Massive Attack’s “Boots on the Ground” doesn’t do much, but it casts a long shadow. Listen even once and you may find its unvarying loops cycling unbidden through your mind, hours afterward—as, say, you stand numbly under the shower or sit blank-eyed at a stoplight: that stumbling trash-can beat, those brooding piano chords, and Tom Waits, sounding more haggard and unhinged than ever, croaking out the song’s titular refrain. Interspersed with that mantra-like phrase, he offers fragmentary visions from the front lines of America’s forever wars as glimpsed through the night-vision goggles of the nation’s jackbooted shock troops: “I kill a brown man I never-ass knew/Choked on spit and then he turned blue.” Waits is one of popular music’s great interpreters of hard-luck characters, but we’ve never heard him play a role like this.
“Boots on the Ground” is a cyclical song about cycles of violence, and part of its genius is the way it collapses multiple theaters of war into one ignominious battle scene, a spiritual blast crater big enough to swallow the whole nation. The Marines manning helicopter gunships in the opening verse, like something out of Black Hawk Down or Apocalypse Now, might also be the cops killing George Floyd. The song’s video, a montage of protest footage by documentary photographer thefinaleye, drives home the connections between overseas wars, the violent repression of civil rights on the domestic front, and the homelessness and substance abuse that plague American soldiers after their tours of duty are done. The song also reminds us of the working-class identity of the military’s ranks—“We trim your hedges, we fight in your wars”—and the lack of respect with which they’re treated by Washington’s kleptocrats: “A soldier’s just clay/How much does every soldier weigh?/Cut you off at the ankles and throw you away.”
In its torpid pace and toe-scuffing repetition, “Boots on the Ground” is structured like a chain-gang chant, which feels appropriate: It’s a reminder of the ways that the modern carceral state, and thus the militarization of domestic law enforcement, are themselves outgrowths of slavery. With a title seemingly ripped from the mouths of the Republican Party’s most avid warmongers, “Boots on the Ground” is a grimly timely song—it could apply equally to Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, or even, why not, Greenland—but it’s also a reminder that the violence begins, and persists, right here at home.
