One of those groups who are let down a little by their front man's appearance - not that he isn't "charismatic", he certainly commands the stage.... but his owlish babyface and mullety hair-style, combined with the bared chest in the performance above.... well he's punching above his weight here in the studly rockgod contest
The source of authority is the self and the self alone - even when it comes to getting a prescription for a pair of glasses.
Now this bit....
Gonna break out of the city
Leave the people here behind
Searching for adventure
It's the type of life to find
... reminded me of the echt-Sixties freedom anthem "Born To Be Wild" and its "looking for adventure"
"A true Nature's child" - except for the technocratically designed and administered apparatus of highway construction / extraction-refinement-transportation of gasoline /manufacture of Harley Davidsons.... that entire enormous engine of post-war production-innovation-prosperity that buoys up the adventure of those allegedly breaking "loose" from it, yet secretly utterly dependent on it....
Irresistible song, though - with another great lyric
Get your motor runnin'
Head out on the highway
Looking for adventure
In whatever comes our way
I like smoke and lightnin'
Heavy metal thunder
Racing with the wind
And the feeling that I'm under
Yeah, darlin' gonna make it happen
Take the world in a love embrace
Fire all of your guns at once
And explode into space
Like a true nature's child
We were born, born to be wild
We can climb so high
I never wanna die
Born to be wild
"Fire all of your guns at once /And explode into space" - this where the complicity with the military-industrial complex almost rises to consciousness within the song
And weren't many Hell's Angels actually veterans of World War 2 who found a return to suburban-domestic quiet life to be too boring? (Some, notoriously, supported the Vietnam War and offered to beat up peacenik longhair protestors...)
On the subject of libertinism - hark at the cover of the Rods single!
That's Aleister Crowley, with Mickey Mouse ears on!
Now I am told by students of the black arts that my interpretation (in Shock and Awe) of Aleister C's dictum "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law" is wrong - it doesn't mean you can do whatever the hell you like, it means that whatever the Cosmos has designed you for, has endowed and ordained as your nature or gift or vocation or purpose, you should pursue that to the limit, or rather to the no-limit.
"Wilt" means "willed" - it's not you doing the willing, you are being willed. Your deepest existential drive is not a matter of volition, something you decided for yourself, but rather emanates from ... the Force or whatever they call it (Thelema?). So rather than being a Luciferian or "disobedient child" mission statement, "do what thou wilt" is really about a kind of submission to the World-Will.
However I must say, in practice, the maxim would seem to be a recipe for a "do-what-you-like" approach to pursuing one's desires - a psychopath or abuser could say, "just following my nature here! Just being my best monstrous self!".
Another hit single expressing a similar life-stance to the Rods hit, from just a few years later: Thin Lizzy, "Do Anything You Want To"
Equally irresistible tune: the Burundi-ish drums invent Adam and the Ants several months ahead of schedule, great dual-lead gtr. And some good lyrics from Phil
There are people that will investigate you
They'll insinuate, intimidate and complicate you
Don't ever wait or hesitate to
State the fate that awaits those who
Try to shake or take you
Don't let them break you
You can do anything you want to do
It's not wrong what I'm saying, it's true
You can do anything you want to do
Do what you want to
People that despise you
Will analyze then criticize you
They'll scandalize and tell lies until they realize you
Are somebody they should've apologized to
Don't let these people compromise you
Be wise too
You can do anything you want to do
It's not wrong what I'm saying, it's true
You can do anything you want to do
Do what you want to
Hey you
You're not their puppet on a string
You can do everything
It's true
If you really want to
You can do anything you want
Just like I do
You can do anything you want to do
It's not wrong what I'm saying, it's true
You can do anything you want to do
Do what you want to
Hey you
You can do
Hey you
Yes, you
The repetition of "you" drills in this idea of the listener being directly incited to autonomy - "Hey you!"
This advert flexes what Althusser called interpellation - or hailing. It's like a recruitment ad - "the country of rock'n'roll needs YOU"
Actually there are two you's in "Do Anything You Want To" - object and subject.
There's the "you" of the verses, persecuted and bossed around. And then that "you" busts loose, in the chorus, into free living.
A perfect anthem of adolescence.
