Heavily Armed Military is Necessary 

After a brief talk about the Nick Cannon opus Drumline at the airport the other day (how do you spend your Mondays?), I started thinking about the idea of militarism in music.  Drumlines hark back to the days of "genteel" rank-and-file warfare when the disciplined and clipped precision of group maneuevers  were a strategy of group control and a tactic of battlefield intimidation.  It's a technique that stretches back to the roman phalanx, a mass of individuals moving as one body, seeming to share the same mind.  The drum corps was a part of this psychological warfare (synchronized movements accompanied by the thunder of drums) and also a practical method of keeping people moving in lockstep.  

In these days of insurgent warfare, field maneuvers are relic of "civilized" battle, which are used more as way of indoctrinating recruits into the group mind.  Recall the first half of Full Metal Jacket where the young soldiers who will soon be running through the jungle are being drilled though obsolete about-faces.  However, on the domestic front, this style of battle is alive and well during protests and riots. Before an all-out melee happens to break out, police use the same intimidation tactics used by the warriors of yore: the massed phalanx moving as one.

Getting back to drums.  The aura surrounding them is naturally suited to the riot and the battlefield.  You beat the living shit out of them, the rhythm they create boils the blood, imitates the quickening pulse,  creates nerve jangling tension and release.  They were useful in battle for the same reasons they are useful on the dancefloor, and countless artists have used them to evoke the atmosphere of the warzone.  

For the purposes of this post however I'm interested in those who have used drums and rhythm produce military force for the purposes (intentional or not) of satire.  

Watch this performance by James Brown (with no less that two full-kit drummers) and remember that it was recorded a year after Dr. King's assassination. 

 

This was a time when anyone with a social conscience had the images of the southern civil rights protests and the Democratic Convention seared into their brains.  It was a time when "clean" crew-cut conservative reactionaries were pitted against the "unkempt" forces of progressive social change.  

James Brown and his band appear onstage like an army, even donning a weird sort of uniform somewhere between Judo master and Jedi knight.  The locked groove they beat out is more clean and  tight than a marine corps marching band.  On top of this unbelievably precise human-rhythm machine (many-as-one) The Godfather of Soul opens fire.  It all closes with the staccato bob-and-weave interplay between bandleader and saxophone in an breathless climax.  The martial sounds and images have been swallowed up into James Brown's spiritual-sexual ecstasy.  He has transformed the coup-de-grace into the petit mort. 

For an even more overt example of this same idea, listen to Zombie by Fela Kuti and the Africa 70.  Each instrument and voice interlocks in a head-spinning polyrhythm.  The percussion becomes fluid then shocks the listener when it abruptly halts with a thunderclap snare hit.   Fela steps up to the mic not as singer but as drill sergeant, leading his band through a cadence of military orders worthy of R. Lee Ermey.  The band follows with frightening discipline.  Fela Kuti continually  spoke and sung against the corrupt military government of his native Nigeria that raided his home, imprisoned him, and killed his mother.  Perhaps nowhere is his criticism of militarism more devastating than in Zombie.  The lyrics sardonically describe a soldier who has surrendered his will to his superiors, whose training has rendered him one of the "walking dead".  However, it is the percussive music itself that contains the most incendiary attack.  By reimagining his band as a paramilitary organization Kuti reveals their musical precision as a threatening artistic parody of military might.

Band as army.  Drums of war.