All the same, the trend troubled many members of the rock community—those who had managed to be young and dumb without donning an S.S. outfit or collecting Wehrmacht daggers. In the late seventies, the Rock Against Racism movement in the U.K. mobilized in response to anti-immigrant diatribes delivered by Clapton, which echoed the far-right National Front. Billy Bragg, who contributes an introduction to Rachel’s book, was a youthful member of that antifascist wave. The Dead Kennedys sang, “You still think swastikas look cool? / The real Nazis run your schools.” The rock critic Lester Bangs diagnosed white-supremacist strains in the punk world: “Anytime you conclude that life stinks and the human race mostly amounts to a pile of shit, you’ve got the perfect breeding ground for fascism.” In the dishevelled grunge years, Nazi regimentation lost prestige, although it didn’t disappear completely. Carlos Dengler, of the early-two-thousands band Interpol, adopted Hitler Youth drag, which he later rationalized as a critique of his German heritage.
The final chapters of Rachel’s book turn to modern pop, showing in the process that fascist chic is not exclusively a white male problem. Michael Jackson’s teaser for the album “HIStory,” in which the star marched between rigid ranks of soldiers, was echt Riefenstahl. Madonna and Lady Gaga each dipped into S.S. kink by way of the 1974 film “The Night Porter.” Nicki Minaj alluded to “Triumph of the Will” in her “Only” music video. Last year, Kanye West released a song titled “Heil Hitler”; this year, he blamed a car accident and a bipolar condition for the misstep. For the most part, however, Nazi strutting belongs to the glory days of white rock and roll, alongside the decorative use of the Confederate flag and other gestures of reactionary rebellion.
Few authors have looked closely at rock’s swastika fetish, and Rachel deserves credit for his assiduous gathering of evidence. In an epilogue to “This Ain’t Rock ’n’ Roll,” he says that he grew up with the music in question, singing along to “Belsen Was a Gas,” and that writing the book was painful for him. Unfortunately, he doesn’t shed much light on the origins of the phenomenon. Although he is right to emphasize unrepentant antisemitism in Western societies, it’s clear that many rockers in the book weren’t viscerally anti-Jewish. Some, in fact, were Jewish themselves. Tommy Ramone, the principal author of “Blitzkrieg Bop,” came from a family of Holocaust survivors. So did Gene Simmons, who once said, “One word from Hitler and the masses would move in unison. It was the same with Kiss.” At times, Rachel’s framing becomes hazy, as when he cites the Scottish band Primal Scream, which has used Nazi imagery to excoriate Benjamin Netanyahu and the state of Israel. Whatever the merits of that approach, this is not a case of a band drawing a positive charge from fascist iconography.
The British-born media theorist Dick Hebdige offered a gentler interpretation in his 1979 book, “Subculture: The Meaning of Style.” Focussing on punk, Hebdige argues that the likes of Siouxsie and Sid Vicious aimed to jolt the establishment by aping history’s supreme bogeymen. One scenester justified the swastika look by saying, “Punks just like to be hated.” Hebdige then turns to post-structuralist theory: “The signifier (swastika) had been willfully detached from the concept (Nazism) it conventionally signified.” In other words, in a postmodern, end-of-history age, fascist symbols lose their specific menace. Likewise, Pamela Rooke, a Sex Pistols adjutant who sported a red armband during the band’s television début in 1976, later shrugged off the episode by saying, “There was no Nazi Party now.” Johnny Ramone claimed that “there’s no threat right now of any Nazi thing,” though he did perceive a “communist threat.” Alas, signifiers have a way of reuniting with their signifieds, and the Nazi thing is alive and well.
The source of the syndrome may ultimately lie in the theatrics of the pop spectacle: isolated figures receiving the adoration of a mesmerized public. Such ceremonies of idolatry go back into the deepest past, but mass communication empowered performers to an unparalleled degree, as it had empowered Hitler. In this sense, Bowie’s discussion of media manipulation in that Playboy interview offered a valuable bit of analysis. The Beatles recognized the new reality when they walked out on a Melbourne hotel balcony. Rapt throngs were materializing out of nowhere, summoned by signals that had circled the planet. Centuries of Anglo-American cultural imperialism laid the groundwork for the Beatles’ ascendancy: English was the language of hegemony. Sound reproduction put the entire globe within reach. Electric amplification enabled the band to perform for audiences of awesome size—fifty-five thousand people in Shea Stadium, in 1965. Without microphones, the Beatles and all their successors would have been inaudible.
