Added: 5 years ago
From: KillRockStars
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  • Beautiful...vid reminds me of the end of Blackadder Goes Forth.

  • Am I mishearing this song or is it really about two soldiers having gay sex in the trenches?

  • @BigFatTubOfLardCo

    It can be interpreted that way. But I think It's less of a romantic love and more of a brotherly thing.

  • if there were a god, justin fucking beaver wouldn't have a thousand times the views of the decemberists, this song is epic

  • "But you, my brother in arms!" I'm 12, and the Decemberists are my FAVe band EVER!!! I don't get why everyone feels like it's so important to say their ages, but... I'm 12! :P :P

  • I didn't realize I was ridiculous for thinking true love is beautiful between all different types of people.

  • This an independent video? I love the song, but the levels seem a bit off... kinda quiet...

  • @dubld00ce no this was made by the decemberists

  • Bullshit this is not a homoerotic song. If you wana hear the truth which you wouldn't, th Decemberist are markxists.

  • @buckwats When you can spell and understand Marxism I'm sure people will be happy to give a fuck.

  • @massdrewski this song is homo erotic i saw them live and the lead singer annouced "and now for a song of homo erotic soldeirs"

  • Buttsecks

  • @mapparu sir what is that comment for? obviously 'tis more about what you, sir, prefer not the song. we needn't know you sexual preference.

  • i just saw the decemberist like 2 weeks ago in nashville, they played this and i sang along

  • I saw the decemberists last night in omaha, and the lead singer specifically said, "let's delve into the homoerotic trenches of our music." i'm gay and love them, just thought it was an interesting tidbit.

  • i love world war one themed things....

  • In all the song's i have heard about war. They all say the same thing, the glory of the soldiers fight for thier country. KIlling nazi's, fighting for america. Thats bullshit. This is the first song that tells the honesty of what war is-brotherhood.

    Cadet Sarsfield,USNSCC

  • Seems like the village idiots have discovered the internet, the Nazi Party was interventionist not socialist, the name is indeed the National Socialist Party, but this only came out after strong debate between calling the party the National Socialist Party or the National 'Social' Party, the use of 'Social' occurs often in German Dialectics. Whats next the Social Democratic Party in Portugal is Social Democratic? The Liberal Party of Australia are Liberals?

  • @SandstoneSandgroper Really?i mean do you really want to warp american history that much? Hitler was a liberal right? let me tell you what he was. a legally elected individual. as opposed to the previous president. keep it out of good music please and read a book go justifyslavery next.

  • Comment removed

  • @SeaGoat7 I am right in suspecting this comment was not intended to be a response to me? Just your comment seems as if it was intended for some one talking about Bush and being a Fascist apologist, which doesnt really fit with my critique of political party names.

  • @SeaGoat7 hitler legally elected...okay? the rest of your comment doesn't get much better from there, so we'll pretend you humiliated yourself just that once. You tried to tell someone off, but ended up playing the fool. Wait, stop. What you want to write back is hopelessly unoriginal. Just take a deep breath...and let it go, child.

  • @reenactor19th I might be wrong, but I think technically Hitler *was* legally elected. I mean, after the first world war Germany was massively screwed up, economically and politically, and Hitler was a very good punlic speaker, so he didn't have a lot of trouble getting people to support him. What's frightening is how quickly he managed to pass laws to crush opposition and turn Germany into a one-party state. Obviously, it wasn't moral, but it was legal :(

  • @HexReinette if you count Bush as illegally elected, then Hitler was exponentially more illegally elected. Even if you don't count Bush as illegally elected, Hitler was still illegally elected. Of course, the way we're talking about it is also horribly flawed because we're talking about it in simplistic terms that don't really correspond with the political system of Weimar Germany. Again, it's not personal judgment against you. Just let it float away.

  • @reenactor19th ..."just let it float away"? dude, seriously. I made one comment, and I didn't even mention Bush (who I have no doubt rigged the polls in...uh, Florida, was it?)

