In 2024, Ozzy Osbourne lashed out at rapper Ye, formerly Kanye West, for sampling the rocker’s music. Ye, Ozzy posted to Instagram, “WAS REFUSED PERMISSION BECAUSE HE IS AN ANTISEMITE AND HAS CAUSED UNTOLD HEARTACHE TO MANY.” It isn’t often, in these times, at least, that a white male Baby Boomer’s all-caps social media post about a rapper is the socially conscious position, but there it was. “This ain’t rock ‘n’ roll,” one might argue.
Except, as musician-turned music-historian Daniel Rachel writes in his 2026 book This Ain’t Rock ‘n’ Roll: Pop Music, the Swastika, and the Third Reich, in 1982, Osbourne himself shared his own “admiration” for Adolf Hitler. In his 2025 memoir, Last Rites, Ozzy elaborates, “I think war is just part of human nature. And I’m fascinated by human nature—especially the dark side…. It doesn’t make me a Devil worshipper, no more than being interested in Hitler makes me a Nazi.”
This Ain’t Rock ‘n’ Roll is a book of reportage, chronicling the surprising and chilling number of rock and pop stars who, in two words used frequently throughout the book, “flirted” with or were “fascinated” by Nazi imagery. The book is a documentary, a litany, a version of Never Forget, the post-Holocaust mantra meant to prevent it from happening again. It is not, as I expected, a work of semiotics, philosophy, or criticism.
The chapters are both chronological and grouped by artist, from John Lennon through members of the Rolling Stones; a gamut of now-classic rockers like Kiss, David Bowie, Queen, and Eric Clapton; to punks (Sex Pistols, Siouxie and the Banshees) and metalheads (Motorhead, Slayer, the aforementioned Ozzy). It concludes with Ice Cube, Ye, and K-Pop, and with many others – too many others – along the way.
Rachel is a clear writer and meticulous researcher. The examples and anecdotes accumulate, discomfortingly, discordantly. My musical idols have apparently goose-stepped, appropriated swastikas, invoked Hitler. Rachel is a witness, offering only occasional commentary. He proffers questions when, in 1978, Mick Jagger “took to the stage wearing a swastika t-shirt designed by Vivienne Westwood”: “Should we see Jagger’s choice… as an attempt to devalue its significance? Or should we take it at face value, accepting its dark historical connotations? Ultimately, we each project our own meaning onto symbols.”
True enough. By virtue of the project itself and throughout, Rachel’s sentiments clearly emerge: Nazi symbols are bad. Very bad.
As Rachel writes of Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page, who donned a “Stormtrooper uniform” on stage in 1977 and then chose to share the image of it online in 2019 to fans who thought it looked “cool”, “The post simply encourages us to admire the accouterments of Nazism. In doing so, it glorifies a barbarous regime responsible for murder on an unprecedented scale.” This is tough to argue against.
Yet, as I read, I found myself uneasy, of two minds. Of course it’s bad. God, the last thing I want to be is a Nazi apologist. Do I need to add that I’m Jewish? It shouldn’t matter. Maybe it does. In This Ain’t Rock ‘n’ Roll’s epilogue, Rachel reveals that he is Jewish as well. It shouldn’t matter. Maybe it does.
At the same time, when I looked up Jagger’s shirt, it was not exactly “a swastika t-shirt”. It says the word “DESTROY” over a swastika, with elements of high fashion and design. Could it imply a message to destroy the swastika? Maybe. Does it render the swastika ridiculous, cartoonish? I think it does. It did not look like it was glorifying it, unless, by default, any representation of it is a form of glorification. Which, maybe. Would I wear it? Hell no. Would a rich, aging 1960s rocker trying to maintain his street cred amidst the late ‘70s punk revolution wear it? Obviously.
The image of Jimmy Page, when I looked it up, is similar. He’s wearing a hat, not the helmet usually associated with Stormtroopers, and black riding pants, not easily identifiable as Nazi paraphernalia to those not in the know. For those in the know, it seems, like Jaggar’s shirt, Page’s outfit is calculated to piss people off from a band already infamous for attracting bad publicity. Regular people can be angered by the Nazi appropriation itself, but also punks—rock’s nemesis at the time—would feel as though Page was stealing the look they stole from Nazis. This ain’t genocide—it’s rock ‘n’ roll.
