was filmed largely by professional journalists, its natural media template was the news report or documentary. The models for the videos pouring out of Iraq come from the entertainment industry. Music videos, Hollywood movies and computer war games are shaping the presentation of the conflict by those who have seen it through their own gun-sights. The unwritten rule for the new soldier-videographer seems to be: If you have to kill someone, you may as well do it to music.
“This is what people join the Marine Corps to do,” an unidentified soldier says, as a pulsing red flash speeds up like an accelerating heartbeat. “You might be in the Marine Corps for 20 years and never get this chance again, to take down a full-fledged city full of insurgents.”
That's from the introductory voice-over to Doing It My Way, another YouTube posting put together from footage shot during the 2004 assault on Fallujah. The imagery shows Marines suiting up for battle, running down streets and bursting into houses, guns firing or at the ready.
Bombs detonate at appropriate points in Seether's Out of My Way, a hard-driving rock song that comes with a history of “moto” swagger: It was the entrance music for former pro-wrestling star Zach Gowen. The video closes with a pall of smoke drifting over the city, and a written dedication to the fallen.
Doing It My Way sums up the multiple needs these videos seem to serve among the soldiers who post them. They show the public a front-line view of the war, shore up pride in doing a dangerous job, and memorialize those who left the field in a bag or on a stretcher.
Watching these episodes of mayhem with music, you might be reminded of the scene in Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now in which a helicopter gunship raids a Vietnamese village to Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries. But the base-camp chroniclers of the Iraqi apocalypse prefer rock, the heavier the better. Bon Jovi's Blaze of Glory, Breaking Benjamin's Blow Me Away or Dope's Take Your Best Shot are among the tunes whose pounding beats and pointed titles are now backing up shots of soldiers raiding houses and firing heavy artillery. One British video on YouTube uses Green Day's Wake Me Up When September Ends, “which was the theme to our tour.” In this case, and probably others, the music seemed right for the video because it's what the troops had in heavy rotation.
Song titles and lyrics count for a lot in these videos, because the words of favourite musicians often serve as the soldiers' only form of comment on the action. Whatever John Deacon had in mind when he wrote Queen's Another One Bites the Dust, there are a lot of troops in the desert who know just what to do with a line like, “Out of the doorway the bullets rip, repeating the sound of the beat.” More than a decade after the last great public debate about the relationship of violent lyrics to violent action (remember Frank Zappa taking on Tipper Gore?), the Marines are firmly on Gore's side.
The degree of violence shown depends on where you find the video. YouTube forbids videos that show “graphic violence,” which seems to mean that clips of cities being shelled are okay as long as you don't see bodies flying apart. Ogrish.com is open to the grisliest shots available, from Iraq or anywhere. But some soldiers decide to keep the dead out of the picture, either on their own or after receiving comments from their viewers.
“I was advised to take out all the stuff with people being killed and injured,” writes one British soldier, “which I think worked better in the final cut.” The notion of multiple cuts (some videos show up on YouTube in several versions) is a clue as to how carefully this apparently raw imagery from the front has been edited. Another is the appearance, in several unrelated videos, of the same spectacular kills. These have usually been taken from official footage released to the conventional media, and mixed in with original video by troops on the ground. Militaryvideos.net offers a download tab for all of its posted videos, which makes it easy to sample other people's imagery and remix it with one's own.
Some soldiers share their footage with others who have the editing skills they lack. Grouchymedia.com offers dozens of military music videos made by a non-soldier who started only with what he could find through Google, but now works mostly “with material people personally sent in for me to use.”
Visually, the subjective camera rules, in part because some troops mount their cameras on their helmets. The most frequently seen shot in these videos is the view down a deserted road through the windshield of a speeding Hummer, trying (sometimes unsuccessfully) to avoid hitting roadside bombs.
The subjective camera is also a favourite of war-game makers, whose latest efforts resemble an idealized version of the music videos found on YouTube. Kuma\War, a free Web-based game series, focuses on real events in the Iraq war, bringing new episodes on-line every month. The latest, The Death of al-Zarqawi, appeared less than three weeks after the al-Qaeda leader was killed. Kuma\War's games cut past all the routine soldiering right to the pivotal incident, with subjective camera action, visible enemy kills and (of course) appropriate music.
