"God is dead,' Nick said. 'They found his carcass in 2019. Floating in space near Alpha."
Philip K. Dick, Our Friends from Frolix 8
When I was in grammar school back in northern France in the late 1970s, there was a small theatre under the school cafeteria, where pupils could try themselves at standing on stage in front of an audience, and learn how to do something worth watching. Some other kids had negotiated with the school director the right to use the theatre as a chill-out space for lunch breaks and covered the walls with early metal bands posters...
I was part of the theatre kids - some of them actually ended up having big careers as directors or performers - but I never really understood anything about what was going on. I loved stage but I was never so much into words, and neither into pretending... But I must have been much more impressed by the Motörhead poster on the wall than by Bertolt Brecht (I think that we made some kind of Bertolt Brecht mash-up at some point) because that's what I remember most. A little bit like the most vivid memory of my first Motörhead concert is the one week long deafness that followed.
Motörhead was the first time I was confronted to musical badassery (at the exception maybe of Stravinsky) and it's like it's been there ever since, the snarling mutant skull, hanging somewhere where one could catch a glimpse of it, as were audible once in a while the blasting drums and the bass riff of Overkill. It was as if for once power and violence would be on your side instead of being against you. Isn't it ironical that a tough motherfucker like Lemmy ended up as a fatherly figure, steadily radical when the 1968 generation turned into 1980s yuppies, 1990s health food consumers, 2000s pensioners? Listening to Lemmy and Motörhead was like being connected to history, the real one, the one that's worth living...
Fucking hell, I think that I reached the age when all my childhood idols will start dying, one after the other... I have to play some loud music.
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