Bankers fleecing us? Markets out of control? Call in… er… Motörhead! December 17, 2010
Posted by WorldbyStorm in Culture, Economy.trackback
Motörhead’s latest album, The World is Yours was released in the last week or so. As you’ll gather I keep my eye on these matters.
It’s a speedy little concoction which is no mean achievement after decades of output, with a hint of the Pistols in the riff, but imagine my surprise when I went to check out the video to new single… Get Back in Line.
Some might find the text on the cards thrown on the table at 0.39 interesting.
Top marks for references to unions and anti-banker sentiment (Perhaps deduct a few for the slightly dodgy sexual politics at the end…), and gaze in awe at how ver Motörhead continue on after all these decades.
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Hmm. Well ok, Ace Of Spades was an all time classic of course, but 30 years on might they have finally run out of ideas
The old outlaws haven’t lost it though, the “Fuck the Establishment” sentiment shines through. Maybe their day has come around again…
It’s difficult to keep writing in not merely the same genre, but a very very specific subset of a genre for 30 years…
though as someone once said about Ramones if you like the idea you’ll like hearing it again and again (I like the Ramones – a lot).
I was actually surprised by the pro-union sentiment. Not sure why, perhaps I thought Lemmy and co. were more anti-establishment in a generalised sense…
I like the Ramones a lot myself, though I don’t tend to listen to them much anymore in any great quantity. They are just a little repetitious.
Pro-union rhetoric and Heavy metal, is that a first?
Hard to say.
Queensryche had a pretty revolutionary couple of albums in the late 1980s. I’ll have to go looking…
Queensryche were very, very popular in Dublin in the late eighties, more so than in most parts of the world (and certainly their homeland.)Operation Mindcrime was a little bit ambiguous in its politics, though.
Yeah, they got into a lot of trouble in thevUS about it, but broadly speaking I think one could term them, or their singer whatsisname leftish in a US sense.
There was Trust of course
>>>>I like the Ramones – a lot
Must . . . . resist. . .
I do remember an interview with Lemmy where he played the working-class Tory, ‘you’re too young to remember Labour governments son, they were shite’ card. He also has a dodgy collection of Nazi memorabilia. This new waxing is still fab, mind.
Pro-union rhetoric and Heavy metal
Never really thought of Motorhead as Metal – more nearly the last survivors of what used to be called Hard Rock. I guess the distinction is a fine enough one, but I figure HR retains a tenuous link with blues/ r n’b chord structures and sticks to relatively simple song forms, whereas metal goes in for that awful chromatic barre-chord riffing and fussy and grooveless drumming.
That’s true though beloved in metal circles and the territory metal claims is now very wide. There’s a lot of punk flowing through those veins of Lemmys.
About eight years ago I saw them in Dublin, just after Joey Ramone died. Lemmy said that from the stage and a small part of the crowd boooed JRs name to which Lemmy went, ‘Nah he was great you silly fuckers’ before promptly launching into Motorheads R.A.M.O.N.E.S
I bow before your greater knowledge there SoS. The closest I ever got to long haired music of any kind was Horslips, other than that it all sounded the same to me, and not in a good way. Actually I lie, Black Sabbath also…and of course Motorhead’s “Ace of Spades” is a cracker, it gets a regular blare on the family PC in our kitchen, so another generation of impressionable minds falls victim to its excellence.
Such careful spelling of the band’s name
Believe it or not it’s not just due to a liking for them. I was once taken to task by someone from a certain famous and powerful central European country for not including the all important umlaut in their name.
Given that in my own name offline I have a fada which I don’t get particularly exercised if people use it or not I was sort of amused.
Sort of.
I used to get irritated at the Guardian’s refusal to spell Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian names (transcribed from the Cyrillic alphabet) correctly: Milošević, not Milosevic. And a letter to Madam suggested we formally drop the fada change the country’s name to Eire (= encumbrance).
As someone with a smattering of Slavonic, this drives me demented. The fada business is worse. Fuck it, what’s wrong with being literate?
Well yes but on the other hand, when we use foreign names in English prose we’re also rendering them in English, which is a language that very rarely uses diacritics. Hence it can be seen as a quite reasonable convention that foreign names, both personal and place-names, can be written without diacritics.
There’s an example I’m very familiar with: I live in Aragon, which in Spanish cannot be written without an accent (thus Aragón) except, curiously, if it is written entirely in upper case. So I write in with the accent, in Spanish – but normally I leave it off, when writing in English.
That said, I don’t think it can ever be wrong to render a name with its original diacritics, but I’m not persuaded that it’s wrong to leave them off as part of a consistent policy.
He’s aging well, I have to say – I first encountered him shitfaced (him somewhat more then me) in a pub in Hammersmith in the 80s.
The cartoon violence is a little, how shall I put it? … subdued – perhaps the arthuritis was playing up.
I must say having just listened to the lyrics,it’s definatly a call for action.Could become a workers anthem.
Sorry for the blatant thread hijack, but a personal hero, the great Captain Beefheart has died….
RIP Don.
Cheers sos for that. I hit the scratcher with the rancid white boys’ blues in my head. Another one gone…
Jeez, that’s a shock. While I was never a big
fan, “Electricity” and “Ice Cream for Crow” are
two excellent pieces of music.
RIP.
Well hijacked sos.
Just coming back from an archaeological party where the first side of Ice Cream was played accidentally, mar dhea. This is a bit of a shock. What can you say? Perhaps this does it… I dunno… I always thought this was at the heart of r’n'roll
RIP
It’s very sad. Again, like Starkadder, never a big fan but there were some great moments.