131. Ace of Spades

Motörhead: Ace of Spades (Bronze, 1980);
composed by Ian Fraser Kilmister, Edward Allan Clarke, and Philip John Taylor

From the time that super high-definition guitar noise became feasible and readily monetizable in the late 1960s, and insofar as that sound was tethered to pop music forms – i.e. songs with sung words – one of the most formidable formal issues has been what sort of words are a natural fit with that unnatural, technologically fabricated sound. Do you proceed as if the unnaturalness was not there by puffing up the grandeur of the meat robots doing the playing, or do you address the technological displacement directly even if you look a little abject? One of my pet theories is that the former is a capsule definition of heavy metal, while the latter does likewise for punk. And one of the many charms of Motörhead was how Lemmy Kilmister’s long-running concoction flipped two fingers at the distinction and confused everybody too thick to get his point. Motörhead were plenty loud and plenty fast, but Lemmy projected a very singular personality as a bellowing frontman – hectic to know, but funny as hell in an oddly introspective kind of way, as in this diffident praise of poker: “The pleasure is to play, Makes no difference what you say, I don't share your greed.”

Note: Secular essays about individual songs, each one exactly 200 words long, appearing one per day through Advant and at least semi-regularly until Donald goes away.