Support Our Troops OH! (Black Angels OH!)

I feel that it is juvenile to prescribe something as "attention grabbing waste." Artists of this kind think their words through a lot, and it is extremely disrespectful to describe it as "attention grabbing waste" when it's obviously deeply personal just like 100% of his other songs.

jamie said in an interview that he had watched or heard footage of soldiers in iraq pumping themselves up for thier "missions" in a "let's go blow some fucking heads off" kind of way. this resembles what jocks do before a game (mission).

and really is it not blatantly obvious that a very very very large percentage of soldiers were most likely ex-jocks.

i think they carry that brutally competitive, win at any cost, attitude with them to war.

taught to win. winning being the most important mission for them.

that dynamic of their personalities is what jamie, i believe, is refering to. and there is nothing childish about that. it is legitamate.

and regarding his brutal description of the four year old girl's death...its just a very crude but true depiction of situations that iraqi families have been put in.

"please sir, can i take her body home"

HM: "Support Our Troops": on it, you say, "Why should I care if you get killed?" in reference to the troops. Do you really mean that? Is that a serious statement? Is that your personal stance, even towards people who might be good people, but have been misled into something unhealthy?

JS: See, I don't really…That's obviously a really difficult statement to justify, but obviously within the context of what people have chosen to do with their lives, it's a little bit difficult to think of it in other terms sometimes. Not all the time, but certainly sometimes. I don't think that people who have joined the military have been misled about what their job in the military is. The job of the military, clearly, is to kill people for imperialistic, corporate government. I feel entirely differently about people who were involved in the Vietnam era because there was the draft and people were forced to do it, but now it's totally voluntary, and people are choosing to become assassins and killers for the government. The song is based on an article where a journalist followed a Special Forces troop into Baghdad, and the troop just talked constantly about how much they wanted to kill people, and how they were hired killers, and they were really into it. And they were completely unapologetic about it and not thinking about the political context at all, or about the repercussions of what they were doing, both to themselves and to the families of the people that they were blowing up. Now, one thing that people have brought up to me that I didn't think about at the time that I was writing the song is: what about the people who are living in total destitution and they just don't have any other options? And, that's not something that I had thought about. Sometimes I think that can be a valid case, but on the other hand, how destitute do you have to be to become a murderer? I'm sure that's not people's motivation, but that's what the point of the military is, and the fact that that is a possibility for someone joining the military isn't a mystery. Bearing that in mind, I feel almost entirely unsympathetic for people who are middle class who decide to join the military. If you want to be of service to your country, join AmeriCorps, or something like that. I just cannot abide… It's inexplicable to me that someone would want to do that with their life. So, when I say, "Why should I care if you get killed?" I'm asking that question clearly. I'm not completely dismissing the idea of why somebody should care…

it's a very brave statement to release a song like this. God2005 is right, no one openly critizises the actual troops anymore, so for jamie to do this, he is making a bold move. i think he's adressing one person in particular, but this person has affected his veiw on all the soldiers.

..what...the ...fuck.

I have to say that a high school style rant about jocks is really out of place in a serious antiwar song. It's as though he considers being a jock to be a tragedy on par with the grisly death of the four year old he describes. Whatever magazine you read that called it a childish thing to say: i agree.

Jamie Stewart mentioned in an interview I saw that Fabulous Muscles was the first album his family members listened to and they were quiet upset about a few of the songs. Id say this is one of the songs that they didnt like. Probably about a relative.

I think its more a personal attack before an anti-war song.

to me, jamie begins to address (in a way) his view of the war. about halfway through the song, he seems to get more personal, as if he is targeting this song to one specific person. perhaps he knew a boy in high school who only did things for recognition, and now, in jamies eyes, he enlisted for the same reason. a few magazines have said that the line "Cuz you're a jock who was too stupid and too greedy And too unmotivated to do anything else but still be The biggest" is childish, but i feel that it just shows us that jamie is using the war issue to let his feelings out about people who will do things, even if they arent enthusiastic about them, just to get their name known.

this has to be the most anti war song ever.

I think Jamie is just using this topic of the war and the unquestionable infallibility of the troops to get even further under our skin. The War is irrelevant -- Jamie just wants to fuck with us.