CASUALTIES OF WAR

It's war again and as our brave boysä take on the might of the Iraqi army, it's worth taking some time out to look at the effects that Gulf War II: This Time It's Personal will have on the music world. Aside from the obvious effects of making previously respectable musicians turn into a bunch of platitude spouting sycophants, there are other stranger occurrences. During the last Gulf War, Massive Attack became victims of see-no-evil censorship when they were forced to change their name to Massive.

This time around the same bizarre yet sinister bans are being self-imposed by the media from MTV to the BBC. The music video channel has banned the playing of System Of A Down's 'Boom'. It's hardly surprising as the promo video is very anti-war and amongst other things contains projected casualties of the war. Not the kind of thing you're supposed to hear.

'ban da bandages'

Even more bizarrely/stupidly, the BBC have banned Hot Hot Heat's 'Bandages', cos y'know bandages are used to treat the wounded and maimed, and if that little boy with the blown-off arms were to hear some catchy new wave pop on the World Service at any point, I'm sure he'd be very upset.

So theoretically Eyeballkid is firmly against this do-gooder censorship that bans harmless pieces of music, while rolling round-the-clock news coverage of bombs dropping on human being fills every orifice of the media. Yet if we never see another System Of A Down video again it won't be too soon. So we reckon we might be onto a winner here and have drafted in one of the US military's top propaganda experts, Gen HR Puffinstuff, to tell us what else could make the Banned list.

1) Alanis Morrisette 'Hand In Pocket': this piece of popular music contains the objectionable lyric, "I've got one hand in my pocket/and the other one is giving a peace sign". Now it's not the peace sign we're against. Oh no! We're all for peace, peace through war has always been our goal and if we have to kill everyone to achieve that then dammit that's what we'll do. The problem here is the keeping of hands in pockets. In times of war it's very important to keep both hands free and ready to bear arms or punch the air shouting "U-S-A" at any given moment .

2) David Gray 'Babylon': this particular song poses the threat of reminding people that Iraq has been the site of some of the most ancient of human civilisations, dating back to the Sumerians. It's better if we treat these people like they were our children so we can open a trust fund to hold the money we'll shortly be giving them for their oil. Hmmmm you guys don't seem to be buying this one. Ok then we just hate David Gray alright!

3) Outkast 'B.O.B.': I'd like to ban this song for its flagrant and unashamed promotion of the electro revival. Oh, and something about Baghdad and bombs.

4) White Stripes 'Seven Nation Army': it's this kind of moody defiance that we're trying to wipe out. On the other hand a seven nation army is not the kind of thing we can muster so being outnumbered we might retreat on this one.

''ban this sick stunt'

5) The Streets 'Has It Come To This?': this is exactly the question we ask ourselves. Especially when our supposed allies are making references to pirates and urging the Iraqis to "lock down their oil rigs". How many time people? It's not about the oil. Goddam limeys!