Donald Trump fancies himself quite the DJ. Singing in the shower to The Village People's "YMCA". Or rocking in the free world with Kid Rock. Or getting teary eyed to Lee Greenwood's "God Bless the USA". Trump knows his way around a tune. Earlier this year, when the United States bombed nuclear sites in Iran, Trump posted Vince Vance & The Valiants' version of "Bomb Iran", a novelty song based off The Beach Boys' "Barbara Ann" along with footage of B-2 stealth bombers. "Bomb Iran" captures the laugh in the face of death nature of Ronald Reagan's America. It is well-known that Reagan liked to crack wise on bombing and nuclear annihilation. Funny stuff.
Written in the white heat of the Iranian Hostage Crisis and the early days of the Reagan administration, the record is good times American style. "Went to a mosque, gonna throw some rocks/Tell the Ayatollah, gonna put you in a box" Or "Ol' Uncle Sam's getting pretty hot/Time to turn Iran into a parking lot." Nothing funnier. Remember Curtis LeMay talking about bombing Vietnam back into the Stone Age? Hilarious. It seems the American public loves a good novelty song about war and mayhem. There were several versions of "Bomb Iran", but the Valiants' version proved the most popular. It reached number 101 on the Billboard charts in 1980. Such songs were a specialty of The Valiants. In 1981, they released "Nuke Iran" to the tune of Gene Chandler's "Duke of Earl". In 2005, Iraq got the Valiant treatment with "Yakety Yak (Bomb Iraq)". It is like Slim Pickens bull-riding the bomb in Dr. Strangelove.
From its release in 1980, "Bomb Iran" often finds itself back in the news in particularly stressful times. Rush Limbaugh featured a version "Bomb Iraq" during the Gulf War. In 2008, John McCain brought up the song during the presidential campaign in responding to a question about military action in Iran. In a video game war like that in the Gulf, industrial and techno music seems much more on point than The Beach Boys, but is that true?
"Bomb Iran" inspires deep thoughts. In the world of philosophy, Jean Baudrillard was considered something of a novelty song. Let's face it, like Slavoj Zizek, he was seen as a joke, not serious, a charlatan. Lou has always had a soft spot for Baudrillard. America is one of the great books of the eighties, a classic that captures the decade, like DeLillo's White Noise or Martin Amis' Money. Like with Jacques Derrida or Sigmund Freud, Lou considers Baudrillard something of a fiction writer. Like the Bible is literature. But what is literature, if not on one level, an expression of truth. A higher truth. A hyperreality. In the early 1990s, Baudrillard's The Gulf War Did Not Take Place was heavily criticized but it seems to Lou that Baudrillard's basic premise that war has become a mediated spectacle that spreads propagandistic imagery is hard to dismiss. A song like "Bomb Iran" serves as a soundtrack to the feel-good movie that war now is. The song's dismissal of mass destruction as fun parallels the video game nature of war, with airstrikes, missiles, and drones rather than directly engaged combat. War is fun, fun, fun.
In these troubled times, you might want a little levity, so Vinyl Vogue has a promo 45 copy of "Bomb Iran" from Paid Records to ease your troubled mind. If you can't cry you have to laugh. Sick joke, right?
Suggested Sites and Sounds:
That Reagan was a jokester: The Joke That Nearly Started World War 3 | Reagan’s 5-Minute Bombing Prank
Ride of the Valkyries: Apocalypse Now - Helicopter Attack- Kilgore
Ride of Slim Pickens: Dr Strangelove Major Kong Rides The Bomb 1080p
Lou Waxman