Hard-On for War

Album: Buddyhead Presents: Gimme Skelter (2003)
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Songfacts®:

  • Mudhoney wrote this song in the buildup to the Gulf War in 2003, when the United States invaded Iraq. In our interview with Mudhoney frontman Mark Arm, he explained: "You could feel this thing was coming for a year before the invasion happened. There was that drumbeat to war and it was like, 'This seems inevitable; I've got to say something about it.' So I started to try to get the idea of who are these people that want to go to war so bad, and what would their motivations be? And it seems like the people who are most behind it were older men.

    So my idea was: they're in it for the chicks, and they can't get chicks without getting rid of the younger men, and what better way to get rid of the younger generation of men than to send them off to war? It was a horrible thing, but there's humor in even the darkest situations, I think."
  • Mudhoney singer/guitarist Mark Arm was inspired by two specific anti-war songs while writing this: Bob Dylan's "Masters Of War" and "Sacrifice" by Flipper. "Those two songs say it all in terms of real terms," he says.

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