The Story Behind The Song: The day of reckoning is coming with the march of Massive Attack and Tom Waits’ ‘Boots on the Ground’
At a time when the world seems to be imploding right before our very eyes, Massive Attack and Tom Waits heeded the call to deliver the message that everyone really needs to hear.
They don’t do that with any sort of huge fanfare or expected kudos, but then again, the sheer fact of Waits releasing his first new music since 2011, and Massive Attack in over five years, is bound to turn a few heads. What better way to do it, then, than to challenge the increasingly ugly set of norms entrenching America?
Despite its searing timeliness to the current agenda, their new song ‘Boots on the Ground’ dates back extensively to a time when Waits felt his poetry would still resonate as much as at any other point in history. “One day many years ago, I accepted an invitation from Massive Attack to collaborate,” he said. “Way back then, we sent them ‘Boots on the Ground’. Their long release delay never worried me.”
Waits added, “Today, as in all of mankind’s yesterdays, guarantees this song will never go out of style. Man’s fiasco folly is a feast for the flies,” and in this respect, he is absolutely on the money. Who could have thought that this song was written possibly years ago, when you have a country in political turmoil and more terrifying scenes unfolding by the day right now?
Massive Attack offer up the platitudes and pleasantries of the “career honour” it is to work with an artistic visionary that is Waits. But in many ways, his presence in the song is a mere vehicle to the elevation of its real cause, as “this track is arriving in an atmosphere of chaos,” they said.
“Across the western hemisphere, state authoritarianism and the militarisation of police forces are fusing again with neo-fascist politics. Seen within the American emergency, at home and overseas, this track contains pulses of callous impulse and abandoned mind.”
There’s a lot of words to take in, but essentially, ‘Boots on the Ground’ is the physical manifestation of brainwashing; the creeping but steady march of extreme right-wing ideologies into an entire nation’s mind. Waits’ gravelly tones take on the mouthpiece for the everyman: “We trim your hedges/ We fight your wars/ Wade in the trenches and we’re fucked ‘til we’re sore,” he states, with a startling simplicity and brazenness that it can only be true.
Whether the track is sonically complex or more of a spoken word piece set to backing music is beyond the point: it’s not here to win critical acclaim or become an awards darling, it just wants to take up space on the resistance front. Accompanied by a film from photo artist Thefinaleye, depicting his images as an epoch from the Black Lives Matter marches in 2020 to the ICE raids of 2026, it makes one simple statement clear.
The journey to this point in the world may have marched into society gradually for a number of years, but it doesn’t mean those armies of hatred cannot be halted in their tracks. Is it any coincidence that just this past weekend, Massive Attack’s Robert Del Naja was arrested at a Palestine Action demonstration in London? He’s putting his money where his mouth is and proving the song’s point in real time.
There is so much else to dissect, from Waits’ decision to work with Massive Attack to the fact that this is the band’s first release excluding Spotify – but really, all of that pales into insignificance when you realise the song’s true mantra. Those boots on the ground are steadily coming for us all, but it’s up to us to stop them.