  • @HexReinette hey, I'm not defending Bush. I'm just saying, if you believe he was illegally elected, then you should burst out crying/laughing at the notion that Hitler was illegally elected. Laughing because that is hysterically wrong, and crying because people actually believe it. You should put the snippity attitude away. And we're at two posts now...and it's floating and floating...shhh, child. just let it go.

    (and you mentioned Bush in the post I first responded to)

  • @reenactor19th Whatever

  • @reenactor19th How bush and hitler were elected were two completely different scenarios...and i like how you guys reached two posts and fulfilled Godwin's Law. “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.” Hitler dismantled the old Wiemar republic, whereas George Bush is accused of breaking the law within an existing system without being reprimanded for said offense.

  • @CaeserAexix Tvtroper? *fistbump*

  • @reenactor19th Its all a matter of perspective. The Government Hitler ran validated his reign. His supreme chancellorship was granted to him by the Wiemar government. Whatever "Illegal" means he used to stifle opposition and dismantle the old regimes hold on power become irrelevant. They no longer existed so their laws meant nothing. And one should not compare present standards with the standards of the past. Their was no real concept of international law. The League of nations was a failure.

  • Um...stupid aguments all around. Just a good band.

  • Check out my cover of THE RAKE'S SONG

  • haha jew you can't spell insightful

  • Guys, it's just a name. The name of the band doesn't make them at all any different then if they were something different. All that matter is that they make good music..

    Adore this song cx

  • See, this is what happens when inbred red necks, get the internet. Using text speak, to try and make a point. It's a Good song, and a great band. Get some friends, stop pretending you're popular and learn to spell. That's it baby.

  • this comment is almost beneath contempt

  • wow kids, really? its just a band's name and this is just a song. enjoy it for what it is, a song.

  • whguh: there are interpretations of facts in history, and debates of course over what constitutes a "fact." this i will grant you. though there are cases in which there is real ambiguity and a variety of opinions can be expressed, sometimes certain opinions are not at all warranted by the facts, and are thus absurd. saying that the 1825 decembrist revolt was communist is absurd and ignorant. i can provide specific evidence for this if you'd like, but i'm sure you can find this on your own

  • god neither the supporters of this band's supposed communist sympathies and people who heckle them for the same have any idea what communism or socialism is. the decemberists are on record as believing that the 1825 russian revolutionary movement from which they got their name was a communist (one assumes marxist). this just proves the band's ignorance, since the historical decembrists were constitutional democrats and regardless marx didn't start writing until the 1840's. fuck everyone.

  • The nuances of political movements are such that its hard to label them, one man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist. It depends on which side of the water you look from. Your view on history is different from the Decemberists, doesn't make them ignorant. History is opinion not fact

  • wow listen to you! you know history! how smart and important you must be. this band is evil because of possible historic connections, like U2 and the Beach Boys! who are you so we simple creatures may follow you, you who know all!! please teach us to be the self righteousself centered overeducated yet under informed jerks who judge past cultures by currents standards.

  • just read the lyrics... definitely about homosexual soldiers, awesome :)

  • what's the meaning of this song? obviously beyond soldiers.

  • Cristiano Ronaldo

  • FAG! bahahaha

    just kidding that comment just put into words exactly how i feel and why i hate to read youtube comments, thanks!

  • haha no worries man. I had to get a wordfilter to block like half the comments...

  • i think people forget this, but this commenting space is not so a bunch of assholes can complain about irrelavant shit, but rather to comment on the video at hand. Remember that.

  • I do agree. I have defended too many decent music videos because of such.

  • no i'm fairly certain it's for people to threaten you with superstitious chicanery and call each other faggots.

    btw, you're an arrogant prick. see?

  • Hi! You must be new here. youtube comments are 99% unrelated bullshit. usually calling someone a faggot.. or a jew.. or something racist... inbetween all that one guy every now an then makes an inciteful comment. and is immediatley called one of the things above. and so continues the circle of youtube commenting.

    Signed

    Faggot, jew or something racist.

  • I see you've taken onboard what I've said. =p

  • Just being nice.

