One for the Money, Two for the Shoah

A decade ago, Rolling Stone ranked Keith Moon of the Who as the second-greatest drummer in rock and pop history, after Led Zeppelin’s John Bonham. Moon’s brilliant drumstick prints are all over Who classics like “Happy Jack,” “Baba O’Riley” and “Young Man Blues,” but crushing the skins is only half of his renown. Even in the 1960s-70s heyday of sex-drugs-and-rock-’n’-roll, Moon’s chemical-fueled debauchery — including a penchant for trashing hotel rooms and exploding toilets — stood out. Nobody was surprised when he died of an overdose at 31. His musical legacy remains forever, but there’s another, darker side of the Moon. He fetishized Nazis, once going so far as dressing in full Third Reich regalia, then driving a Mercedes convertible around a Jewish neighborhood in London populated by escapees of Nazi-occupied Europe.

Moon is part of a long history that spans classic rock ’n’ roll, the British punk and New Wave scenes, and continues today with megastars like Lady Gaga and the kids of K-pop. 

There’s zero chance Madonna would ever run “Birth of a Nation” behind her during a U.K. concert, nor would Scottish band Primal Scream don Grand Wizard robes and hoods on a U.S. tour leg, but neither had a problem working swastikas into their acts. 

Musician, author, liner-noter and documentary talking head Daniel Rachel lays out this history artist-by-artist in “This Ain’t Rock ’n’ Roll: Pop Music, the Swastika, and the Third Reich.” More than a mere litany of witless “edgy” incidents, Rachel’s book is a deep investigation and deconstruction of why Nazi-by-proxy things keep happening and what happens when iconography becomes detached from its fascist-genocidal roots. Rachel spoke to Truthdig from his home in London. As a bonus track, he curated a playlist for your reading/listening pleasure. 

Truthdig: One thing that comes through in “This Ain’t Rock ’n’ Roll” is there has been an overwhelming amount of Nazi stuff in music over the decades. When did you start to notice it and why did you want to dig so deep into it? 

Daniel Rachel: I’ve had conversations over the years with Billy Bragg about whether music can really save the world as we’d like to believe. Around three years ago, with that idea in mind, I started thinking about musicians in the concentration camps in the 1930s and ’40s, only to find it’s been written about extensively. I’ve always been fascinated by the Third Reich and the Holocaust and I started to wonder about the intersection between Nazis and rock. I was aware of moments like the swastika T-shirt Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols wore in “The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle,” but I hadn’t really considered the infiltration of the Third Reich in my record collection. It set off a train of thought that led to uncovering stuff both new to me, and reminders of other things in my subconscious, like where the name Joy Division originated. 

Before we get into individual musicians and bands, I want to ask about your relationship with Judaism, which in the epilogue you reveal walking away from. How did that manifest itself in writing the book?

I was raised in a Jewish family, but rejected it as a teenager for many reasons. It’s more complicated than just leaving a Christian or Catholic church, though, because I can’t help spending my life with the shadow of knowing if Nazis ever return to power, I’d be sent to an extermination camp. I was probably 12 or 13 when I first saw the horrific Holocaust images from the liberation footage. It terrified me, yet here I was singing along to the Sex Pistols “Belsen Was a Gas,” with the lyrics:

I heard the other day
In the open graves where the Jews all lay
Life is fun and I wish you were here
They wrote on postcards to those held dear

It’s a very strange duality. I was conflicted. Now around the same time, I’ve been told Joy Division was the name of the orchestra in Auschwitz. I don’t know if it was to protect me or simply misinformation, but it’s wrong either way. It’s the name of the concentration camp brothels, an initiative of Heinrich Himmler, where women were sent as reward for factory workers and officers in the Schutzstaffel, the SS. When you stop and consider what the factory produced — not cars, food, jeans or trainers — it’s dead bodies. It’s state-sponsored rape as an incentive to keep the factories roaring. It’s a heavy idea. The genesis of the book was reminding readers, fans, the media and the music industry at-large that Third Reich imagery, lyrics and iconography are rooted in an evil, murderous dictatorship. 

Why does your book focus on the crossover between Nazism and known, often enormously popular, musicians with little said about avowed white supremacist bands like Skrewdriver or Berserkr? 

Going back to the 1960s, the mainstream adaptation or flirtation with the Third Reich is really important. In many ways, I expected the narrative to perhaps run dry from the mid-’80s onwards. At that point, I thought I would get into modern neo-Nazis, fascism and music, but the story runs well into the 21st century. It was getting long and it was never my intention for the book to be an endless list. I’ve noticed a British reaction, fans have asked, “Why isn’t this band in there?” It’s sort of missing the point. Good on them if they want to highlight more Nazi ties, but “This Ain’t Rock ’n’ Roll” is about the larger overall theme of normalization. 

