Now who the hell are these federal pricks?
Hiding in the senate like a bloated ass tick
Air conditioned fuckstick loafers
Sittin in a room full of army posters
Day and night have been beaten thin as tin by the hammer of the bulletin, and the Republic lives now by interruption: sirens, chants, the cracked loudspeaker, the bright wound of the smartphone screen. Grief is scarcely granted the dignity of silence before it is numbered, argued over, folded into the next alarm. In the streets, the people carry both fury and fatigue; in the cells and under official hands, the vulnerable are made to pay in blood. We go on half-awake, half-shattered, learning the bitter modern labour of keeping one heart open while history tramples past it.
Massive Attack’s Boots on the Ground, their new collaboration with Tom Waits, arrives with the sort of timing that makes one suspicious of history’s sense of rhythm. It is the Bristol group’s first new music since 2020, and Waits’s first new recording since 2011’s Bad As Me.
Massive Attack have long understood pressure, how to make atmosphere feel civic as well as emotional, and here they build a setting less like a stage than a zone of occupation. Waits enters that terrain with a voice that remains one of the great weather systems in American music: corroded, amused, biblical, faintly obscene. His presence changes the song’s temperature. When he sings of men yielding themselves to “The Masters of War,” the Dylan phrase lands like a judgement that has outlived every administration that might have preferred to treat it as period language. The track’s force lies partly in its patience. It advances with the grim logic of machinery already in motion, a procession of grief for the violent death of the Great Society.
The lyrics turn war into a grotesque pageant of lust, obedience, class contempt, and mechanical slaughter. Soldiers are rendered as expendable bodies, crude instruments for distant men in comfort, while patriotism curdles into butchery. By the end, ideology has burned away, leaving only death, debris, and the remnants of uniform. This is Tom Waits at his finest.
Waits, characteristically, frames the release with mordant clarity: “One day many years ago, I accepted an invitation from Massive Attack to collaborate. Their long release delay never worried me. Today, as in all of mankind’s yesterdays, guarantees this type of song will never go out of style. Man’s folly of fiascos is a feast for the flies. Hence, the B side of Massive Attack’s upcoming 12-inch The Fly features my appreciation for the winged nuisance.”
The accompanying film, made by Massive Attack with American photographer thefinaleye, gives the single its historical field. The montage draws on footage and research connected to protests against ICE raids, the militarization of domestic force, and state authoritarianism, citing organizations including the A.C.L.U., the American Immigration Council, and FactCheck.org. In another artist’s hands, such apparatus might have hardened into homework. Here it sharpens the song’s moral contour. It is a chilling look at what we hath wrought.
Watch below:
Boots on the Ground is a grounding spiritual of sorts, when the modern state of society prefers spectacle, repetition, and fatigue. Massive Attack and Waits answer with a dirge for the public square, and with a warning delivered in a voice rough enough to sound like the nation’s conscience.
Massive Attack is embracing an eco-conscious vinyl pressing and packaging process for this record to leave a smaller carbon footprint. This ‘EcoSonic’ edition will be 180g vinyl in red, white and blue. Pre-order it HERE.
Viewers seeking further information or wishing to take action are encouraged to visit:
The ACLU
Veterans Aid
Immigrant Defense Project
Freedom For Immigrants
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The post “A Feast for the Flies” — Tom Waits Joins Forces with Massive Attack for Protest Song “Boots on the Ground” appeared first on Post-Punk.com.