There is, I suppose, a grim irony in a band named after the man whose assassination triggered World War I now having their biggest hit conscripted into propaganda for what increasingly looks like the opening chapter of the next major regional war. On Saturday, the Israeli Defense Forces set a video of fighter jets, ground explosions, and an Israeli soldier celebrating the recent joint U.S.-Israeli airstrikes on Iran to Franz Ferdinand‘s “Take Me Out”, captioning it “Operation Roaring Lion—this is how it’s done.” Frontman Alex Kapranos responded on his Instagram Stories with the kind of clarity you’d hope for: “These warmongering murderers are using our music without our consent. This makes us both nauseous and furious. Kind of typical, though, isn’t it? To strut up and take what isn’t theirs with a vile arrogance…”
The (now deleted) video in question is part of the IDF’s messaging around Operation Roaring Lion, Israel’s name for the joint strikes launched with the U.S. on February 28 that killed Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, targeted hundreds of military and leadership sites across Iran, and also bombed an all-female primary school, killing 168 young girls. The strikes have since provoked retaliatory attacks from Tehran on Israeli targets and American bases across the region, and the situation is now threatening to spiral into a wider conflict—one that Trump, for his part, seems entirely comfortable accelerating, having warned that Iran would be “hit very hard” in response to its retaliation, while Netanyahu promised “an organised plan with many surprises” for the next stage of the war. It is not the sort of thing that should be soundtracked like a highlight reel, but the IDF has never been particularly shy about aestheticizing its own violence, and “Take Me Out” (a title that, in this context, reads less like a romantic proposition and more like a kill order) is about as ghoulish a needle drop as you could come up with.
This is also, unfortunately, part of a much wider pattern of military and state entities borrowing the language of pop culture to launder the aesthetics of violence. We wrote just last week about the White House using Kesha’s “Blow” to score a missile-strike fancam. Similarly, ICE’s recruitment strategy has leaned heavily on familiar songs, meme formats, and short-form montage language to rebrand armed enforcement as something fun and communal: soundtracking detainment footage to Sabrina Carpenter, packaging raids with Olivia Rodrigo hooks. The IDF video operates on the same principle: take something people already love, drape it over footage of mass destruction, and hope that the familiarity of the music smooths over the horror of what’s actually being shown. It is propaganda in its most literal form, and the fact that it’s being distributed casually on social media, commodified and spun into brainrot content, makes it all the worse.
Franz Ferdinand, for their part, have never been quiet about politics. In 2016, they released “Demagogue” ahead of Trump’s first election, and Kapranos described the result as a “nightmare.” But there’s a difference between choosing to make political art and having your art conscripted, without permission, into someone else’s military propaganda. Kapranos’ statement doesn’t mince words, and it shouldn’t have to.