We’re of similar age, and growing up in Billings, Montana, I was surprised the Holocaust wasn’t taught in England, which isn‘t an excuse for Nazi fetishization but helps explain its prevalence in say, the 1970s British punk scene .…

Even today, Holocaust education is not mandatory or standard throughout the United Kingdom or the U.S., which leaves it up to individual states. In England, it wasn’t taught until 1991, nearly 40 years after World War II, so I was self-educated. It isn’t simply the lack of education either, it’s the importance of having it contextualized in a safe space, by a trusted source. The hundreds of marchers in Charlottesville chanting, “Jews will not replace us,” were taught about the Holocaust, maybe without any depth, and it’s also been a central part of popular culture and news footage for decades. Formal contextualized education is important, but even without it, the Holocaust was around all these punks of a certain age who claim they didn’t know. The Adolf Eichmann trial and the film “Judgment at Nuremberg” were both in 1961, “The World at War” documentary was in the early 1970s, the “Holocaust” miniseries was later that decade .… It was all around us. Artists just weren’t considering, or outright ignoring, the reality behind Nazi symbolism.  

Some of these musicians that were all-in on swastikas, like Sid Vicious and Siouxsie Sioux, seem like it was done as shallow snot-nosed juvenile shock value. Why is labeling it as such not enough? 

We all want to think the best of our musical heroes, I do too. It’s easier to brush it aside by telling ourselves our favorite band isn’t sporting Nazi regalia for anything deeper than shock value. It becomes about patterns of behavior, about looking into the history of that band. Is this an isolated one-off? For Joy Division or Siouxsie and the Banshees, it’s a catalog of incidents, sometimes denied by fans, even by the artist themselves. Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring once said, “Iron ore has made the Reich strong. Butter and drippings have, at most, made the people fat.“ Siouxsie alluded to that rare and unusual speech in “Mittageisen,” which she sang in German, odd but deliberate choices for a pop song. 

Using Nazi atrocities as lyrical material is sinister because people tend to sing along without really knowing what’s being said, right? 

What does it mean to have a chorus of fans singing along to Slayer’s “Angel of Death?” It’s a song about Nazi physician Josef Mengele, who practiced inhumane medical experiments on prisoners. The ramifications of people getting caught up in the moment, without considering those who were tortured, is possibly greater than any historical justification. 

Bands of the punk era were more overt about it, but the Nazi fetishization started earlier with much bigger stars, was this new to you?

I’m huge fans of so many of the artists, so I was aware of some of it, but the extent of their flirtation was a shock. I had no idea John Lennon had a collection of Nazi war items. 

I was unpleasantly surprised to learn Lennon tried to get Adolf Hitler on the cover of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”

In 1997, Peter Blake, the artist behind “Sgt. Pepper’s” said Hitler is on there, you just can’t see him. I’m glad John Lennon kept his collection private, that’s his business. The harm comes when they bring their Nazi junk out in public. 

Lemmy from Motorhead is so egregious on this front, I’m not sure I can listen to “Ace of Spades” in the same way again.

I will give Lemmy this: He’s honest about his love of Nazi artifacts and doesn’t equivocate with, “I have a Jewish girlfriend or manager,” as so many have. His memoir was extremely disappointing because he doesn’t contextualize his collection outside of the aesthetics. But he congratulates Hitler for successful achievements: economic growth through war, the birth of the Autobahn, and that he “killed the Jews” like he said he would. There’s no additional commentary other than he has a deep interest in the Third Reich. That’s where it ends with Lemmy, although he does point out he’s had Black girlfriends, which is, of course, irrelevant. This comes from an intelligent well-read man who knows his stuff. Lemmy doesn’t talk about the horrific elements, the extermination camps, behind his room filled with swastika flags and Hitler Youth gear. 

“This Ain’t Rock ’n’ Roll” isn’t just a British story, though. American musicians are guilty of the same things, right?

Sure. The Stooges, Dead Boys and Mötley Crue all have ties of some kind. The New York Dolls are the band that gave Malcolm McLaren, the man behind the Sex Pistols, the swastika motif he distributed across London. Members of the Ramones were Jewish and still made Nazi references. In 1978, Debbie Harry gave a Sieg Heil at a show in West Berlin, and it was even rumored that Blondie was named for the Fuhrer’s German shepherd. At the time, their Jewish guitarist Chris Stein, who also had a collection of Nazi memorabilia, threatened to change the band’s name to “Adolf Hitler’s Dog.”

