25 November 2010
You Irish people of 2010 must have really loved the British Army, since this is the second charity fundraiser for injured British military personnel that you sent all the way to the top of the charts in Ireland—my country—in two years. I had emigrated then, as all true sons and daughters of Erin do, so I had no hand, act or part in your strange pro-British tendencies. (I’m back now, to clean up all this damage to our national psyche in my absence.) Your nostalgia for your pro-British years must be what gets you so het up as to call Liveline and write your newspaper columns about your own teenage offspring singing Wolfe Tones songs at music festivals. Don’t you ever stop and think that they’re simply rebelling against the shame of you buying a 2010 British Army charity single?
Whatever the prevailing mood was about these things in 2010, I’m prr-etty sure a British Army charity fundraising single would not get to number one in Ireland today. And in case you think that means the pendulum of Irish record-buying sympathies has swung fully to the other side, this summer’s controversial Wolfe Tones singalong number didn’t even re-enter the Irish top 100 singles chart.
Anyway, this 2010 X Factor side-hustle drops the quotation marks from Bowie’s ‘”Heroes”‘ so that no irony or contestation of the term is admitted here. Still, it doesn’t drop the line “And the guards shot above our heads” that positions actual military action as anti-“heroic” even while corresponding exactly with this project’s narrative of who a “hero” is. The added climactic key change and emotionally manipulative video are par for the course, but you like that sort of thing in your British Army propaganda. Not only that, our own Niall Horan and Mary Byrne, my fellow Irish expats, got contractually-obligated into this too! Ah yes, convenient cover for you and your Brit-licking, poppy-kissing ways.