  • don't forget grammar correction...which is lost on most people...

    btw, that's "insightful," not inciteful - calling someone a fag/jew would be inciteful if the word was proper english. Oh, wait, I need to mispell something...ooh, i feel better, thanks!

  • if only jewtube had an edit button.. oh well live and learn.

  • This isn't 4chan. Fuck off please.

  • It's true... makes you wonder why they even waste their time writing comments that nobody pays any attention to.

    Signed

    Heathen or some other stupid insult

  • Good comment there.

  • @sbtech01 fukin jews! =P

  • @sbtech01 I bet your one of those caucasians aren't you. You make me sick with your white uncolored skin and your various colored hair. I BET YOUR EVEN A HETEROSEXUAL doing sick things with those of the opposite gender. You make god and baby jesus cry.

    Figured I'd mix it up.

  • @sbtech01

    You are today's winner of the "one guy every now an then" award!

  • @sbtech01 +1 for a great comment and a second +1 from another account for the ending sentement!

  • @sbtech01 You my friend have been on Youtube for a very long time Signed,  Apparent new kid

  • One would take the text to be homoerotic unless one has been in battle and underfire. when you are in the military and under fire, your brothers become you. you trust your life in them and would do anything to help. You grow to love them as a mother, father and brother. it is hard to understand for someone whom has never been in combat. but listen and try to understand. A soldiers love is different. You love because to give your life to someone else to help protect and would do the same.

  • It's actually not that difficult to understand. I'm not saying that you're wrong, because you're very right, it's just that it upsets me when people expect less from other people, we should be expecting more, more intelligence and more understanding. When you actually use your brain, it shouldn't be difficult to understand that war makes brothers out of strangers.

    Maybe it's because I'm a writer that I understand things so well, but that's no excuse for the rest of the world for not being smart

  • Okay, just by reading your last comment, you're quite the arrogant one aren't you? I apologize for the rest of us non-writers down here for being so stupid.

    And, more relevant to video, I love The Decemberists, this song, and the video for it.

  • That was directed at craazhy by the way.

  • I wasn't saying I'm smarter because I'm a writer. I'm saying a large amount of my work is war related stories.

    I'll admit, maybe undermining a good willed comment was a mistake, but all I'm saying is there are a lot of people in the world that are still struggling to understand concepts that have existed since the beginning of organized society, and we should be expecting more. I wasn't trying to put myself on a pedestal, I just want the world to be as wise as they have the potential to be.

  • Ah well, I see. Just a simple case of misunderstanding I suppose.

  • @massdrewski Uhm, pretty sure this isn't about just love for your fellow soldiers, but it's pretty explicitly about romantic love. The protagonist refers to his subject as "My bombazine doll" and goes on to sing about staring into each others eyes while cradling each other on a bed in civilians cloths (i.e. not on duty)...

  • @massdrewski

    that's very possible, but they really intended this as a romantic song... i saw them perform yesterday and he announced this song as 'a song about two soldiers who are very attracted to each other in the trenches of WWI'

    I can imagine the kind of friendship and brotherhood you experience, but this song really is meant to be homoerotic.

  • @massdrewski

    you may be one hundred percent correct in your assessment of soldierly love, but I still think your wrong about the song. The homosexual aspect seems very deliberate. You can't negate the writer's intentions, with your comparisons of heterosexual soldierly love, regardless of how correctly you characterize it.

  • looks like a bad assortment of cheap surplus rifles. Great song in contrast to the weapons.

  • It's a stylized music video not Saving Private Ryan.

  • Communism was based on Marxist philosophy, but in the end it became slightly different because not all ideas, such as everyone living in harmony as equals, didn't happen, as Stalin and Lenin ruled with terror.

  • More Stalin with terror, with his five year plans which killed a hell of alot of workers and his somewhat bias court cases.

    Lenin introduced the NEP, which almost everyone loved

    "Communism will never work because people like to own stuff" just about sums it up

    Good song

  • @putasensura factories don't have political views

  • its a pretty quiet video but it sounds very good.

  • song's awesome but the band is a bit communist.

  • how are they communist and if they are then why is that bad?

