The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #2915   Message #2085904
Posted By: Azizi
24-Jun-07 - 05:59 PM
Thread Name: Military Jodies?
Subject: RE: Military Jodies?
Here's an excerpt of an interesting article that I found by goggling "airborne ranger chant":

"Released in 2002 by the Orchard, the recordings of U.S. military "cadence calls" gathered on Marching Cadences of the U.S. Marines, Run in Cadence with the U.S. Marines, Vol. 2 and Run to Cadence with the Recon Marines should be instantly familiar to anyone who has ever watched a war film. These rhythmic chants are always prominently featured in montage sequences of boot camp training. From Stripes to Full Metal Jacket to Jarhead, you know the drill: A vein-popping sergeant barks out bawdy, macho calls and the newly shorn privates grunt back, as stomping combat boots keep time on parade-ground tarmac and the new recruits magically turn into seasoned leathernecks.

Fans of '80s rock will know this stuff for a different reason: The "I wanna be an airborne ranger" chant that fades up at the end of U2's "Seconds" (from their War album) was subsequently immortalized by Judd Nelson-as-Bender, jogging through his high school's halls in the 1985 John Hughes film The Breakfast Club. U2 and Hughes/Bender were mocking such calls (and military culture in general) as stiff, conformist and square, a matter of top-down discipline and nothing more, and they had a point: this is the sound of individuals tightening into an obedient group, of bodies being brought into line, and that's why these recordings were, somewhat optimistically, marketed as functional fitness soundtracks for running or aerobics. But when you listen to the perverse lyrics and (frequently amazing) vocal performances collected here, the cadence call is revealed as in fact a wildly diverse, popular American folk form in its own right.

Supposedly created in 1944 by private Willie Duckworth's immortal chant ("Sound off, one, two/Sound off, three, four/One, two, three, four/One, two-three, four!"), the cadence call takes lyrical fragments of social history and sets them to riffs and patterns hot-rodded from blues and rock & roll, and more distantly, the call-and-response of gospel and African music. The chanted words are a free-range combination of motifs that offer a window into the military mind: mournful, mocking descriptions of the recruiters who got you into this mess, anxiety about "jodies" (civilians) stealing the sweethearts left behind, somber expressions of death-bound macho grandiloquence, and politically incorrect sexual braggadoccio."

http://www.emusic.com/features/spotlight/289_200604.html
"I Wanna Be An Airborne Ranger
-snip-

The article continues with a description of the recording.

**

Btw, unless someone beat me to it, this is post #100!