(Credits: Far Out / Alejandro Páez)
There are some rock stars who seemed to be crushed under the weight of celebrity. Who charged into the spotlight as a gunslinging madman, but slowly, under that warm glow of attention, became wilted and mushy. Lemmy Kilmister was never one to mince his words.
From his consistent pleas to the rock press to stop calling Motörhead, largely considered one of the heaviest metal bands of all time, heavy metal, to his honest appraisal of the benefits of amphetamines (“coke’s all right, but speed’s better”), he was one of the most frank figures in music.
Having had a hand in the formation of heavy metal, he took that unflinching honesty and assessed the development of metal in the late 1990s. His take on some of the biggest names to come out of the movement? “Crap.”
The likes of Limp Bizkit, Slipknot, and Tool were all in his firing line. Talking to Ear Candy in 2000, he said Limp Bizkit, who by this time had three studio albums out and were at the forefront of nu-metal, were not reflective of the version of rock and roll he’d devised.
“People like Limp Bizkit, I don’t understand it,” he said. “I don’t understand their success.” He wasn’t phased by people enjoying it but seemed genuinely confused as to why their music appealed. “What the fuck is this, it’s just rubbish!” he baulked.
Kilmister wouldn’t stop there. It wasn’t that he didn’t understand their sound, so to speak, is what that they appeared to be entirely juvenile and without the metal edge that he so dearly desired in his favourite bands. “You’re just garage attendants with fucking gas masks on. And I mean, I don’t mind kids having their own thing, I’m all for it. When you’re 17, you want a 17-year-old band to play for you, you don’t want these old fuckers like me.”
Slipknot weren’t exempt from his criticism either, with him describing them as “just crap” as a unit. “And I know crap when I hear it,” he assured. “Been listening to it all my life, you know? A lot of these new bands have a riff and no song. I was brought up to admire songs. A good well-crafted song. Like the Beatles, five years into their career and they were doing ‘Yesterday”.”
A lot of his ire stemmed from the fact that throughout the ’90s, Motörhead were releasing some of their most critically acclaimed records, like 1919 and March ör Die. While they were trying to inject some old-school rock and roll into the metal scene, they were coming up against grunge, nu-metal and progressive rock.
This, he believed, was why Motörhead didn’t have a bigger American audience. “We’re not pretty enough, and the music’s too brutal for them,” he said, naming Tool as one example of a band that seemed to seize on American audiences’ tastes for something more avant-garde.
Marilyn Manson also cropped up in a conversation with Hot Press as an example of a musician who built their brand of sheer weirdness rather than musicality. “All mouth and no tights” was Lemmy’s assessment. “The show’s great, but that last record of his was hopeless. Fair play to him for getting up people’s noses. But he needs to come up with a few decent tunes.”
“Everything there is fad-driven,” he lamented. “Limp fucking Bizkit and Tool and all that. It’s just fucking hopeless. If that’s the future of rock ‘n’ roll, it’s suicide for me.”
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