Jethro Tull’s “Aqualung”: An Unrecognized Tragedy

^[1]724 words

The song “Aqualung ^[2],” the title track on a Jethro Tull album from 1971 bearing the same name, is quite familiar to those such as myself who were born in the middle of the Pleistocene epoch. Although it’s one of the best-known songs in Jethro Tull’s repertoire owing to its striking riff, its full meaning isn’t obvious. From a superficial reading of the lyrics ^[3], it seems to be about a bum checking out girls from a park bench while suffering from chronic bad health.

Still, there’s more underneath the surface. How did he get there? That’s the tragedy. In a time when anti-war songs were quite popular, this somehow escaped recognition for being one.

Who was Aqualung? ^[2]

Jethro Tull – Aqualung (Official Music Video)

At first glance, it might seem that the lyrics don’t leave much to work with in regards to textual analysis. The next song on the album, “Cross-Eyed Mary ^[4],” which highlights another face of the downtrodden, also mentions Aqualung briefly, but nothing further is revealed about his identity. The key to the mystery, as it happens, is in his name.

By now the meaning has been obscured by time’s passage, but in 1971 it was more obvious. There were living examples then: veterans of the First World War who had survived gas attacks but then went home with irreversible lung damage. This often resulted in raspy breathing, much like what we’d now associate with Darth Vader. It’s quite possible that Aqualung’s painful leg was the result of a battlefield injury, too.

Was Kaiser Wilhelm to blame? Not so fast — he tried to stop the disaster ^[7] before it got started. Now how about all those warmongers who sat pretty at home while sending their country’s finest into the meat grinder? The guilty parties in that unnecessary war didn’t deserve a drop of blood to be spilled on their behalf.

Aqualung came away with a broken body, but what happened to his mind? It’s not entirely clear how prolonged exposure to unrelenting terror and scenes of utter atrocity affected him psychologically. Whatever the results were, he couldn’t reintegrate into society after his demobilization. The wounded soldier spent the rest of his years sleeping out in the open, often in the freezing cold, frightened of strangers and smoking discarded cigarette butts. The local soup kitchen was his only lifeline keeping starvation at bay. With a normal life out of his reach, he spent his days gazing at the pretty girls and wondering what could’ve been. Finally, in spring, when the flowers were in bloom, the forgotten veteran’s untreated illness choked the life out of him.

Let’s stop fighting someone else’s battles ^[8]

Pink Floyd – When The Tigers Broke Free [Video]

The character of Aqualung is fictional, of course, but he was a poignant archetype of the Lost Generation, which had been ground up in the gears of the “War to End All Wars.” This kind of fate wasn’t only a British tragedy, of course. It was also repeated, but not as a farce. The outcome wasn’t so different in the various wars that were later fought for globalism, the banks, and Zionism — causes which are getting harder and harder to distinguish between lately. Plenty of veterans returned from the “War to Make the World Safe for Democracy” with their minds shattered — and some were literally lobotomized. The Vietnam War in particular produced another generation of veterans, many of whom ended up homeless and abandoned on the streets, some of them hooked on heroin. Things were hardly better for those who fought in the later spit-in-your-eye wars, other than that their addiction was rather to opiates in the form of Oxycontin ^[9]. “Aqualung” is thus their story, too.

We can expect this vicious cycle to repeat itself if Resident Bidet’s handlers get froggy — unless, of course, they think big and end up destroying the world, in which case nothing I am saying matters, anyway.

In closing, I have an imprecation for all those politicians, profiteers, white feather bitches ^[10], and other ghouls who sent their countrymen off to unnecessary wars in which many good men had their bodies and minds mangled or destroyed. To those guilty parties, I offer a hearty Bronx cheer and a Foxtrot Uniform loud enough to be heard down in the pits of hell, where I hope these externalizers of the Oedipus Complex are enjoying their stay — not!