  • They play the Soviet National Anthem at the beginning of all their concerts, also they meet in a Turkish bath spa, and as history proves communism will never work.

  • Unfortunately imperfection in people will probably never allow communism to succeed but Soviets and Turks are communist, that doesn't mean that their Anthem or Bath Spas make people communist.

  • Umm... okay it's how communism takes away a lot of rights that people who are under a republic of democracy have like religion and the right to own private property, which you don't get in a socialist or communist government.

  • Actually communism is an economic system rather than a governmental system so there could be a communist democratic republic, in theory. Also freedom of religion isn't in any way related to communism or socialism.

  • Communism is not an economic system. It *is* a socioeconomic structure - which is more than a simple economic system. It is *also* a political ideology, which means it includes the concept of an ideal form of government.

  • At the same time there is no one dominant theorist of Communism; and hence there is no one communism per se'.

    A lot of people assume Marx is *the* theorist of communism; but actually he had fairly little to say about a potential Communist society. All we can know about it is that it would not retain any of the social relationships that make Capitalism possible.

    Marx was a theorist of Capitalism and a philosopher of history and the human subject; he wasn't a theorist of Communism, per se'.

  • that doesn't mean they're communist

  • Then why do they play the Soviet National Anthem at the beginning of all their concerts?

  • Haha they didn't meet in a Turkish bath spa. They've all been in bands for awhile in Oregon, and they met through mutual friends. I don't know where you got that one from.

  • All right I'll admit I'm wrong on that but not the communist part. The band's name refers to the Decembrist revolt, an 1825 revolt over the Imperial Russian succession that Meloy views as an attempted communist revolution

  • you seriously need to take a breath and chill out. they don't start ALL of their concerts with that song, i've seen them plenty of times when they didn't do that. maybe it's a recent thing.

    but the point is, everyone looks a little too deeply into their lyrics. colin is a history buff, who happens to find the decembrist movement interesting- like i happen to find world war 2 and hitler's germany interesting. does that mean i want the usa to become socialist and kill jewish people? of course not

  • Hitler was a fascist not a commie fascist hate communist as a point of fact oddly enough him and stalin had an agreement not to attack each other but hitler betrayed him.also I like studying the nazis so to speak all of thier weird shit they got into but I agree with you I have no idea why I wrote all of the above.

  • Socialist is not the same as communist, and while nazi Germany may have been nothing like a socialist state as most people would conceive it, 'nazi' stands for nationalsozialismus - national socialism.

  • fascism is basically the right wing version of Communism, that the state is more important than the people

  • it was a misnomer

  • And? During its conception the NAZI part was Socialist. After Hitler was given control of the party, it was no longer a Socialist party...but kept the name.

  • continued:

    colin has been quoted plenty of times as saying if he really likes an idea from history or from a story, and he runs with it in a song. the entire crane wife album is based off of a book. plenty of people do this. when you write a fictional story about something in history, it's called historical fiction. i'm sure there is a whole section for it in your local bookstore.

  • You ever read "Fallen Angels" by Walter Dean Myers?

  • i just have to say it this comment because every communist believes in something entirely different that history proves everything will end up communist. hahah i dont care either way i just found that funny and had to share

  • What do turkish baths have to do with communism?

  • kevin bacon

  • either way, if this song is about gays being happy together or on how brothers at war become so close, the song is absolutely great

  • It makes me so happy when I see two ugly people so happy together

  • 3:20 to 3:38

    is so good, so Neutral Milk Hotel-esque

  • holy crap! gtfo

  • hahahaha...nice

  • ...D: NO YOU DIDN'T. GTFO

  • GOD, I love this song.

  • It looks like they love eachother, it's so nice.

    Not in s sexual way though.

  • Sure... don't ask don't tell

  • It's guy love, between two guys.

  • There's nothing gay about it, in our eyes.

  • i love the decemberists!!!!

  • Eeee! Me too!

  • For some reason I love the way he says 'arms'

  • <3 this song

  • The helmets in the video are the types they used in WWI

  • And WWII....The Korean war and some time after....Atleast for the British Commonwealth.

