Pop culture has had several foolish flirtings with Cabaret-style camp, but John Galliano's outburst is altogether more sinister
Once upon a time, two young men named Mick Jones and Tony James were attempting to form a rock band called London SS. Their prospective manager, one Bernard Rhodes, summoned them to a meeting in a pub, and then dumped a bagful of Nazi memorabilia and militaria ? badges, knives, caps and the like ? over the table. "If you keep that name," he told them, "you'll be spending the rest of your lives having to discuss and justify stuff like this."
They got the message. The name "London SS" was formally buried, and the pool of musicians upon which it was based later ended up in The Clash, The Damned, Generation X and The Pretenders, with swastikas and "Nazi chic" being left to the likes of Sid Vicious. Dr Hunter S Thompson once remarked that if the Hells Angels had really wanted to freak out Middle America, they'd have worn the hammer-and-sickle rather than the swastika, and by sporting red stars and a Brigade Rosse T-shirt, the late Joe Strummer took the good doctor at his word.
That instantly infamous clip of a drunken John Galliano letting his inner bigot out for a stroll has more in common with Eric Clapton's notorious Powellite rant (delivered from a Birmingham stage in 1976 and directly stimulating the founding of Rock Against Racism) than it does with any pseudo-decadent dabbling in Weimar chic induced by one too many viewings of Cabaret. Both disturb because they suggested that, tongues unlocked and inhibitions dissolved by alcohol, Galliano and Clapton were revealing their true feelings about certain groupings of their fellow humans: the sneering, hateful racist lurking beneath the veneer of civilised urbane sophistication.
In direct contrast, nobody could seriously suggest that Lemmy, an obsessive collector of precisely the sort of bits and pieces with which Rhodes had confronted Jones and James, has any truck with rightwing politics. "I'd collect Belgian army stuff if the Belgians had had the best gear", he says.
For those who grew up in the shadow of the second world war, or with endless reruns of Dad's Army, there is an element of kitsch ? demystifying and defanging the monster by subverting its symbolism ? and a simple impulse towards transgression, shocking parents (or the parent culture) by pretending to cuddle up to the stuff of nightmare.
Essentially, we're dealing with two very different phenomena. On the one hand, a fascination with the camp aesthetics of the Nazi era and a fondness for Weimar Cabaret stylings and its associated iconography (let me make a clean Brecht of it: I'm a sucker for a nice long black leather trenchcoat) can be intensely misleading. Kurt Weill was by no means vile: he and Brecht were committed leftists.
On the other hand, there are actual pro-fascist sympathies. No modern fascist wants anything to do with the imagery of the Third Reich ? a recent news story reported a poll revealing that a worrying number of people in the UK, by no means all of whom are white, would support an anti-immigration party provided it carried no overt associations with the downmarket bootboy neo-Nazism of the BNP.
The latter is genuinely worrying, while the former is perhaps merely foolish. As for John Galliano: his employers' decision to immediately dropkick him into the middle distance shows just how much they wanted to avoid inadvertently founding "Rock Against Dior".
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/mar/02/galliano-racism-cabaret-camp
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