Bruce Cockburn’s highly effective “If I Had a Rocket Launcher” is sort of probably essentially the most violent track about peace ever written. The penultimate monitor on his thirteenth album, Stealing Hearth, Cockburn wrote the tune following an Oxfam-sponsored go to to a number of Guatemalan refugee camps in 1983. Its raging poetry is the sort one can solely hope will lose relevance; but, immediately it’s about Ukraine, Gaza, Yemen.

A notch up out of your mom’s “If I Had a Hammer,” “Rocket Launcher” was launched among the many ’80s wave of music hip to the higher struggling of the lots (“We Are the World,” “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”), which tried to “[make] a literal distinction, metaphorically,” as Bo Burnham would say. Neither a charity single nor a protest track nor a late addition to the civil rights motion’s nice musical canon, “Rocket Launcher” endures for its brutal honesty, for instance of how an artist can meaningfully stroll alongside the topics of struggling, and as a singular show of Christian pacifist observe.

Inside the monitor, Cockburn’s voice and lyrics stay within the area between his mournful, open electrical guitar riff and contradictory frenetic dancing synthesizer. The track is in E minor, a pure match for each a guitar’s customary tuning in addition to for creating a way of restlessness, because it virtually, possibly, simply would possibly resolve to the relative C main, the purest of the keys. The BPM is 97, sitting above a standard grownup’s resting coronary heart fee. It’s as if quite than turning to face the magnitude of his desolation, Cockburn’s sole weapon in his combat to take care of his sanity is his escalating ideas of vengeance.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9HFjErMMlA

Bruce Cockburn’s track endures for its brutal honesty, for instance of how an artist can meaningfully stroll alongside the topics of struggling, and as a singular show of Christian pacifist observe.

He begins the lyrics in medias res, setting the scene of a predatory helicopter approaching for “the second time immediately.” It’s circling helpless civilians, who can solely “scatter” and “[hope] it goes away.” These are the human victims of dictator Efraín Ríos Montt’s counter-insurgency marketing campaign in opposition to the indigenous Mayan folks of Guatemala. Montt’s genocidal logic has been summarized as “they’re communists and subsequently atheists and subsequently they’re demons and subsequently you possibly can kill them.” Montt constructed cathedrals of cognitive distortions to rationalize why his will gave him a go from the commandment thou shalt not kill, however Cockburn’s reckoning is each aware and sober—What about, not in self protection, offing a dictator?

“What number of children they’ve murdered?” he challenges us, not hesitating to spring the digicam on the viewer on the opposite facet of MTV. The query is rhetorical, however Cockburn doesn’t know the reply both. “Solely God can say,” he cries out, earlier than revealing his first order of enterprise upon buying his rocket launcher—to “make someone pay.”

Cockburn qualifies within the second verse that he “[doesn’t] imagine in guarded borders… hate… generals, or their stinkin’ torture states.” The best way he spits out “stinkin’” as an epithet accentuates his geek-ery. This verse additionally emphasizes his perspective as an outsider to the Guatemalan battle, significantly with the road “after I discuss with the survivors of issues too sickening to relay… If I had a rocket launcher, I’d retaliate.” Cockburn didn’t try to write down a track from the angle of a Guatemalan refugee, as his anguish for others isn’t predicated on his capability to place himself into their footwear. Relatively, he can empathize all the identical with the struggling of others strolling alongside them in his personal. 

In that vein, the third verse speaks to the truth that whereas the track’s anguish could also be timeless, Cockburn’s was provoked by a particular incident—“On the Rio Lacantun, 100 thousand wait, to fall down from hunger, or some much less humane destiny. Cry for Guatemala, with a corpse at each gate, If I had a rocket launcher… I’d not hesitate.” 

In barely “We Are the World” style, the fourth and ultimate verse begins with “I wish to elevate each voice, a minimum of I’ve bought to attempt,” however ends in a really un-“We Are the World” method with the track’s most well-known line: “If I had a rocket launcher, some son-of-a-bitch would die.” The road is jarring coming from the identical bespectacled Canuck whose curse phrase of selection solely two verses in the past was “stinkin’,” but in addition for making specific that his intention together with his firearm is to not hearth off warning photographs or browbeat someone. His cup of empathy has overflown right into a thirst for blood. 

