Godsmack taken to task for military recruiting

it goes with whatever’s an extreme situation.

http://www.taquitos.net/dbimages13/Doritos-Extreme-ZSCC.jpg

When I was 18 I thought a draft would be a good idea.

The main reason I think/thought this is because there is a significantly large segment of the American population who is completely complacent about their status in this nation and mandatory service might instill more of a vested interest in participating in the civil side of living in this country but I haven't quite worked my way around the whole "stupid leaders putting us into stupid wars" thing yet.

or just continue being a snarky asshole, whichever works best for you.

hmm.

but still, i'm not understanding how restarting conscription would nec. kill the bill, seeing as how the g.i. bill was started when conscription was active and the first few rounds(i think) of WWII conscripts were coming home(1944 or so).

you can't even quote me properly. much less represent an opposing viewpoint accurately.

that's not what Godsmack does or says. did you even read the interview? have you even seen a recruiting commercial, been to a recruiting drive on a high school campus, etc.?

or is your tack some sorta meta-comment on misrepresenting people and their views...

ah the internet.

I never brought up the GI bill (you did), nor did I call it fascist.

"a politicized and conscripted military is totally the way to go again"

didn't say this either.

Please show me where I said these things. k thx bye.

actually a standing military is a fairly new development in america.

stence: automobiles and television are fairly new developments too. let's imagine a fantastic world without them too, a unicorn in every pot, etc.

J blount high fives respek knuckles all around for doing to fucking Shakey exactly what his brother did to whatsisface. Shakey you realize he comes off like an incorrigible little dipshit right?

well earned.

xpost no I worked with special needs children jon, wtf

I don't think I could ever feel good selling a song to the military, but where to draw the line is a toughy. You could argue that making cars look sexy is pretty bad too because oil is what's preoccupying most of our military resources and you're encouraging people to drive rather than take trains, bike, walk, live closer to work, etc.

okay, back to work.

okay back to work.

you stop an average person off the street and ask them to explain their feelings re: war in iraq (myself for example) and they'd probably be as incoherent. if you were as lame about it as shakey's brother then i'd hang up, too.

also i took money from the navy for two years to do environmental science. i guess i shouldn't have done that because paying for basic science is part of why the DOD enjoys grudging acceptance from lots of scientists?

they didn't invent or create that impulse and the futurists made this sort of art for free, what's your point?

UC (system) in bed with northrop grumman, lockheed, hughes and raytheon SHOCKAH!!!!!!!

Didn't their new album just debut at #1? I think I read that in the paper this morning - that's pretty good publicity!

I don't understand what you mean here

"and the futurists made this sort of art for free, what's your point?"

its a stupid and unhelpful aesthetic that serves no purpose other than to encourage the murder of other people and as such shouldn't be propagated or emulated towards that end.

Is being stupid/ignorant a get-out-of-jail-free card?

That said, the Godsmack dude came up with some alarming lines that made me think "if enough people think like that, no wonder Bush keeps winning etc" HIs whole "if it wasnt for our miltary Saddam etc would be all over us now" as if that was ever thre issue.

But this smacked of a Fox news O'Reilly badgering.

It also reminds me, granted slightly less, of Move-On's "YOU GO CALL THIS SENATOR RIGHT THIS INSTANT... NOW.. OR YOU'LL BE SKROOOOOOD" e-mail strategy. I had to filter them out. I can't blame them for it, because it is indeed better than doing nothing.

So many militaristic analogies being used by the left in an article written by someone on the left criticizing the military... just seems so immediately transparent. JB was pretty much role-playing a drill sargeant in this article, to some degree.

The success of right-ist strategies, especially in the religious right, depends on leaders to "gather the troops", if you will, and the supporters are ready, willing, and able to go out to this building and protest the use of rubber protects being put around penises to prevent reproduction, people who like to intimately touch people of the same sex, or whatever.

Others, generally, don't like to be badgered or "gathered" in such a way.. libertarians, leftists, or what have you.

Anyway, back to Godsmack...

But that's just me. And I'm not american, so there's surely a lot I'm missing.

Would it have been different if he hadn't recorded the call and never told anybody about it?

Having one's cards laid out when the other doesn't, being really good at interrupting, etc. seem to have worked for O'Reilly and other right-wing talk show hosts, though. Jay did a great job of that here. So, in this last sense, yes it is. Your attempt above to grossly re-word and generalize one's point above isn't though... it's used by both left and right.

Would it have been different if he hadn't recorded the call and never told anybody about it?

Of course. There would be less Godmack fans online willing to have something to unite over.

Had he been more subtle and less focused on this one thing he seemingly wanted to embarrass the Godsmack dude about, then this could have been a more more pleasant and interesting article that wouldn't have just invited more pointless political polarization.

I wasn't asking for a banal NPR style.. You can be confrontational and still not be insulting to your interview subject, even if the subject isn't too bright. Hell, Howard Stern is far less badgering in comparison to Jay, in this example.

Basically, if Jay took a more Stern approach, in strategy and wit, I probably would have not only saved this article, but make it an absolute classic.

As I wasn't in the room when the interview took place, I have no idea what the interview truly was like. And I'm not accusing Jay of fabricating anything. There are many journalist tricks one can play in a Q&A type interview, though, which are ethically sound. Whether one was used in this instance (maybe the ALL CAPS thing?), or one SHOULD have been used, or both.. well, outside Shakey, Jay, some folks at Arthur maybe, and the Godsmack dude, we'll never know.

no comparison is ever 100% accurate but this is a fair one, I think

Just so long as we're clear that you're Tough On Fascism. What's a little free speech between happy anti-fascists amirite?