The last lines are odd in this "nothing can hold you back" anthemic-ness context:
Elvis is dead
The king of rock and roll is dead
Elvis is dead
A sobering conclusion to a song based in the idea rock'n'roll shows you the royal road to freedom and self-realization - early death (42 in Elvis's case)
And of course Phil Lynott would be gone by the age of 36... drugs and drink related illnesses.
As the Thin Lizzy tune ended, another song piped up on YouTube - in an advert - "nothing can stop me, I'm all the way up"
Yes the sentiment is imperishable - and this idea of rock-as-unbridled-freedom lives largest in hip hop
Underlining my sense that rap's politics are libertarian and magical voluntarist (positive thinking, visualization, manifesting) *
As with pre-punk rock, it's the worldview of the adolescent, the disobedient child.
Of course, no way for a society to be run and thank god for the conscientious parentally minded professionals trying to keep the whole shitshow on the rails...
Personally I am in favor of more rules and regulations - a World Government, with an arsenal of punitive powers for those destroying the live-ability of the planet.
Not just Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry for the Future, hatching policies and solutions and hoping they'll be taken up ... but a whole judicial apparatus...
A Super Ego for a world amok with id energies
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
* Reminded of this surprising quote about his addiction to MTV from Harold Bloom
"My favorite viewing, and this is the first time I have ever admitted it to anyone, but what I love to do, when I don’t watch evangelicals, when I can’t read or write and can’t go out walking, and don’t want to just tear my hair and destroy myself, I put on, here in New Haven, cable channel thirteen and I watch rock television endlessly. As a sheer revelation of the American religion it’s overwhelming.... I watch MTV endlessly, my dear, because what is going on there, not just in the lyrics but in its whole ambience, is the real vision of what the country needs and desires. It’s the image of reality that it sees, and it’s quite weird and wonderful. It confirms exactly these two points: first, that no matter how many are on the screen at once, not one of them feels free except in total self-exaltation. And second, it comes through again and again in the lyrics and the way one dances, the way one moves, that what is best and purest in one is just no part of the creation—that myth of an essential purity before and beyond experience never goes away. It’s quite fascinating"
Too many examples...
addendum
I suppose "Anarchy in the UK" and its flipside "I Wanna Be Me" are the properly punk versions of the Sovereign Ego stance.... "I Wanna Be Me" especially sounding more paranoid and cornered than triumphantly free.... a portrait of identity confusion and fear-and-loathing of the media
I had enough of this
This is brainwash
And this is a clue
To the stars who fool you
Gimme World War Three
We can live again
You didn't fool me
I fooled you
You wanna be me
Yeah, didn't I fool you?
I ruined you
I got you in the camera
And I got you in my camera
A second of your life
Ruined for life
You wanna ruin me in your magazine
You wanna cover us in margarine
And now is the time
You got the time
To realise
To have real eyes
Down, down, down, down
And I'll take you down on the underground
Down in the dark
And down in the crypt
Down in the dark
Where the typewriter fit
Down with your pen and pad
Ready to kill
To make me ill
Down, wanna be someone
Wanna be someone
Need to be someone
You wanna be me
Ruin me
A typewriter god
A black-and-white king
PVC
Blackboard books
Black and white
Wanna be me
Lot here (complimentary) - let me try and take it in bits:
ReplyDelete1. Your point about the unspoken implications/omissions in Born To Be Wild reminds me that its most famous usage, in Easy Rider, could also carry that - Hopper and (I think) Terry Southern both made the point, decades after the fact, that their 'new cowboy' bikers could be read as wannabes and pretenders who didn't so much blow it as never had it to begin with
2. Hip-hop has, from at least the early 90s onward, a sort of bent Horatio Alger mentality - early on, it was that even if racism precludes you from reaching the upper echelons of official American elitism, you can still beat them at their own game by intuitively grasping that only a thin veneer of false respectability separates titans of industry and finance from gangsters and using that to your advantage; later, once those heights were reached by a certain few, it became much weirder and detached from the everyday lives or even aspirations of most Black Americans - a sort of Black Patrick Bateman-ish syndrome set in
3. The dialectic underlying all of this, of course, is the push and pull between liberation of self and imposition on others - what Alan Moore, twisting Blyton to anarchist ends, dubbed the Land Of Do-As-You-Please versus the Land Of Take-What-You-Want. Both claim the mantle of 'freedom', yet it's very easy to see how that could be shifted towards the freedom to exploit and oppress others - following on from Crowley, speaking of occultism, Anton LaVey himself called Ayn Rand the secularized version of what he was teaching.
