Sounds Against Cannons

Torn open by metal explosions
Caught in barbed wire
Fireball

Slap bass and snare drum crack like whiplashes, the funk beat marches in lockstep with the soldiers. The distorted guitar spins like an air-raid siren or a rocket from right to left through the stereo space. This acoustic spectacle blares surprisingly from a large loudspeaker while a general rallies his soldiers for war—the Vietnam War. To him they are merely a mass, to be moved and directed. Because of the racket from the loudspeaker, the general has to break off his speech; he boils with rage while his subordinates try in vain to switch off the loud music. The soldiers smirk, their discipline suddenly seeming to dissolve into nothing.

It is a key scene in the rock musical “Hair,” first performed in 1967, which Miloš Forman adapted very strikingly for the screen in 1979. It shows what happens when commanders lose control and soldiers learn what truly awaits them in war.

Shoot the muscle
256 Vietcong captured

The “Hair” musical took a number of its lines from the very long poem “Wichita Vortex Sutra” by Allen Ginsberg, who sharply criticizes the Vietnam War. Ginsberg supposedly spoke the text spontaneously into a tape recorder while riding through Wichita in a VW bus, giving free rein to his rage over the war. Whether he was paid by the makers of the “Hair” musical for the lines is not recorded.

The number 3500 offers plenty of material for speculation, in any case: some claim it is the number of dead GIs per week—or per month? Who really knows?

But 3500 is also the number of U.S. Marines who in 1965 reinforced the 23,000 Americans already stationed in Vietnam, escalating the war still further. Others again suspect a parallel to a weapon used in the Vietnam War that had a maximum range of 3,500 meters. Perhaps most plausible is the thesis that what is meant here are the 3,446 lynched Black people who met their deaths between 1882 and 1968. Racism and war are, after all, simply two different manifestations of a fundamental human ill: the inability or unwillingness to resolve conflicts by diplomatic means.

I heard this song for the first time shortly before my court hearing as a conscientious objector, where I likewise felt as if I were in a film. There I had to answer questions such as what I would do if a Russian were to rape my girlfriend at night in the park and I had a weapon on me. And whether it was not a problem for me that, as a conscientious objector, I found myself in the minority. I did not even understand this last question—but perhaps, faced with that bizarre scene, my thoughts were simply with the song “Three Five Zero Zero,” which, after the staccato funk beats, turns into a swinging gospel and now seems to mock the business of war with irony. The power of the many throats seems to tell us: we can end the madness, if only we are numerous enough.

Prisoners in Niggertown
It’s a dirty little war
3-5-0-0
Take weapons and start the killing

Three Five Zero Zero—there is hardly a war in which a number like this cannot be found. In Afghanistan 3,500 foreign soldiers died; in all there were more than half a million dead. In the Iraq War, according to the United Nations, 35,000 civilians were killed in the year 2006 alone; the entire war, according to a Lancet study, claimed 655,000 civilian victims:

Six Five Five
Zero Zero Zero.

Or Yemen: there, since 2014, some 350,000 people have died as a result of the war.

Because of the war propaganda on both sides, no reliable figures can be found on this, but a hundredfold increase in the number of victims is not unrealistic.

The song, more than 50 years old, is thus unchanged in its relevance in an age in which the United States alone already invests 2.5 billion dollars in armaments—and that daily!

Two Five
Zero Zero Zero
Zero Zero Zero
Zero Zero Zero.

Already during my time in civilian service, humanity had amassed enough weapons to wipe itself out several times over. I do not want to know how many times we could obliterate ourselves completely today, that is, 45 years later. The already questionable concept of military deterrence has come completely unhinged. It seems as unbridled as the Green Party, which originally—back when I was sitting in court over my conscientious objection—grew out of the peace movement. I confess: I stood with them in the street when the Greens, in the days of Petra Kelly, demanded the dissolution of the Western and Eastern military blocs and rejected German NATO membership. At the time I toyed with the idea of joining the Green Party.

By the nineties at the latest, however, the former party of peace had lost its pacifist innocence, when Daniel Cohn-Bendit called for military intervention in Sarajevo and Germany, under Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, took part in both the Kosovo and the Afghanistan wars. It remains a mystery how the Greens could turn 180 degrees on former party issues such as pacifism, self-determination, or the rejection of genetic engineering without falling apart: no other party is currently driving so hard toward war and agitated so fiercely against those unvaccinated against COVID, whom it sought to compel into taking genetically engineered therapeutics. How is peace to arise and endure in a society without tolerance, empathy, and individual freedom?

In the “Hair” film, the subversive music is silenced in martial fashion: military police fire at the loudspeaker until it falls, shredded, from its mast. The music dies in the hail of bullets.

As a music journalist active for 30 years, I painfully miss your voices. Where are you?