David Bowie’s flirtation with fascist imagery in the 1970s remains one of rock’s darkest and most puzzling episodes – and RadarOnline.com has the inside track on why it is far from unique.
Author Daniel Rachel explores in his new book, This Ain’t Rock ‘n’ Roll: Pop Music, the Swastika and the Third Reich, how some of music’s most influential figures became entangled with Nazi iconography and ideas.
A Dark Chapter in Rock History
Bowie shocked fans in the 1970s with his flirtation with fascist imagery.
The writer, best known for his books Walls Come Tumbling Down and Too Much Too Young, says his latest work was driven by both cultural history and personal reckoning.
“It felt important to collate pop music’s history with the swastika and the Third Reich,” he explained. “There are personal reasons too, which go back to my childhood.”
Rachel, who grew up in Birmingham, England, in the 1980s, recalls being captivated by punk before fully understanding its provocations. “I would happily sing along to Belsen Was a Gas,” he said.
“I saw images of Sid Vicious with a swastika armband and thought it was funny. At the same time, raised in a Jewish house, I began to understand what the Holocaust was, and to see images of mass burial sites at Belsen while singing Belsen Was a Gas triggered an emotion that was difficult to unravel. It has stayed with me ever since.”
Bowie, Lennon, and the Dangerous Allure of Fascist Imagery
He argued that West’s swastika-themed fashion revived a dangerous legacy from rock’s past.
In his book, Rachel traces how artists from the 1960s onward used fascist imagery to shock or seduce audiences – often with little awareness of its true weight. Bowie’s 1970s incarnation, the Thin White Duke, was described by the singer himself as “a very Aryan, fascist type.”
In 1975, he called for “an extreme right front (to) sweep everything off its feet and tidy everything up,” later telling Playboy, “Adolf Hitler was one of the first rock stars.”
“Bowie, Mick Jagger, and Bryan Ferry have talked about the impact of Leni Riefenstahl’s film of the Nuremberg rallies,” Rachel said. “When you watch Triumph of the Will, it’s easy to see a parallel between Hitler doing a Sieg Heil before thousands of people and a rock star on the lip of a stadium stage, controlling an audience. But in rock’n’roll there has been an attempt to divorce the spectacle from the reality, which was an attempt to exterminate the Jewish people.”
Rachel points out Bowie’s statements – later dismissed by the musician as the product of cocaine addiction and confusion – were not isolated. John Lennon once drew himself as Hitler, while The Who’s Keith Moon once dressed in an SS uniform and marched through north London’s Golders Green, a largely Jewish area.
More recently, Kanye West has praised Hitler and sold swastika-themed T-shirts online.
Provocation, Ignorance, and the Roots of Shock Culture
Rachel said West’s praise of Hitler shows how the fascination with Nazi symbols continues.
“I don’t want to be the Simon Wiesenthal (a famous Holocaust survivor) of rock’n’roll,” Rachel said, “but it’s happening in plain sight and being digested by, in some cases, millions of people. Having laid all this out in the book, I’m asking, why is this still going on?”
The fascination of musicians with Naziism and Hitler, he believes, stems from rock’s impulse to provoke.
“Both stupidity and provocation are the substance of rock’n’roll,” he said. “I was in a band for most of my younger years, and not thinking about what you’re doing is a mainstay of band life. But that’s why the infrastructure around it has to take responsibility.”
Rachel adds ignorance has also played a role.
“The Holocaust was an orchestrated genocide,” he said. “That understanding wasn’t necessarily present in the history of rock’n’roll, but it should be now.”
A Personal Reckoning With the Past
Rachel compared Bowie’s stage power to Leni Riefenstahl’s films of Hitler’s rallies.
Visiting Poland’s concentration camps while researching his new book, Rachel admitted to confronting his own curiosity.
“I found myself almost wanting to buy SS memorabilia, to hold these relics associated with mass murder,” he said.
“So I do understand the fascination. But Keith Moon parading around Golders Green in an SS uniform only 20 years after the Holocaust? That can’t be right.”