DeleteAnother good example: the recent confusion by the right and the centrist establishment of 'freedom of speech' with 'freedom from consequence for themselves' :
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/12/bari-weiss-censorship-free-speech-hypocrisy/685404/?gift=Je3D9AQS-C17lUTOnl2W8NFQyfCs6CQ9s2PP9UlygC0
Despite all of this, I still do believe in liberation, both in a political anarcho-communist sense and a personal/sexual sense - the problem is that it'll take a long time indeed to sort through those conflicting impulses, assuming we can at all
4. Speaking of late 70s temporal-rhetorical dissonance, only from the other side: I've always found it funny that Barry Gibb and Frankie Valli's title theme for the movie adaptation of Grease, in addition to the obvious anachronism of being disco, also features very post-60s lyrics about enlightenment, social liberation and forming an explicit movement against 'conventionality', none of which fits in with the film or the depicted period. The former is a fascinating Frankenstein's monster to begin with - originally a hard-R regional stage musical about a very specific slice of ethnic Polish Chicago with all original songs, by the time it got adapted to film it was PG, set in Anytown USA, and half outside/jukebox numbers - but that especially sticks out
DeleteRap - which is why the famous scene in Scarface (look at the bad guy etc) is so central in gangsta rap imagination
DeleteRe. 'Grease' the song. Yeah I've always been puzzled by the fact that it's so '70s and un-rock'n'roll in sound. Never really paid close attention to the lyrics though
Barry Norman's original review of Grease:
Deletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjWvs4FsBfA
Basically, everything about it is wrong, but somehow it still works.
"Personally I am in favor of more rules and regulations - a World Government, with an arsenal of punitive powers for those destroying the live-ability of the planet. "
ReplyDeleteThis is, of course, just another variant of Boomer utopianism. Lennonism with Churchillian characteristics.
Crowley is not really taken seriously in dedicated occult circles, btw - he is basically The Monkees of Golden Dawn magic. The real deal are the likes of Dion Fortune, MacGregor Mathers, Wynn Westcott etc.
Aleister's definitely the one that rockers know about most though. Bowie typically dug deep, I remember Dion Fortune was one of his favorites.
DeleteAustin Osman Spare is the esoteric choice of the industrial set, I think.
I don't take any of them seriously - but I take seriously the uses that people who do take them seriously have put them too.
The Monkees are great!
I read that Phil Lynott lyric about Elvis as a statement of unlimited possibility: the King is dead, so now anyone can do anything. It’s like Nietzsche’s line about the death of God: “Shall we not ourselves have to become Gods, merely to seem worthy of it?”
ReplyDeleteThe lyrics are very like hip-hop, too.
“People that despise you
Will analyze then criticize you
They'll scandalize and tell lies until they realize you
Are somebody they should've apologized to
Don't let these people compromise you
Be wise too”
Jay-Z would have been happy with that.
Yeah it's close to the haters critique - although "despise" is not quite the same as "envy"
DeleteTo be annoyingly pedantic, Hells Angels is spelt without an apostrophe. Their website stated as to the matter of the missing apostrophe, "it is you who miss it. We don't."
ReplyDeleteGoing off on a tangent, Living Color did their song "Elvis is Dead", with a guest verse by Little Richard. Perhaps intended as an excoriation of those cashing in on the memory of a dead man, its grisly relish in describing Elvis with coarse, ignoble imagery does make it seem also a sneer against the man himself. Here's the video, and I have one question: is the cut-out of an Elvis impersonator Gary Glitter? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nvpRkn_R5g
“Do Anything You Wanna Do” by Eddie and the Hot Rods was written by their guitarist Graham Douglas and Ed Hollis, the group’s manager (who also produced the record). The younger brother of Ed Hollis was Mark Hollis, of Talk Talk fame. Is there an element of libertinism in their biggest hit “Life’s What You Make It”? Definitely no euphoria to be detected in the songs lyrics, but perhaps a resigned libertine perspective?
ReplyDeleteTalk Talk's earlier hit "It's My Life" is pretty self-assertive, I would say.
DeleteI actually quit my first job with this ringing in my ears.