Computer war games have been around for decades, which means that they, like Hollywood and MTV, have helped set the terms of engagement with the new military music videos. It's not hard to understand the frustration of the soldier MC who, in a base-camp video for his rap song Live from Iraq, yells “This is not a movie!” (he might just as well have said “This is not GameCube!”). The “real thing” has arrived on our computer screens in a way that seems to mirror the pretend thing, which chez Kuma\War is becoming more real every month. To further complete the circle, MTV recently ran a feature about the new war videos, some of which have shown up on its on-line affiliate, iFilm.com.
The Pentagon all but outlawed unofficial coverage of the first Iraq war, but has so far developed no policy to control videos made in the field by its own troops and distributed on-line. Doing It My Way was even shot and edited by a Marine combat correspondent, whose day job is to report on the war for the military's own internal media (the Canadian military has similar correspondents, whose videos from Afghanistan, including at least one with a heavy rock soundtrack, are stored at www.combatcamera.forces.gc.ca).
Perhaps the Pentagon hasn't noticed the Internet's open window on the Iraq war. More likely, it has decided that most of the videos on YouTube will do more to help the military's business in Iraq than to hinder it.
Anti-war videos from the front are outnumbered by awe-filled tributes to the Gatling gun or the Marine Corps, and the rare flares of dissent often convey their orientation solely by their music.
For instance, the imagery of Mosul Rocks isn't much different from that of many other videos, but it reads differently when set to Black Sabbath's War Pigs (“Generals gathered in their masses, just like witches at black masses”).
Then there's Sopranos — Iraq Style, a video in which an otherwise stereotypical armoured vehicle ride is cut to mimic the opening sequence of The Sopranos, with that series' theme song, Woke Up This Morning by Alabama 3, as the score. It's not a protest video, unless you see it as a sly way of underscoring the way in which forms of popular culture are affecting and merging with supposedly unfiltered representations of combat.
It could be the most truthful video yet to emerge from the Iraq war.
Doing it my way
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDiEi-ydzt0
Semper Fi
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WnXRzlvtaE
Ellie
ROBERT EVERETT-GREEN
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
Corporal Henry Guevara had a little down-time in Iraq, so he called his brother Marines together and they shot some video for his rap song, Semper Fi. The blotchy footage, as posted on YouTube.com, shows MC Hank Gee and the others striking aggressive poses familiar from many other rap videos, with one big difference: The guns they're toting have been used on the field of war.
Soldiers used to write home from the front. Now they post videos, and since they grew up on MTV, their footage is often set to music.
Some make their own music, attempting to comment on the war or to provide “a ‘moto' [motivational] song to get the blood pumping and do what U.S. Marines are trained to do,” as Guevara said in an e-mail. Many more soldiers shoot first and find suitable music later, cutting and editing their work to mimic the pace and thematic coherence of what they've seen so often on MTV. Sometimes they even superimpose the song credits in a lower corner of the screen, just like on the regular music networks.
Vietnam was the first television war, and since it was filmed largely by professional journalists, its natural media template was the news report or documentary. The models for the videos pouring out of Iraq come from the entertainment industry. Music videos, Hollywood movies and computer war games are shaping the presentation of the conflict by those who have seen it through their own gun-sights. The unwritten rule for the new soldier-videographer seems to be: If you have to kill someone, you may as well do it to music.
“This is what people join the Marine Corps to do,” an unidentified soldier says, as a pulsing red flash speeds up like an accelerating heartbeat. “You might be in the Marine Corps for 20 years and never get this chance again, to take down a full-fledged city full of insurgents.”
That's from the introductory voice-over to Doing It My Way, another YouTube posting put together from footage shot during the 2004 assault on Fallujah. The imagery shows Marines suiting up for battle, running down streets and bursting into houses, guns firing or at the ready.
Bombs detonate at appropriate points in Seether's Out of My Way, a hard-driving rock song that comes with a history of “moto” swagger: It was the entrance music for former pro-wrestling star Zach Gowen. The video closes with a pall of smoke drifting over the city, and a written dedication to the fallen.
Doing It My Way sums up the multiple needs these videos seem to serve among the soldiers who post them. They show the public a front-line view of the war, shore up pride in doing a dangerous job, and memorialize those who left the field in a bag or on a stretcher.
Watching these episodes of mayhem with music, you might be reminded of the scene in Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now in which a helicopter gunship raids a Vietnamese village to Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries. But the base-camp chroniclers of the Iraqi apocalypse prefer rock, the heavier the better. Bon Jovi's Blaze of Glory, Breaking Benjamin's Blow Me Away or Dope's Take Your Best Shot are among the tunes whose pounding beats and pointed titles are now backing up shots of soldiers raiding houses and firing heavy artillery. One British video on YouTube uses Green Day's Wake Me Up When September Ends, “which was the theme to our tour.” In this case, and probably others, the music seemed right for the video because it's what the troops had in heavy rotation.
