GI's Rap their Anger - Fighting Words

By Monica Davey The New York Times Sunday 20 February 2005

On one more steaming day in Baghdad, word filtered out to the artillery regiment that some of the younger guys were not going to get to fly home for their promised rest-and-relaxation break. Soldiers fumed. They'd spent months of long hours in this crazy place, knowing that at any moment a homemade bomb might explode, a rocket-propelled grenade might land or an Iraqi child might spit at them.

But though they were armed to the teeth, they chose to respond with a different kind of weapon. They stepped outside and, of all things, began to rap.

"I started doing some of the most outlandish freestyle you can imagine," Javorn Drummond, an Army specialist from Wade, N.C., recalled the other day. "We were just going off about how we do all the work, but we can't go home. We didn't care who could hear. We didn't have to care. I'll tell you, it felt good. At that time, they were killing us. We were working so hard we weren't getting sleep."

Moments like those, when service members turn to rap to express, and perhaps relieve, fear, aggression, resentment and exhaustion, have become a common part of life during nearly two years of war in Iraq. "Rap is the one place," Specialist Drummond said, "where you can get out your aggravation - your anger at the people who outrank you, your frustration at the Iraqi people who just didn't understand what we were doing. You could get out everything."

If rock 'n' roll, the sounds of Jimi Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane and Creedence Clearwater Revival, was the music of American service members in Vietnam, rap may become the defining pulse for the war in Iraq. It has emerged as a rare realm where soldiers and marines, hardly known for talking about their feelings, are voicing the full range of their emotions and reactions to war. They rap about their resentment of the military hierarchy. But they also rap about their pride, their invincibility, their fallen brothers, their disdain for the enemy and their determination to succeed.

Plenty of soldiers still listen to the twang of country music or the scream of heavy metal. Many, in fact, said that metal - and albums like Slayer's "Reign in Blood" - helped psyche them up for combat as they roared across the desert in the very first days of conflict. But a great many say it was 50 Cent, Pastor Troy or Mystikal (himself, a Gulf war veteran) that kept them chugging along in trucks and Humvees - in one case, manning the Humvee machine gun - miniheadphone lines tucked away under Kevlar vests. They listened to get stirred up on the way to house raids, before tense guard duty assignments or simply when they awoke to another tedious day under that enormous sun.

The more than 1,450 American service members killed in Iraq have also left behind traces of hip-hop scattered in the memories. Sgt. Jack Bryant Jr., of Dale City, Va., who died last Nov. 20 when a makeshift bomb blew up near his convoy in Iraq, had written rap, his father remembered the other day. And Pfc. Curtis L. Wooten, of Spanaway, Wash., who was killed on Jan. 4 when a roadside bomb exploded near his vehicle in Balad, had planned to go to school when he got home, his brother said, to become a producer in the hip-hop world.

As for the many soldiers who are writing and performing their own raps, their lyrics sample the lexicon of the war - the Sandbox, I.E.D.'s (improvised explosive devices), I.C.D.C. (the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps) and Haji (the word many soldiers use derogatorily for the enemy) - and the wide scope of their feelings about it. "There is a great potential for ambivalence in their words," said Jeff Chang, author of a new book, "Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation" (St. Martin's Press). "That's part of the ambivalence hip-hop has often carried. You hear two ideas in what they are saying here: An implicit critique of 'what am I doing here?' but at the same time, the idea of loyalty to your street soldiers, loyalty to your troops, loyalty to the guys you ride with."

It is the music of Specialist Drummond and his colleagues in the First Armored Division's Second Battalion, Third Field Artillery that makes up much of the background sounds in a new documentary, "Gunner Palace," about the experience of one group of ordinary soldiers in Iraq. The movie, which will open in theaters on March 4 and was directed by Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein, records the everyday lives of 400 soldiers living in the bombed-out palace of Saddam Hussein's son Uday after the fall of Baghdad.

Rap might seem at odds with the conformity of military life, but Mr. Tucker, who served in the reserve in the 1980's, sees it as an extension of the cadence, or the calling-out songs to which troops run. And from the lyrics they write, it's clear that some of these soldiers identify their role - urban guerilla warriors fighting an unseen enemy - with that of the heroes of the genre. Even the USO has responded: They sent Nappy Roots, Bubba Sparks, 50 Cent and G-Unit to perform for soldiers in Iraq, and Ludacris appeared at a giant welcome home for soldiers at Fort Hood, Tex.

"Rap has become another part of barracks culture," Mr. Tucker said in a phone interview. "As far as soldiers go, rap is almost the perfect medium: they are able to say so much, to let off steam and also to have so many hidden meanings in what they say."

One day in April 2004 Sgt. Nick Moncrief, who said he had felt close to death many times during his 14 months in Iraq, felt at least four bullets whiz past his face while he was guarding the perimeter of an area in Baghdad. "Those bullets were close to me the way you're close when you're getting ready to kiss a girl."

Not long after that, he scribbled down a rap: "I noticed that my face is aging so quickly/Cuz I've seen more than your average man in his fifties/I'm 24 now/Got two kids and a wife/Having visions of them picturing me up out of they life."

Now back at his post in Germany, Sergeant Moncrief, who also appears in Mr. Tucker's film, has turned 25. "My message in my rap is that I have a lot of anger about the war," he said. "Why are we there? Why me? That's basically what I want to say when I write: Why?"

