This Ain't Rock 'n' Roll: Pop Music, the Swastika, and the Third Reich
By Daniel Rachel
Akashic Books
336 Pages
$29.95
"Adolf Hitler was one of the first rock stars. Look at some of his films and see how he moved. I think he was quite as good as Jagger. It's astounding. And when he hit that stage, he worked an audience." –David Bowie
What was going through David Bowie's head when he said this to Cameron Crowe, who was interviewing him for Playboy magazine, in 1976? Yes, Hitler was a mesmerizing speaker. This is undeniable. But how could Bowie not have acknowledged that the Führer's performance was in service of a war and a genocide that resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of people on battlefields and in extermination camps? As charismatic as Hitler may have been, is it not deranged to see him as a precursor to Mick Jagger?
But Bowie, in the Führer's thrall, then declared, "I could have been Hitler in England. Wouldn't have been hard…. I think I might have been a bloody good Hitler. I'd be an excellent dictator." Which is why the title of this book is a Bowie quote. "This ain't rock 'n' roll! This is genocide!" he cries at the beginning of the Diamond Dogs LP.
At least Patti Smith, who, like Bowie, saw Hitler as "a fantastic performer," a "black magician," and somebody that she learned from, recognized that he was also "a hunk of shit."
This Ain't Rock 'n' Roll is a catalogue of the connections between the music industry and Nazism. And the author, Daniel Rachel, seemingly overlooks nobody in the business who has ever expressed a thought about Nazis. Some are pro-Nazi (Kanye West). Some are anti-Nazi (Manic Street Preachers). And one claimed to be anti-Nazi but is actually pro-Nazi (Roger Waters).
A number of the performers Rachel cites, notably the punks of the 1970s, were into Nazi chic and the idea of indiscriminate shock by whatever means necessary. Partial to Third Reich fashions—SS uniforms were designed by Hugo Boss, a member of the Nazi party—some of them wore black leather trench coats, shiny black boots, and Iron Crosses. Others, like Sid Vicious, wore swastika T-shirts or armbands in order to provoke the generation that fought in World War II—because the punks thought the swastika was a cool symbol and many of them were too ignorant to know what it symbolized. They thought the WWII generation took Nazis too seriously.
Others knew full well who the Nazis were and what they did, but felt it was their right as artists to write songs invoking Nazi imagery. They then claimed they used that imagery to condemn Nazism, and in most cases apologized after the fact if their song/video/stage show offended anybody (Lemmy).
This Ain't Rock 'n' Roll is a disturbing book, one I often had to put down to contemplate the information it contains or to google the images it talks about—there are only a half-dozen photos. One image Rachel describes that sent me down internet rabbit holes is a painting from the book Rock Dreams, by the artist Guy Peellaert, published in 1973 (and probably unpublishable today): In a room full of naked, prepubescent girls, Jagger is wearing garters, stockings, and boots, the other Rolling Stones are wearing Nazi uniforms, and Keith Richards, an Iron Cross around his neck, is sipping from a swastika-branded teacup.
I also stopped reading to watch Leni Riefenstahl's 1935 masterpiece of Nazi propaganda Triumph of the Will, which Rachel constantly refers to. I wanted to make up my own mind as to whether Jagger really had copped some of his moves from Hitler. My conclusion: Maybe he did, like the arm movements or walking with his hands on his hips. I also needed to see this documentary to fully appreciate Nicki Minaj's "Only" video, which evokes Triumph of the Will and was released on the anniversary of Kristallnacht. (Minaj apologized if the video or its release date offended anyone.)
And I put the book aside to listen to Joy Division, the post-punk band named after a brothel in Auschwitz where women were forced into sexual slavery. The book's cover illustration, a member of Hitler Youth banging on a drum, is from a 1930s German propaganda poster that Joy Division used for the cover of their EP An Ideal for Living. The band is referenced countless times, as is Siouxsie and the Banshees, because Siouxsie wore those fashionable and provocative swastika armbands.
This Ain't Rock 'n' Roll is as much a book about rock history as it is a book about Nazi history.
This Ain't Rock 'n' Roll is as much a book about rock history as it is a book about Nazi history, a fact borne out in an index of cognitive dissonance—Bono followed by Martin Bormann, Mein Kamph followed by Melody Maker.
And it's a distinctly British book, with British spellings and punctuation (single quote marks where double quote marks would be) and full of references to incidents, bands, songs, and TV shows that are better known in Britain than the US. I was, for example, unfamiliar with the band Throbbing Gristle and their tune "Zyklon B Zombie" that, according to Rachel, sold 60,000 records in the UK.
Among the other bands I've never heard of, probably because they got little to no radio play or mainstream media coverage in America, are Master Racial Masturbation, Cockney Rejects, A Certain Ratio, Theatre of Hate, The Skids, The Exploited, Bethnal, and Body Snatchers. Nor was I familiar with the concert promoters Final Solution or 2 Tone records, whose bands, like Madness and The Specials, were anti-Nazi but whose shows attracted Nazi sympathizers.
Yet I may be the perfect audience for This Ain't Rock 'n' Roll. In addition to my abiding interest in rock music, I, like a number of musicians Rachel writes about—Ron Ashton of Iggy & the Stooges comes to mind—was also fascinated by all things Nazi when I was a kid. My father, an infantryman in WWII, had fought the Nazis in Europe, liberated a concentration camp, and brought home a box of war souvenirs. I played with those trinkets as if they were toys: a Nazi bayonet, a Nazi compass, a swastika flag, and Nazi medals that I pinned to my chest. I first attempted to read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich when I was eight; the capture of Adolf Eichmann was one of the most exciting moments of my childhood. And long after putting my "toys" aside, I wrote a book titled Bobby in Naziland (later re-released as A Brooklyn Memoir) about growing up in the aftermath of WWII, in Flatbush, a neighborhood populated by concentration camp survivors and army veterans—a neighborhood suffering through an epidemic of PTSD and one that became the setting for William Styron's novel Sophie's Choice.
Yet even after a lifetime of living in the shadow of the Holocaust and reading about the Third Reich, there were myriad facts and anecdotes I didn't know that Rachel uncovered about the Nazis and their connection to rock music and pop culture.
One story I hadn't heard was how, in a London underground station, Keith Moon, dressed in full Nazi regalia, came upon an unattended announcement booth, picked up the microphone and said: "All Jews line up here, ready to be gassed." Nor had I been aware that the SS lightning-bolts emblem is almost identical to the last two letters of the Kiss logo or that Sid Vicious wrote the Sex Pistols song "Belsen Was a Gas." And in a useful comparison to Donald Trump, who, like Hitler, is a megalomaniacal tyrant with dreams of domination, the Führer's chief architect and minister of armaments and war production, Albert Speer, said of Hitler's endless monologues, "One of the reasons he gathered so many flunkies around him was that his instinct told him that first-rate people couldn't possibly stomach the outpourings."
This, and so much more, can, for your reading horror, be found in the pages of This Ain't Rock 'n' Roll.
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