In April 2007, Republican presidential hopeful John McCain stood onstage during a primary campaign stop in Murrells Inlet, South Carolina, blew his nose, and fielded a question about sending “an airmail message” to the “real problem” in the Middle East: Iran. The senator considered the attendee’s proposal, shoved his used handkerchief into his pocket, and launched into an impromptu rendition of “that old Beach Boys song, ‘Bomb Iran.’” “Bomb, bomb, bomb …” he sang briefly in the cadence of “Barbara Ann,” the doo-wop classic popularized by the Beach Boys in 1965. The moment drew big laughs in the room, but it nevertheless became a defining gaffe of McCain’s presidential bid. A grainy video of it went viral on YouTube, Barack Obama cited it during two presidential debates, and McCain was forced to clarify in multiple interviews that he was “joking.” But a warmongering “Weird Al” Yankovic McCain was not. Rather than an off-the-cuff riff, his joke was a reference to an existing parody song that, improbably, traces the story of the past four decades of U.S.-Iran relations — up to and including the recent bombing by the U.S. of three nuclear facilities in Iran on June 21.
The origins of the song date to the Iran hostage crisis of 1979. In response to the U.S. granting asylum to the brutal and recently deposed Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi — whom it had previously installed by engineering a coup of a democratically elected leader — a group of Iranian students stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and took 66 Americans captive. Calls for retaliatory military intervention against the country were immediate, and it took less than a month for one of these war cries to take the form of musical parody. Over the next year, at least six radio DJs and novelty musical acts released songs titled “Bomb Iran,” riffing on the aforementioned Beach Boys’ staple. There are slight variations in musicality and lyrical content across them, but they all accomplish the same effect of laundering repetitive calls to violence through sunny barbershop quartet harmonies. They’re maddeningly catchy. Listen to any of them twice through and the refrain “bomb Iran” starts to feel matter-of-fact. (This is to say nothing of the song “Ayatollah,” a “My Sharona” parody by Chicago radio personality Steve Dahl that covered similar themes.)
An American public enraged by the ongoing hostage crisis seemingly found a release valve in these ham-fisted parodies, as several of them became regional or national hits. The most well-known version, by Vince Vance & the Valiants, charted as high as No. 101 on the Billboard “Bubbling Under Hot 100 Singles” chart and likely would have charted higher if not for legal-clearance issues that made its popularity difficult to track. In a 1980 piece in Billboard, Tom Rivers, a local radio DJ in Anchorage, Alaska, wrote about the regional success of a “Bomb Iran” parody he recorded with his wife. Within just three days of playing the song on air, his local station supposedly logged 20,000 calls, 97 percent of which were supportive. (For context: The entire population of Anchorage at the time was 200,000.)
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While the U.S. government did not ultimately heed the advice of Vince Vance to resolve the hostage crisis by “turning Iran into a parking lot,” as the lyrics go, the conflict kicked off a period of steely diplomacy between U.S. and Iran, during which time forceful intervention into the country has never strayed too far from the foreign-policy discourse. The song likewise has a way of resurfacing whenever tensions in the Middle East are inflamed. In 1981, while the hostage crisis was still ongoing, Vince Vance tried to recapture the popularity of his original with a follow-up single titled “Nuke Iran”: In 1992, Rush Limbaugh played on his radio show a version of the song titled “Bomb Iraq” with updated lyrics about the first Gulf War; in 1997, political-satire group Capitol Steps put out a version of the song on its album Sixteen Scandals. A decade later came the infamous McCain gaffe, and leading up to the 2012 presidential election, Pulitzer Prize–winning cartoonist Jim Morin put out an editorial cartoon in which leading Republican candidates Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, and Mitt Romney cynically sang “Bomb Iran” as a way to shore up their election chances.
When Israel launched its full-scale war against Iran on June 13, the jingoistic Beach Boys parody once again began to make the rounds. Days after Israel’s first strike on Iran, a video went viral of a family in Israel standing on a balcony and performing an updated version of “Bomb Iran” with the lyrics “We bombed Tehran, we blocked their plan / ’Cause when you’re messin’ with the Jews, you’re always going to lose, it’s God’s plan.” The musician Rahill posted an Instagram Story about an Orthodox Jewish synagogue blaring “Bomb Iran” into the streets of New York via loudspeaker. On Monday, two days after the U.S. attack on Iran, President Trump negotiated a cease-fire between Iran and Israel, bragging that he had achieved “peace through strength.” The next evening, he posted a propaganda video to Truth Social featuring footage of B-2 stealth-bomber jets soaring ominously and majestically through the sky. You’ll never guess what song was playing.
