All the kids in the back of the club want the military to keep producing the most expensive plane in history. What, you didn’t know?
Lockheed Martin wants to remind you. Just in time for the Paris Air Show, it rolled out a new website for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter family of jets on Monday. The first thing that bombards you when you load it: a multi-gender, multi-racial band of Fort Worth youth vowing “I’ll go anywhere/I’ll do anything,” presumably singing from the perspective of a Joint Strike Hipster.
The glasses! The hoodies! The sweater vests! The F-35 stickers on the guitar case next to the fraying Nirvana and “Keep Austin Weird” decals!
What is it with defense contractors and music videos these days? When Northrop Grumman released footage of the first flight of its experimental carrier-capable drone, the X-47 had a soundtrack thatsounded like the Killers covering “With Or Without You.”
Lockheed Martin explains it’s all about the music. The company licensed “Go Anywhere, Do Anything” from a production music library it uses, and then recruited “real musicians mostly from the Fort Worth area” to perform it for a music video in 2010, explains F-35 spokeswoman Laurie Quincy.
“We wanted a band that could really learn to play the song for realism, even though they are not actually performing the song,” Quincy says. OK then.
The video actually debuted last year as an all-purpose promo for Lockheed aviation products like the F-22 Raptor or the C-130 cargo plane. For the f35.com, Lockheed decided it’d select the choice 30 seconds focusing on the Joint Strike Fighter. You know, like remix culture?
One thing you won’t learn from the video is that the Pentagon’s most recent lifetime estimate for procurement and maintenance costs for the F-35 is a trillion dollars. (“I’ll cost anything…” presumably didn’t scan.) Nor does it mention that the Marines’ variant is on pause for the next two years so Lockheed can demonstrate its reliability.
But whatever, grandpa. If Congress complains about the cost of the jets, just play lawmakers the video. And the enthusiasm evident from these kids suggests that it’ll fly on a mixture of bathtub Sparks and hoarded Four Loko, so at least it can cut down on fuel expenses.
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