Some soldiers described jotting down lyrics on scraps of paper at night, between power failures. They rapped to whatever beat they could find - a homemade CD on a boom box or just some drumming on the metal armor of a Humvee. The soldiers joked that they could have even rapped to the beat of gunfire.

In fact, they very nearly did in "mortar alley," a Baghdad spot where service members held freestyle contests outside their sleeping quarters. Half a dozen soldiers or more would gather around; when the mortar rounds started coming - as they so often did between 7 p.m. and midnight - the music swiftly ended and everyone raced inside. As Specialist Terry Taylor, 27, recalls, those raps tended to come particularly fast. "You wouldn't want to wait too long," he said. "We got caught outside with mortars coming more than a few times."

Other nights, Specialist Taylor said, he and his friends would sneak a radio along when they had to escort some high-ranking officer, and rap while they waited through his appointment.

Usually, violence was the inspiration. After a June 2003 shootout that left one man dead, Specialist Taylor wrote: "I can't believe Iraqis are after me/It's got to be a tragedy/The way these people bust and blast at me/Dear God, is this the way it has to be?"

It was one of his "aggression" raps. "For me, this was a way to stand up and say, 'hey, I'm not going to take it,'" he said. "If I didn't feel that, if I didn't get that out there and say that out loud, I just don't think you'd make it. A lot of guys didn't make it. You can't show kindness or weakness out there. This was a way to make it out safe."

His song went on: "You have no success with your bombs now it's mortar attacks/Oh! So you think that we not ready for that/We got snipers on the roof flipping cats like acrobats/And I am the living proof, I'm on guard and I'm going to be there all night/And to me your guerilla tactics is nothing to me but a little monkey fight."

While working on "Soundtrack to War," a film about the role of music in the Iraqi conflict that was broadcast on VH1 last summer, the director George Gittoes said he found that rap had not fully crossed over for all white soldiers, who tended instead to listen to country music. If true, it's a distinction affecting more than just what CD's get played in the barracks. For while country music has by and large been wildly supportive of soldiers and the war, hip-hop's relationship to the conflict and to military life in general, has been a lot more ambiguous and shifting.

Rap was already infusing the culture of soldiers in the first Gulf war, in 1991, when many artists were critical of the administration. Paris wrote "Bush Killa," about the current president's father, and Ice Cube came out with "A Bird in the Hand," a biting look at government policy. (He also appeared in David O. Russell's 1999 film, 'Three Kings," a dark comedy about soldiers in the aftermath of that war.) Still, the symbol of the fearless street soldier was gaining in popularity.

In the months after the terrorist attacks of 2001, Mr. Chang said, some rappers wrote about defending the country. But as the war in Iraq has gone on, more pointedly antiwar songs have emerged. In Jay-Z's 2003 "Beware of the Boys," he wrote: "We rebellious, we back home/Screaming, 'Leave Iraq alone!/But all my soldiers in the field, I will wish you safe return/But only love kills war, when will they learn?"

According to Bakari Kitwana, the author of "The Hip Hop Generation: Young Blacks and the Crisis in African American Culture," "the contradiction that people in the hip-hop culture see is that the war is creating job options and life possibilities not just for Iraqi people but for large American corporations, and meanwhile, the soldiers have no such options."

As for the soldiers, some say the war has helped break down whatever barriers of race or taste there may have been before among the troops on questions of music. Rap, country, metal - it's all Iraq.

"I guess I don't even see the difference between rap and country anymore, except the beat," said Specialist Richmond Shaw, 21, who grew up in Pontiac, Mich., and wrote jarring raps in Iraq. "We're talking about the same things. We're all out here in the middle of this oven. There's nothing going on. It's desolate. We're basically stuck. Dirty, dusty, windy, blowing, miserable."

"I might be part of the Tupac generation," he went on, "but we're all trying to avoid getting shot, and we're all wondering whether people will remember us and we're trying to make difference before we die. Isn't that what country music is about, too?"

Three days after Specialist Shaw's friend was shot in Iraq, he wrote a song. He said he knew he was "living on borrowed time" and needed people back home to know that life there was real, not something on the news, not something in a press conference, not an idea. He sat in his room to write it, looking out, he said, at a river, listening to the constant flapping of choppers going by, and once in a while, gunfire somewhere:

'Trials and tribulations daily we do/And not always life's pains wash away in our pool/When we take a dip, we try to stick to the script/But when those guns start blazing and our friends get hit/That's when our hearts start racing and our stomach gets whoozy/Cuz for y'all this is just a show, but we live in this movie."

Rap music, it seems, has been for many soldiers a bridge between their normal lives and the strange, surreal world of their Iraqi service. Their lives, they said, were changed dramatically by war, but their music helped them understand it. Rap, with its stories of crumbling neighborhoods, street violence , wild economic disparities and life-or-death swagger, helped them make sense of what they saw there.

"When you start looking at the fighting between the Sunnis and the Shiites," said Specialist Drummond, 22, who finished four years of service in November after spending more than a year in Iraq, "it's at least as complicated as the fighting between the Bloods and the Crips back home. People can't tell who is who and who is mad at who. Truth is, there are some very scary similarities between what you see in the neighborhoods and what you see in Iraq. I think that's why rap fits both so well."

Unless pressed, Sergeant Moncrief does not talk much about what he saw in the war. He is trying to live in the now, he says. But his raps are still coming.

"I don't know any other way to get my feelings out," Sergeant Moncrief said. "I was scared over there, and frankly, I think if you weren't scared, there was something wrong with you. I rap because I feel it."