  • this might sounds really stupid, but this looks more like WWI than the civil war. I guess thats just me, cuz I mean there in trenches and their hats look like the ones in WWI

  • This is WWI. They refer to trenches in the song. While trenches are used in most wars/conflicts, they are typically mentioned when referring to WWI.

  • haha i love his voice its so vute...

  • lol it is foolish to argue about this, but it was entertaining. i especially like the part where one of them said

    "please stab yourself in the liver"

    "after you,"

  • haha you guys got into an argument about crap that really doesn't matter, oh man that was some prime entertainment while i was waiting for the video to load...and also this is a great song

  • wtf do you care about guns anyway.. they are no that cool.. the song is

  • Garands are WW2 not WW1 and the Lee EnField is a fricken british company and the americans had sprigfields

  • my comment was a reply to those people arguing.

    I love love love the song, I think it's about falling in love and keeping it alive in the worst of times.

  • Read Band of Brothers sometime and you will understand how men can be that close and still not be gay.

  • I think we could say the realationship in the video is a little deeper than that

  • Well the guys who made this video are infering something other than the song I think...

  • yeah, the song is definately leaning towards a camaraderie feeling, but I think in the vid it's more lovey dovey lol

  • For anyone into historical/literary stuff, Storm of Steel (Junger) and All Quiet on the Western Front (Remarque) also give good examples of how soldiers develop a special bond because of all the stuff they have to go through together.

  • actually the line is "swaddled in our civies." its short for civilian clothes. it means they used it for bandaging....dude

  • actually the line is "swaddled in our civies." its short for civilian clothes. it means they used it for bandaging....dude

  • WHO CARES!

  • I KNOW LOL!

  • thank you

  • Jesus.

    The internet is crazy. But I have to agree. The Lee-Enfield rifle in question was indeed invented in 1895. The Enfield used in the Civil War was known as the "three-band" Enfield. It's a musket reinforced by 3 bands of steel, hence the name. You people are pathetic for getting into an argument about it.

  • lol, hey you just replied, thanks for agreeing with me btw, but that also makes you pathetic since you replied to this argument

  • Please stab yourself in the liver.

  • after you

  • *Stab!* More like after me!

  • this whole entire argument is pointless about the song giving out a homoerotic message, its not it just isnt, it shouldnt be discussed anymore because its pointless, just enjoy the music, since its great

  • your comment reminds me of an old joke about "the longest river in egypt." it's especially amusing in light of your keen interest in "guns."

  • Yet another example of the Decemberist's beautiful composition ability's.

  • Bombazine is a crepe-ish cloth used back in the day for dresses and suits of mourning. Take the symbolism where you will, I guess. The word homo-erotic is thrown around a little too much for this time period under discussion, people. They didn't think or live *quite* like us. I'm not saying it never happened, but people under fire have a hell of a lot more to worry about, you know? This song is extremely deep, so I say again, please don't knock it by being crass and cynical. It's rude.

  • im glad somebody said it...

  • don't ask, don't tell-- but you kids do know that "skivvies" means underpants, right?

  • yea its a kinda underpants like boxers

  • he doesnt even say skivvies. he says "civies" meaning civilian clothing. god.

  • moron, he says Civies not skivies. Civies is a term used in the military referring to civilian clothing. Hence dungarees.

  • Well for those of you who keeps insisting that there are no homo erotic overtones in this song, I have to ask, when would a straight guy ever refer to his army buddy as a "bombazine doll?"

  • Um, if you think all male-male bonding is homoerotic, you're a bit narrow minded. You're meant to come up with your own conclusion, but me being me, I think it's cute either way.

  • If you think this is gay go read a history book! This was the worst war, psychologically, in history. The Decemberists are one of the very few bands in the world to use history as their subject matter. If you don't get the history, you're missing half of their music.

  • well, i'm a historian, and i am of the opposite opinion.

  • yeah, brothers in arms is simply theyre friends, or close allies on the battlefield, and whent he song says "id rather id lose my limbs then let you come to harm" its not meant in a love way hes not gay hes just saying that he cares for his companions, i dont see why people had to see this video as homoerotic at all