Regarding the nature of the questions: it was determined by what's unique about this band, which is their public pro-military, pro-war stance and the extent of their involvement with US military recruiting campaigns. They've spoken about this stuff in public before, so there was no reason for me to think that they wouldn't be willing to speak about it again. Thus, the interview.

After Sully hung up on me, I called back. The band's publicist, Ken Phillips, told me that Sully had emerged from the room shouting at the top of his lungs, and he wasn't sure if he could get him back on the phone with me so that we could talk about the album, Wicca, karma -- all interests of Sully's -- that I had hoped to explore. Two days later I was told by Phillips that there would be no further interviewing and the band would rather the feature not run.

Why?

Who knows? Perhaps it's the way Sully charachterizes people who join the military as guys who want to jump out of helicopters and shoot people and use infrared goggles. That doesn't really jibe well with them being "brave souls" or honorable freedom-prtoecting people, does it?

Perhaps it has to do with Sully's attitude towards the Navy's recruiting efforts. Essentially he is saying that the Navy wasted their money by licensing Godsmack music for their advertisements, since the music has no influence/impact -- none, zero -- on the viewers.

And so on.

I suppose to a degree it's like shooting fish in a barrel, but... lives are on the line. People need to be held accountable. I've been trying to interview this band since 2003. I finally got my chance. It's stimulated a ton of discussion -- check out blabbermouth.net's various thread, or the number of blogs and rock news sites that are now picking this up -- and it's embarassed the band into silence on the issue, which is better than the jingoism they'd been spouting previously.

Finally: these guys are millionaires. They're using their music to help recruit poor, under-educated, foolish, impressionable kids into the military at a time of worthless, pointless war, the consequences of which we -- all of us -- will be feeling for the rest of our lives. Fuck them.

Oh, it didn't harsh my mellow at all. It did seem to give you a "shouty" demeanor though, which I wasn't sure was intended or not. And apologies for not noticing the audio link before.

Regarding the nature of the questions: it was determined by what's unique about this band, which is their public pro-military, pro-war stance and the extent of their involvement with US military recruiting campaigns. They've spoken about this stuff in public before, so there was no reason for me to think that they wouldn't be willing to speak about it again. Thus, the interview.

OK, maybe it's just me... but I really could give a shit about Godsmack. I had no idea they were still around, and if so, were doing stuff like this (whether one thinks it's OK or not.) Had there been more of a preview of Godsmack's shenanigans mentioned in the header to this interview, the perspective on the interview itself would have been quite different --- for me, at least. Sure, their album debuted at #1, but that doesn't mean even most MTV fans know a single thing about them, much less Arthur readers. Since the band were going to end up not wanting this article to run anyway, it wouldn't have made a difference to add a monologue about Godsmack's use of their point in career to cash in for the cause of military recruiting. I doubt Arthur readers are Godsmack fans, or may know all that much about their shenanigans other than hearing that they were involved in it. Some cold detailing about it would have been interesting to read. Again, whether one agrees it's ok or not for Godsmack to do this is irrelevant. Presenting the context objectively would have done the job just fine. Besides -- even outside Arthur readership, the amount of people who support the Iraq war is dismally low right now anyway, so being objective wouldn't have hurt your agenda to stick to to Sully at all.

After Sully hung up on me, I called back. The band's publicist, Ken Phillips, told me that Sully had emerged from the room shouting at the top of his lungs, and he wasn't sure if he could get him back on the phone with me so that we could talk about the album, Wicca, karma -- all interests of Sully's -- that I had hoped to explore. Two days later I was told by Phillips that there would be no further interviewing and the band would rather the feature not run.

Why?

Who knows? Perhaps it's the way Sully charachterizes people who join the military as guys who want to jump out of helicopters and shoot people and use infrared goggles. That doesn't really jibe well with them being "brave souls" or honorable freedom-prtoecting people, does it?

Perhaps it has to do with Sully's attitude towards the Navy's recruiting efforts. Essentially he is saying that the Navy wasted their money by licensing Godsmack music for their advertisements, since the music has no influence/impact -- none, zero -- on the viewers.

And so on.

Why didn't you (perhaps after some rephrasing here and there of course) put this in the header of the article? Again, this would have been GREAT to read. Again, people knew you had an agenda in the article anyway. Why not be explicit about it in the header?

I suppose to a degree it's like shooting fish in a barrel, but... lives are on the line. People need to be held accountable. I've been trying to interview this band since 2003. I finally got my chance. It's stimulated a ton of discussion -- check out blabbermouth.net's various thread, or the number of blogs and rock news sites that are now picking this up -- and it's embarassed the band into silence on the issue, which is better than the jingoism they'd been spouting previously.

Finally: these guys are millionaires. They're using their music to help recruit poor, under-educated, foolish, impressionable kids into the military at a time of worthless, pointless war, the consequences of which we -- all of us -- will be feeling for the rest of our lives. Fuck them.

Well, you certainly sounded like something who let go of a three year old anxiety in one blast. If that was your only goal, you accomplished it. Well done. As for what I learned from the article -- in total:

a) Sully isn't too bright
b) You should work for Move On

x-post

ha.

A bunch of copies of Sully Erna's autobiography fell on my foot when I was browsing at Borders yesterday. A little kid laughed at me.

http://inverse.physics.berkeley.edu/archives/nelson.gif

Why is it some surprise that a Christian band would be doing this?

uh the "hack" is my brother

http://loudwire.com/boston-august-6-godsmack-day/