Heavy metal legend Dave Mustaine and TAS’s old friend,
Human Events editor Jed Babbin, probably don’t share too
many overlapping areas of interest. But, as Megadeth’s latest
offering United Abominations makes clear, the
transgressions of a certain international body situated on the East
River is one topic over which the guitarist and Inside the Asylum author could have a
meeting of the minds.
In a mere five minutes and thirty-seven seconds United
Abominations’ title track encapsulates a litany of complaints
against this “blot on the face of humanity,” as Mustaine sneeringly
calls it, from its practical indifference to ethnic cleansing and
state-sponsored terrorism to the “mire of hypocrisy, bribes,
kickbacks and corruption” it mucks around in. “The U.N. is where
our so-called allies undermine us, and we pay 22 percent of the tab
to host our enemies here at home,” Mustaine intones during what is
almost certainly the only song this year to name check Kofi Annan’s
son Kojo (“Held hostage by Oil-For-Food/Yet their own plates are
full off the fat of their lands/There’s no blood on their hands,
right Kojo?”) thunders along.
“I have a feeling a couple years from now, people are going to
be saying, ‘Who the f—k is Kojo?’” Mustaine laughed in a recent
telephone interview from Amsterdam amidst the hustle and bustle of
the United Abominations world tour. “But you know what? I
bet some of the kids who bought this record looked his name up
after reading the lyrics and know a whole lot more about the
Oil-for-Food scandal than they did before.”
Not everyone is amused by Mustaine’s battering of the blue
helmets. “I just wonder which abomination he considers worse:
Eradicating polio or ending obstetric fistula?” Mark Leon Goldberg
sniffs on UN Dispatch. “Or is it the campaign to reduce childhood
mortality rates by two-thirds that gets the aging rocker’s blood
boiling? I suppose he can take his pick.”
“I’m sure the United Nations does some good stuff,” Mustaine
retorts. “I mean, they’ve got one of the most beautiful women in
the world pushing rice in Darfur. But that’s the irony of it all.
They’ll send those C130s over there full of supplies, drop it off
and…the rebels get it. Deliver it all the way if you’re going to
deliver it. What good is it if it goes to the bad people? Then
there are these allegations of women and children being raped by peacekeepers in Africa — the first
time that happens it’s a crime, the second time it is a
travesty.”
It’s the lack of outrage that has Mustaine outraged. “Why
doesn’t Michael Moore do an expose on the UN?” he asked, adding,
“When I see Syria on the Security Council [in 2002-2003], am I
supposed to feel secure? It’s mad….They just rely on UNICEF, this
one good thing they’re doing, to cover up all the stuff that
they’re not doing, to put them beyond dissent. I’m not impressed.
How long are they going to sit by and watch Hezbollah fire Katyusha
rockets into Israel from Lebanon? That’s a question I’d like
answered.”
Speaking of Israel, on another track, “Amerikhastan,” Mustaine
envisions a dystopian future wherein a “legion of bankrupt souls
with a lust for revenge” brings civilization to its knees. “You
must ignore the focus groups,” he advises in his melodic howl. “You
must send in the Mossad/Turn off the BBC and CNN/And don’t look
back.”
Ignore CNN? Call in Mossad? Is it any wonder Mustaine’s recent
reception in Tel Aviv was near-rapturous? And how long will it be before Mustaine
winds up a roving celebrity ambassador for the Project for the
New American Century?
TECHNICALLY SPEAKING, MUSTAINE’S career should be dead, dead, dead.
Mega-dead, even. Over the last half decade, Mustaine suffered a
“compressed radial nerve” in his left arm, forcing him to spend a
painful year relearning to use his fingers and play guitar. Then
there was the endless ridicule over his unflattering appearance in
Some Kind of Monster — the 2004 documentary detailing
Metallica’s unintentionally hilarious year of group therapy — a
band Mustaine was unceremoniously fired from…in 1983. Finally,
the controversialist became a born-again Christian, alienating heavy metal’s substantial evil music constituency. (United Abominations
contains two touching paeans to Mustaine’s faith — “A Tout Le
Monde” and “Never Walk Alone: A Call to Arms.”)
The metal press had their hammers and chisels out, prepared to
carve the epitaph. Mustaine wasn’t ready to jump in his own grave,
however, returning in late 2004 with a message and sound that was,
if anything, less compromising. That same year Mustaine, proving
his knack for confrontation was not limited to compact disc,
told a reporter, “Natalie Maines from the Dixie
Chicks said that she is ashamed to be from the state of Texas.
Well, I’m ashamed that you are f—king from America.”
“People say musicians should stay out of politics, and I agree,”
Mustaine sighed when asked about the appropriate nexus of music,
politics and everything else. “But I’m a citizen, too. I love my
country. When I went to cover the [1992] Democratic National
Convention for MTV, I walked around like a respectable American who
happened to be in the music business instead of like one of these
idiots in a T-shirt that says ‘F — k Our President.’
“In a lot of ways, it doesn’t matter,” he continued. “I can’t
tell you how condescending the look I got from John Kerry was when
I walked up to interview him at the 1992 convention or the way
Oliver Stone treated me. I was like, ‘You know what? Don’t let the
hair fool you, guys.’”
Or the records, for that matter. The message of the band’s 1986
sophomore effort Peace Sells…But Who’s Buying? is as
crisply provocative and self-explanatory as United
Abominations, while Rust in Peace (1990) delved into
Cold War-era fears. The song “Holy Wars…The Punishment Due”
actually proved to be a fairly prescient take on the impending
clash of civilizations — even if other tracks dealt with alien
abductions and alchemistic curses.
“I had labelmates when I was on Capitol Records like Poison who
had songs like ‘Talk Dirty to Me,’” Mustaine explained. “That never
appealed to me. I wanted to do something that was a little bit more
profound, even if I didn’t really want a bunch of pontificators in
the front row.”
Disaffected youth and outcasts are always going to make up the
largest segment of the heavy metal audience, yet Mustaine
nonetheless insists his is a message and a medium that attracts
more sophisticated fans than those outside the genre circle might
suspect. The last time Megadeth played El Paso, for example, a fan
introduced himself to Mustaine. They chatted about the new album
for a bit and then Mustaine asked him what he did for a living.
“He said, ‘I’m an in utero cardiologist,’” Mustaine
recalled. “And I said, ‘What? You’re a Megadeth fan
and you go inside a pregnant woman’s stomach and operate
on a fetus’s heart?’ I thought, ‘There’s so much more to this music
than most people understand.’”
The cardiologist is not alone. At the Megadeth online
headquarters there are separate Dutch, Finnish, French, German,
Israeli, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish,
Turkish and English forums where fans gather by the thousands. In a
way, Mustaine is running his own model United Nations.
