On Saturday, Motorhead will be live-streaming Ian "Lemmy" Kilmister's memorial service on youtube, In Lemmy's honor, here are some recommendations of what to read while listening to Motorhead this week.
His most famous song, The Ace of Spades, is about gambling, and Lemmy loved gambling, particularly slot machines. Since Lemmy also loved music, sex and drugs, and started his career in the 1970s, Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas seems like a good place to start in your memorial reading.
Lemmy died of cancer, a real mother-fucker that has taken way too many wonderful people from the world way too soon. Metal gets a bad rap for being dark and angry, so get angry and read Barbara Ehrenreich's Bright-Sided. No, it's not part of anyone's divine plan and it's not for the best.
But since Lemmy did live fast and die (relatively) old given his habits, it's also appropriate to celebrate his life instead of dwelling on his being killed by death. While listening to his autobiographical song, "We Are the Road Crew"
read Lemmy's autobiography, which explains some of the lyrics in greater detail. It's called White Line Fever. Just remember whose book it is you're reading. I key-word searched "fucking" in Google books and had 84 hits and that doesn't count "fucked" and "fuck."
If you think about everything politically, it's probably worth it to think about Lemmy in the context of heavy metal and rock more broadly. If you want to go that way, let's start with one of my favorites, "Eat the Rich" which seems to be about both class war and oral sex.
To read while that's spinning, read this interview with Lemmy from Inked magazine, and then check out Robert Walser's Running with the Devil: Power Gender and Madness in Heavy Metal Music, which I recently recommended to a student who was writing a thesis involving heavy-metal fandom. Walser is a musicologist, and this book is rare in that it gets good marks from metal fans, academics and music critics.
His most famous song, The Ace of Spades, is about gambling, and Lemmy loved gambling, particularly slot machines. Since Lemmy also loved music, sex and drugs, and started his career in the 1970s, Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas seems like a good place to start in your memorial reading.
Lemmy died of cancer, a real mother-fucker that has taken way too many wonderful people from the world way too soon. Metal gets a bad rap for being dark and angry, so get angry and read Barbara Ehrenreich's Bright-Sided. No, it's not part of anyone's divine plan and it's not for the best.
But since Lemmy did live fast and die (relatively) old given his habits, it's also appropriate to celebrate his life instead of dwelling on his being killed by death. While listening to his autobiographical song, "We Are the Road Crew"
read Lemmy's autobiography, which explains some of the lyrics in greater detail. It's called White Line Fever. Just remember whose book it is you're reading. I key-word searched "fucking" in Google books and had 84 hits and that doesn't count "fucked" and "fuck."
If you think about everything politically, it's probably worth it to think about Lemmy in the context of heavy metal and rock more broadly. If you want to go that way, let's start with one of my favorites, "Eat the Rich" which seems to be about both class war and oral sex.
To read while that's spinning, read this interview with Lemmy from Inked magazine, and then check out Robert Walser's Running with the Devil: Power Gender and Madness in Heavy Metal Music, which I recently recommended to a student who was writing a thesis involving heavy-metal fandom. Walser is a musicologist, and this book is rare in that it gets good marks from metal fans, academics and music critics.
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