Napalm Girl
1985 · Creation CRE019T · London, UK: England
- Artist
- Slaughter Joe
- Title
- Napalm Girl
- Release
- I'll Follow You Down
- Year
- 1985
- Label
- Creation # CRE019T
- Format
- 12" · Single
- Language
- English
- Country
- London, UK: England
- Genre
- Rock · Noise Rock · Punk Rock
- Primary theme
- Post-War
Annotation
Slaughter, also known as "Slaughter Joe", was Joe Foster, the bass player from Television Personalities, born 9 August 1960 in Bloomsbury, London, UK, and currently based in Glasgow, UK. The Punk Rock song "Napalm Girl" (Creation Records # CRE 019) is presumably a reference to Phan Thị Kim Phúc, referred to informally as the Napalm girl, a South Vietnamese-born women, who was famously pictured at the age of 9, in 1972, running naked on a road after being burned in a napalm attack in South Vietnam. The photo was taken by Nick Ut, which won a Pulitzer Prize, and is one of the defining images of the Vietnam War. (1) Chemical weapon Napalm B is a jellied gasoline mixture, with polystyrene, benzene, and gasoline. Declared a war-crime since 1980, the US government extensively used this weapon during the Vietnam conflict, dropping 388,000 tons on Indochina between 1963 and 1973. (2) (3) (4) So in this song the group use sharp, fast noisy guitar sounds to present a napalm attack: "wish I'd never seen... get down... on your hands and knees".
Annotation by Justin A. Brummer
About the artist
Born United Kinidom: AKA: Joe Foster