Thursday, March 10, 2005

Lemmy's Take on History, SpongeBob

Here's the story of Lemmy, as told by Yahoo!:

Ian Kilmister, a.k.a. Lemmy, the frontman for Grammy-winning English rock trio Motorhead, could have made a stimulating history professor, sharing his begrudging admiration for Goering and disdain for "bastards" like Hitler and Roosevelt with eager students. Instead, the 59-year-old achieved cult fame with generations of headbangers by singing and writing furious anthems like "Killed By Death" and "Orgasmatron."

But he remains fascinated by World War II and he spends his money collecting Nazi memorabilia, which is piled high in his two-bedroom apartment off the Sunset Strip. "I was born in '45, the year it all ended," Kilmister said in a recent interview over Jack Daniels and Cokes at his local watering hole, the Rainbow Bar and Grill. "It's not ancient history to me, and I don't see it as all the good English and Americans and all the bad Germans."

...Coincidentally Motorhead, which Kilmister founded 30 years ago, is biggest in Germany, and he never misses an opportunity to tour historic sites across Europe -- though not the concentration camps. "You've got to draw the line between what you like to collect and what they actually did," he said.

[Update: I took out a part of the interview where he talks admiringly of Goehring. It was wrong of me to include it in the first place, and I apologize for doing so.]

...He says his interest in history and current events has taught him about hypocrisy and people's refusal to learn from the past, and that it also inspires his songwriting. "Sex, war, murder and death," he said. "And injustice, and there's plenty of that around. I don't foresee being short of subject matter in the foreseeable future." Yet, many of the songs are laced with humor, such as 1984's "Killed By Death," and the band somehow landed a song on the soundtrack for the children's movie "SpongeBob SquarePants."
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I wonder if the interviewer recorded the conversation with the mike looming over Lemmy's head.

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