This ain’t rock n’ roll: Pop music, the Swastika, and the Third Reich

Author:Daniel Rachel

“This ain’t rock n’ roll…” (TARR) is a polemical history of the use of Nazi imagery and semiotics in rock music, particularly covering the 1970s onward. You get an idea of where it is coming from by Billy Bragg having written the forward (though this is not a topic which invites a dispassionate analysis given the awfulness of what the Nazi’s did, and inspired in others).

TARR documents some grim quotes and style errors by lot of national treasures regarding their complicity and airheadedness about appropriating swastikas, recommending (or at least trying with plausible deniability to consider) right-wing authoritarian leaders, and generally observing that those Nazi’s had a lot of style (which brought to mind PJ O’ Rouke’s observation that “be that as it may be, nobody ever had a sexual fantasy about someone dressed as a communist”).

The author of TARR would not find that funny; as though Nazi ideology is ostensibly not a topic to joke about. But it really is. People laugh at death and that which they fear, “dark humour” being a classic defence mechanism, and over 50 years on, “The Producers” remains a fantastically subversive response to Nazis and the boneheads who like them. Authoritarians don’t like being laughed at, so do your worst. The trouble is the nature of the bonehead who exploits polemical subversion; while David Bowie was bitten on the arse by this in his cokey “Thin White Duke” era, others have got away with it rather more than they should. The rant by Eric Clapton, at the Birmingham Odeon, in 1976 (was anyone there?) remains a shocker, and particularly given “I shot the sheriff” had been a recent hit, and the black blues artists on whom Clapton made his career: :

“Do we have any foreigners in the audience tonight? If so, please put up your hands So where are you? Well wherever you all are, I think you should all just leave. Not just leave the hall, leave … our country I don’t want you here, in … the room or in my country. Listen to me, man! I think we should send them all back. Stop Britain from becoming a black colony. Get the foreigners out. Get the wogs out. Get the coons out. Keep Britain white … The black wogs and coons and Arabs and f*cking Jamaicans don’t belong here, we don’t want them here. This is England, this is a white country, we don’t want any black wogs and coons living here. We need to make clear to them they are not welcome. England is for white people, man This is Great Britain, a white country, what is happening to us, for f*ck’s sake? … … Throw the wogs out! Keep Britain white!”

Oh dear. Too much “Love Thy Neighbour”? No wonder Rock against Racism emerged (though interestingly, RAR was seemingly a bit more awkward about anti-semitism). Grand old men of rock don’t come off well. John Lennon also. “Imagine”.

On the author’s reading punk also got a very easy ride regarding the gormless use of Nazi imagery and swastikas, etc. A 19-year-old Siouxsie saw it as winding up middle-aged suburbanite adults still going on about WW2, Mick Jones (part Jewish) was part of the awks-named “London SS” and had a collection of Nazi memorabilia (as so many rock musicians once did), and as for the Sex Pistols – Christ, where do we start? Here. Malcolm McLaren’s mendacity and provocation emerges as key. Once a situationalist, then trying to give the later New York Dolls a commie chic makeover, Malcolm never saw a provocation he didn’t seek to use, like the nasty showbiz huckster he was (child porn was an idea he also mooted using, as was a singer with the look and “arm movements” of Hitler). By the witless, shit end of the Sex Pistols (“Belsen was a gas”, “No one is Innocent”) , Malcolm McLaren was hiding in plain sight. He may have seen himself like an Ed Wood/ William Castle exploitation movie director, but the patina of art and trendy acceptance he had meant he was worse than that – and he was never knowingly kind or humane in what he did, either. Just cynical.

Speaking of unkind hucksters, Genesis P Orridge, the Throbbing Gristle collective, and Factory records (never missing a totalitarian phrase to use for their cooler student audience) also get pointed out, long after anyone still cares about these John Peel type acts. Was it just turning rebellion into money? Well, that the gormless, pitiful Sid Vicious often wore a swastika t-shirt had it’s reciprocal in Joe Strummer’s “Brigade Rosse” shirt (worn at Victoria Park for the RAR show) showed he could as easily support another bunch of ideological murderers, and there’s been plenty of that since, Raging against the Machine and making money hand over (raised) fist.

I think a lot of this is about the appropriating of cultural symbols, and 25 years after WW2, the Nazi’s were still high in every adult’s mind, whether they had fought, been a war child, or like us, read “The Victor”, watched “Where Eagles Dare”, and asked for the theme to “The Dam Busters” to be played on “Junior Choice”. I dare say there are many folk on the other side of the Iron Curtain using their version of murderous authoritarian chic ironically, “artistically”, or nostalgically. The systematic violence used by a century of communism has been odious, too, though had much better PR given the 100m killed in Russia and China by internal conflicts, engineered famines, etc. Cultural symbols are used in popular music for their meaning and cultural shorthand, whether religious, occult, political, or even the natural world. The Nazis are a more sinister example of such things, but maybe we need to have a nuanced understanding and interpretation of what is being communicated. In a research study I once did, I sought to see how commonly people were interested in Nazi’s, as some clinicians suggested it is a strong indication of an unwholesome mind. I found over 90% of a large cohort were interested in them, and mentally disordered offenders (who you might think keener on them) no more interested than a control group. Projecting pathology onto people looking under stones and into the toilet bowl needs to take other things into context.

Length of Read:Long

Might appeal to people who enjoyed…

Gary Lachman’s “Turn Off Your Mind”or “Touched by the Presence”, sociological analyses of popular music.

One thing you’ve learned

Lemmy’s apologetics for his collection of Nazi militaria are very weak. Mid-70s Nazi art-porn (“The Night Porter”, “The Damned”, etc) is a kick in the arse off the rather less generously-regarded “Ilsa: She Devil of the SS” movies.

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