One of the things your book does so well is show the range from serious grotesque Nazi fetishization, to stupid in-the-moment things, to random bizarre Third Reich connections. To me, Spandau Ballet was the band with the “Sixteen Candles” prom song, but then again, I never looked into their name .…

The band’s name is a reference to the suicide of Hitler’s deputy henchman, Rudolf Hess, who hung himself inside Berlin’s Spandau prison at the age of 93. The “Spandau Ballet,” was a body hanging from a gallows, writhing and contorting, as if dancing. Hess was a sworn Nazi for life who transcribed and edited “Mein Kampf,” a man who proclaimed himself the leader of the Fourth Reich. 

Spandau Ballet certainly weren’t utilizing Hess in any way ideologically, but it is still a cultural association with a man at the heart of it. Yes, the larger point is all of these Nazi connections, which continue to this day. There are extreme examples like Kanye West, who put out a song last year literally called “Heil Hitler,” which caused an uproar in Miami a few weeks ago. But then you also have examples of Madonna and Lady Gaga, who aren’t questioning their affectations in any depth. They aren’t the same in intention, but they are part of an ongoing continuum. 

I have to ask about the universally beloved artist I feel is most central to your book, David Bowie. What do you make of his fascistic Thin White Duke era? And have we collectively memory-holed it just because he’s David Bowie?

Deification Bowie, as I call him now. I love him and own every album he’s ever put out. I’ve also read as many books and seen as many films as I possibly could, some talk about his interest in Nazism, but more don’t. Or if they do, it’s excused away because he was doing so much cocaine, anything to draw a conclusion Bowie isn’t responsible for his actions. To my knowledge, he wasn’t out of his gourd on coke every day of his life, but even if that were the case, how do you account for his brilliant songwriting, staging and costuming? His gift for reinvention? It can’t be that’s all on one side and the cocaine-induced fascism is on the other. It was all part of his thinking. Bowie openly referenced Nazis for at least a dozen years. He tried to explain it away in the ’90s, but has never accounted for his obsession with Joseph Goebbels. He wanted to make a film about him. Did you know he owned Goebbels desk?

I did not, and don’t love learning that. 

Just imagine what was signed at that desk. In 1976, the organization Rock Against Racism was formed to counter the growth of the far-right National Front Party, and David Bowie was Public Enemy No. 1. He was the first rock star on all of their posters alongside Adolf Hitler. His music will live forever, as it should, but it doesn’t erase his years immersed in Nazism. The evidence is there.

What about the Kanye West situation, where to a degree, he tanked a booming career and is now actively trying to revive it via public apology? 

Kanye West has apologized before, saying he’s not antisemitic, so another pattern of behavior. And I believe his last few albums sold roughly a million copies, which came after the various praise he gave Hitler and the Nazi party. What’s more concerning, or as concerning at least, is that Kanye doesn’t operate as a silo. He has his group of managers, agents, record company executives and a vast array of people working to protect the Kanye West brand. No decision happens singularly and yet these incidents keep occurring. Then there’s the idea his behavior is excused because he’s bipolar. Again, we want to excuse our heroes, to think the best of them. Winston Churchill was bipolar. He didn’t like Nazis very much. 

Lastly, what do you hope “This Ain’t Rock ’n’ Roll” accomplishes? 

In modern music, overt racism isn’t acceptable. Even misogyny is being challenged more and more. I’m not American, but as you pointed out, it would be crazy to feature lynching or KKK footage at a concert, but Nazi iconography including the Hakenkreuz, the hooked cross swastika designed by Hitler, is still fair game. At no point in the book do I accuse anybody of being a Nazi, I suspect the majority of people mentioned in it don’t share Adolf Hitler’s stated beliefs in his writings and speeches. Yet, far too many rock stars feel they can cherry-pick ideas, images, terminology and deviancies as they see fit. They claim it has nothing to do with the Third Reich, but it doesn’t change the reality that behind that are people’s lost lives. Those were people living on the same streets as friends and neighbors, neighbors whose successive family histories are still present in all of our lives. It’s why we can draw direct parallels with the recent killings at the synagogue in Manchester and on Bondi Beach. 

The Nazis were responsible for a history so horrific it can never be forgotten. The swastika represents the death of millions of Jews and other minority groups. Everyday people were seduced by Nazism and that’s why the parallels and dangers needed to be written about within the framework of rock ’n’ roll history. Music is amazing in its ability to reach people and change them in all kinds of ways, not all for good. Normalizing dehumanizing fascist iconography will lead to more atrocities. The long-standing intersection of Nazi fetishism and rock ’n’ roll shows no respect for the victims of the Holocaust. It’s unacceptable.