Song titles and lyrics count for a lot in these videos, because the words of favourite musicians often serve as the soldiers' only form of comment on the action. Whatever John Deacon had in mind when he wrote Queen's Another One Bites the Dust, there are a lot of troops in the desert who know just what to do with a line like, “Out of the doorway the bullets rip, repeating the sound of the beat.” More than a decade after the last great public debate about the relationship of violent lyrics to violent action (remember Frank Zappa taking on Tipper Gore?), the Marines are firmly on Gore's side.
The degree of violence shown depends on where you find the video. YouTube forbids videos that show “graphic violence,” which seems to mean that clips of cities being shelled are okay as long as you don't see bodies flying apart. Ogrish.com is open to the grisliest shots available, from Iraq or anywhere. But some soldiers decide to keep the dead out of the picture, either on their own or after receiving comments from their viewers.
“I was advised to take out all the stuff with people being killed and injured,” writes one British soldier, “which I think worked better in the final cut.” The notion of multiple cuts (some videos show up on YouTube in several versions) is a clue as to how carefully this apparently raw imagery from the front has been edited. Another is the appearance, in several unrelated videos, of the same spectacular kills. These have usually been taken from official footage released to the conventional media, and mixed in with original video by troops on the ground. Militaryvideos.net offers a download tab for all of its posted videos, which makes it easy to sample other people's imagery and remix it with one's own.
Some soldiers share their footage with others who have the editing skills they lack. Grouchymedia.com offers dozens of military music videos made by a non-soldier who started only with what he could find through Google, but now works mostly “with material people personally sent in for me to use.”
Visually, the subjective camera rules, in part because some troops mount their cameras on their helmets. The most frequently seen shot in these videos is the view down a deserted road through the windshield of a speeding Hummer, trying (sometimes unsuccessfully) to avoid hitting roadside bombs.
The subjective camera is also a favourite of war-game makers, whose latest efforts resemble an idealized version of the music videos found on YouTube. Kuma\War, a free Web-based game series, focuses on real events in the Iraq war, bringing new episodes on-line every month. The latest, The Death of al-Zarqawi, appeared less than three weeks after the al-Qaeda leader was killed. Kuma\War's games cut past all the routine soldiering right to the pivotal incident, with subjective camera action, visible enemy kills and (of course) appropriate music.
Computer war games have been around for decades, which means that they, like Hollywood and MTV, have helped set the terms of engagement with the new military music videos. It's not hard to understand the frustration of the soldier MC who, in a base-camp video for his rap song Live from Iraq, yells “This is not a movie!” (he might just as well have said “This is not GameCube!”). The “real thing” has arrived on our computer screens in a way that seems to mirror the pretend thing, which chez Kuma\War is becoming more real every month. To further complete the circle, MTV recently ran a feature about the new war videos, some of which have shown up on its on-line affiliate, iFilm.com.
The Pentagon all but outlawed unofficial coverage of the first Iraq war, but has so far developed no policy to control videos made in the field by its own troops and distributed on-line. Doing It My Way was even shot and edited by a Marine combat correspondent, whose day job is to report on the war for the military's own internal media (the Canadian military has similar correspondents, whose videos from Afghanistan, including at least one with a heavy rock soundtrack, are stored at www.combatcamera.forces.gc.ca).
Perhaps the Pentagon hasn't noticed the Internet's open window on the Iraq war. More likely, it has decided that most of the videos on YouTube will do more to help the military's business in Iraq than to hinder it.
Anti-war videos from the front are outnumbered by awe-filled tributes to the Gatling gun or the Marine Corps, and the rare flares of dissent often convey their orientation solely by their music.
For instance, the imagery of Mosul Rocks isn't much different from that of many other videos, but it reads differently when set to Black Sabbath's War Pigs (“Generals gathered in their masses, just like witches at black masses”).
Then there's Sopranos — Iraq Style, a video in which an otherwise stereotypical armoured vehicle ride is cut to mimic the opening sequence of The Sopranos, with that series' theme song, Woke Up This Morning by Alabama 3, as the score. It's not a protest video, unless you see it as a sly way of underscoring the way in which forms of popular culture are affecting and merging with supposedly unfiltered representations of combat.
It could be the most truthful video yet to emerge from the Iraq war.
Doing it my way
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDiEi-ydzt0
Semper Fi
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WnXRzlvtaE
Ellie