In that sense, the track is each a name to compassion and a warning. It asks us to query whether or not wars can ever be holy, crimes of ardour ever justified. In his article “Magnificence Limned in Violence: Experimenting with Protest Music within the Ignatian Classroom,” Christopher Pramuk compares that: 

The human predicament expressed in “Rocket Launcher” remembers in some methods the youthful [St. Ignatius of] Loyola, whose “hidalgo” persona— loyal, impetuous, passionate, fearless—led him on a minimum of one event to the brink of homicide. Certainly, the Jesuit bent towards motion greater than phrases, the mobilization of energies and assets towards a single-minded function, may be seductive and flatly harmful if not grounded in humility and relentlessly sincere self-examination. 

It demonstrates how a Christian might use creative expression as greater than a fleeting solace however because the medium via which the emotions they share with warmongers may be channeled.

Decoding the track as sincere self-examination quite than a sympathetic ode to vigilante justice lies in a single’s assumed ethical posture of the songwriter. Bruce Cockburn’s religion, politics, and peaceable convictions are robust themes in his music. He had a Christian conversion expertise in 1974 and has been concerned in activism relating to the rights and welfare of indigenous peoples, towards the abolition of landmines, and for pro-environmentalist causes. It is very important observe that he doesn’t establish himself as a pacifist, however he has conceded that “my hardest combat as a performer has been with myself, to be as clear a conduit as potential for what must be stated… [to] get my ego and my mind out of the way in which and let these items occur.” Whereas it could not have been his intention, one can enterprise to guess he could be open to the track serving as a secular hymn of solace to the struggling peaceable particular person, in addition to to the pacifist.

That stated, Cockburn has continuously expressed his concern that “Rocket Launcher” could be misconstrued. In a 2017 interview he shared that “I virtually didn’t file it… I didn’t need folks to suppose that I simply wrote the track as a result of I assumed they need to go down and kill Guatemalan troopers.” He even took a short hiatus from performing the track stay post-9/11, expressing that he was extra cautious “to run the danger of feeding a physique of emotion that I don’t wish to journey up.”

The query of the dissemination of harmful concepts via artwork is all the time a contentious one but it surely was significantly hot-button when “Rocket Launcher” was launched within the ’80s, from Tipper Gore’s Dad and mom Music Useful resource Heart to Ozzy Osborne having to be cleared of any wrongdoing following a youngster’s dying by suicide after allegedly listening to “Suicide Answer.” In that case, Superior Court docket Choose John Cole wrote in his opinion that “[m]usical lyrics and poetry can’t be construed to include the requisite ‘name to motion’ for the elementary cause they merely aren’t supposed to be and shouldn’t be learn actually. Cheap individuals perceive musical lyrics and poetic conventions because the figurative expressions which they’re.”

Two important distinctions about “Rocket Launcher” that shield it from misinterpretation are (1) the grandiose, virtually comical selection of weapon over, say, “if I had a handgun,” and (2) the key phrase “if.” (“As soon as I Get a Rocket Launcher” could be a really completely different track.) America’s racial creativeness also can clarify why “Rocket Launcher” quietly peaked at quantity 88 on the Billboard Scorching 100 whereas Ice-T’s comparably themed “Cop Killer” obtained mass condemnation as much as and together with the Oval Workplace. After all, “Rocket Launcher” encourages the MTV era to look past the relative consolation of their nation’s borders, whereas “Cop Killer” factors to the fireplace inside the home. Ice-T’s protection of his track explains why portraits of violent rumination are nonetheless artwork, necessary artwork, and can’t be thought of a name to arms:

I’m singing within the first particular person as a personality who’s fed up with police brutality. I ain’t by no means killed no cop. I felt prefer it a number of occasions. However I by no means did it. For those who imagine that I’m a cop killer, you imagine David Bowie is an astronaut.

“I felt prefer it a number of occasions. However I by no means did it.” That admission distinguishes the Christian pacifist from the non secular bypasser. If the human violent impulse can by no means be eradicated, it may possibly all the time be reworked. As in Proverbs 3:31, “Rocket Launcher” doesn’t “envy the violent,” nor does it “select any of their methods.” Relatively, it demonstrates how a Christian might use creative expression as greater than a fleeting solace however because the medium via which the emotions they share with warmongers may be channeled.