The People United Will Never Be Divided: Early 2000s Anti-War Protest Songs

Put down that can of Surge and take a trip down memory lane.

Songs: “Dirty Harry” by the Gorillaz, “Succexy” by Metric, “Square Dance” by Eminem, “Mass Destruction” by Faithless, and “Let Them Eat War” by Bad Religion

Most Boomers and Millennials alive today can recall what they were doing when the second plane hit the World Trade Center on 9/11. I was in tenth grade chemistry class in Northern Virginia, a couple miles from the CIA. We were told that the fourth plane could be coming for us and to get under the desks until our parents could pick us up early. My uncle Colin’s best friend, along with his little girls, were on the plane that crashed into the Pentagon. I vaguely remember two tiny dark-haired sprites in flouncy dresses and Mary Janes chasing each other around the kitchen table at a Christmas party. I’m naturally a pacifist but even my hippie flower-child ass wanted to bomb Afghanistan back into the Stone Age.

Little did we know they were already there.

Despite the inability of most Americans to find Afghanistan on a map, we cheerfully marched into Kabul in late 2001 as part of the Global War on Terror- a catchall term for anything the Bush administration didn’t like. There was general widespread support for revenge on the Taliban and al-Qaeda; a popular country song by Toby Keith claimed, “We’ll put a boot in your ass, it’s the American way.” Two years later, while our troops were still bogged down in rural Helmand Province behind sandbag forts, President Bush announced that we were also going to war with Iraq. Huh? Because they *might* have nukes? Because his war-hawk cabinet of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Karl Rove wanted to flex their nuts? Because Daddy had failed to take Big Bad Saddam out of power in the First Gulf War and now it was up to Junior?

The conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan dragged on for years, as a U.S.-led coalition tried futile attempts at “nation building.” At one point over two million Americans were deployed to the Middle East in some capacity or another. But as casualties (both military and civilian) began to mount, Operation Iraqi Freedom became staggeringly unpopular. Here are a few songs you probably blasted in your ’96 Ford Crown Victoria back in the day.

They’re just too weird not to love.

Gorillaz (a collaboration between comic illustrator Jamie Hewett, DJ Danger Mouse, and Blur’s Damon Albarn) railed against war in “Dirty Harry,” the third single from 2005's Demon Days. It features Bootie Brown from Pharcyde laying down some of the best verses of the decade.

“And I’m filled with guilt
From things that I’ve seen
Your water’s from a bottle
Mine’s from a canteen
At night I hear the shots
Ring so I’m a light sleeper
The cost of life
It seems to get cheaper
Out in the desert
With my street sweeper
The war is over
So said the speaker with the flight suit on
Maybe to him I’m just a pawn
So he can advance
Remember when I used to dance
Man, all I want to do is dance”

Brown refers to George Bush Jr. wearing a flight suit when he declared “Mission Accomplished” in 2003 during a televised speech aboard an aircraft carrier. (Not only was the war not over, but the vast majority of casualties occurred after this pronouncement and the U.S. wouldn’t fully pull out of Iraq until late in the Obama administration.)

Even mild-mannered Canadian indie bands objected to this conflict.

Toronto alternative band Metric was also heavily affected by the Iraq War, as they show on their single “Succexy”. “All we do is talk, sit, switch screens/As the homeland plans enemies/Invasion so succexy, so succexy.” Operation Enduring Freedom (Afghanistan) and Operation Iraqi Freedom were the first conflicts to heavily rely on new technologies like drones, laptops, cell phones, and social media; Metric frontwoman Emily Haines warns, “War as we know it is obsolete.”

Eminem, growing the fuck up.

Another musician to tackle the Iraq War was Eminem, in 2002’s The Eminem Show. We know him now as one of the eminent elder statesmen of rap, but before this album he was the bratty, offensive, resentful Slim Shady sticking nine-inch nails through his eyelids and ripping Pamela Lee’s tits off. In “Square Dance” he confronts the panic of a new era: “Yeah you laugh til your motherfuckin’ ass gets drafted/While you’re at band camp thinkin’ the draft can’t happen/Til you fuck around get an anthrax napkin. . . Fuckin’ assassins hijackin’, Amtraks crashin’/All this terror America demands action!”

It’s worth noting, as a historical footnote, that this was the best-selling album of 2002. It won a Grammy for best rap record and was named the top LP of the year by Blender, Muzik, and LAUNCH. The notoriously picky Pitchfork Magazine ranked it 9.1/10. Meaning, a lot of people listened to it. I first heard it as a 16-year-old drinking Coronas in my friend Anthony’s bed. And it’s stuck with me ever since.

Check these guys out. You won’t be disappointed.

Faithless aren’t as well-known in America as they are in the UK, which is a shame. This trio of fantastic electro-pop wizards have been around since 1995 but achieved their greatest success with 2004’s No Roots. “Mass Destruction” features a lead vocal from singer/producer Maxi Jazz, plus a skittering beat and layers of background harmony by multi-instrumentalists Sister Bliss and Rollo.

“Whether long range weapon or suicide bomber
A wicked mind is a weapon of mass destruction. . .
Whether inflation or globalization
Fear is a weapon of mass destruction. . .”

They even have the brass balls to call out the American defense and finance industries:

“Whether Halliburton, Enron or anyone
Greed is a weapon of mass destruction. . .”

I’m sure that made Dick Cheney’s pacemaker race.

I used to have nightmares about this war criminal hiding under my bed.

Which brings us to our last entry. Yes, I know there are probably other and better protest songs, but for the sake of keeping this article at a manageable length we’ll just look at a handful of better-known ones.

Veteran punk rockers Bad Religion released an album in 2004 called The Empire Strikes First which featured a single called “Let Them Eat War.” The lyrics go as such:

“From the force to the union shops/ The war economy is making new jobs
But the people who benefit most/Are breaking bread with their benevolent host
Who never stole from the rich to give to the poor
All he ever gave to them was a war/ And a foreign enemy to deplore
Let them eat war! Let them eat war! That’s how to ration the poor”

Which is about as straightforward anti-war as you can get.

“Sure, a costly foreign invasion with zero casus belli sounds like a great idea to us.”

As great as these songs are, they didn’t sway our government. We pulled out of Iraq in 2011 after a failed crack at convincing Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds to cheerfully bury the hatchet and form a Western-style democracy. By the time the last Blackhawk chopper departed, approximately 100,000 Iraqis had lost their lives in the conflict (although several studies place that number even higher). We stayed in what my military friends called “Asscrackistan” for even longer, leaving in 2014 after almost 2,500 American casualties (and the first-ever quadruple amputees).

So did any of it work? Yes, we removed the Taliban from power, but a retired Army colonel concluded that U.S. actions had given “warlordism, banditry and opium production a new lease on life.” Meanwhile Iraq’s government is about as sturdy as a Jenga tower you and your friends built after beer-bonging five Bud Lite tall boys each. We captured Saddam and killed Osama bin Laden- but at what cost? Your call.

Hey hey! Thanks for visiting- your presence is warmly welcomed. Please correct me if I accidentally got something wrong. If there are any songs, artists, or genres you’d love to learn more about, I’m always down for recommendations! This blog is free to read (and always will be) due to a fair amount of academic traffic, but you can always buy me a coffee (aka put a tip in my jar) if you enjoyed this article.