Kiss’s inclusion is more ambiguous. Their logo, designed by guitarist Ace Frehley, “incorporated the distinctive double ‘SS’ flashes of Heinrich Himmler’s Schutzstaffel motif.” Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley, both Jewish, initially recoiled, but they knew courting controversy was good marketing and embraced it. Rachel comments, “Surprisingly, Simmons … differentiates between ideology from artifice.”
Is it surprising, though? Ozzy Osbourne, and Lemmy from Motorhead—who honestly seems a little enthusiastic for Nazi paraphernalia for my taste—along with Kiss’s fellow Jews in Blue Öyster Cult (are umlauts Nazi imagery? Rachel implies that they are) and the Ramones, felt the same way: that their self-professed values (“ideology”) were not Nazism but rather shock and showmanship, which then in fact matched their artifice, their craft, their media. Kiss was already wearing mask make-up, playing characters, performing under pseudonyms, as were the Ramones.
If the ideology is anything conventional—and recoiling from Nazism is, thank goodness, conventional—then rock, metal, and punk’s entire modus operandi is to differentiate ideology from artifice. Artifice always prevails. That doesn’t make them right or Rachel wrong. Still, it should not be surprising that rockers who are famously trying very hard to upset middle-class postwar normies on behalf of snotty teenage ignoramuses would pick the symbol that literally upsets the most people.
Rachel is also consistently surprised that even Jewish rock stars borrowed Nazi imagery, but he does not dig into the contradictions or complexities of Jewish identity. Artifice—or, at least, art—is contradictory, complex as well. Similarly, Rachel alludes to sexual fetish as part of the Third Reich aesthetic appeal, but he does not plumb these depths. His analysis remains on the surface. Maybe it should stay there.
However, that does not make for a moving reading experience, as much as I appreciate the topic and its value. If anything, as the catalog of offenses went on and on, I found myself growing numb to it. The Sex Pistols had already worn Jagger’s “Destroy” shirt. Jimmy Page’s flight cap was already old hat in 1977.
David Bowie’s appropriation of fascist imagery is even hazier. Bowie was, at this point in his career, not just clearly playing a character, in his chameleonic, chimerical, iconic way, but changing characters, here to the Thin White Duke. Rachel’s book title comes from Bowie’s 1974 album Diamond Dogs, where it is shouted at the end of the spoken-word opening track, “Future Legend”. Bowie was opting to incorporate aspects of WWII and the Third Reich, as Rachel takes pains to demonstrate. It seems clear that he was using the imagery as part of a larger postwar art project to challenge his listeners. Is he also obligated to break character to explain his art?
Semioticians look to the polysemous nature of signs to analyze their “floating chains of signifieds”, as Roland Barthes put it. Meaning can be slippery and unstable, even a symbol as charged and conversation-ending as the swastika, especially in the hands of an actual genius like Bowie, as opposed to the nihilistic 20-year-old doofeses in the Sex Pistols. They are, for me, not the same, but here, they are presented as parallel.
Queen’s inclusion is even more bewildering. Queen’s concerts were blasted as “another bloody Nuremberg rally.” Yes, Queen, or any arena rock concert, has a large number of people responding bodily and emotionally, like people at a Nazi rally. That is where similarities end. The reasons for the congregation and energy—musical exaltation and communion for the concert, vs. celebrating war and mass murder for the rally—are opposite. The similarity is peripheral; the contrast is central. Yet the similarity is all we are directed toward.
This Ain’t Rock and Roll‘s litanies, then, fail to draw meaningful distinctions. Many of the stars seem to be challenging the iconography even as they employ it, although Rachel points out that the artists are not always clear about their intentions. Must they be?
Of course, some musicians simply come off badly and need to be called out. Englishman Eric Clapton tops that list. His racist, xenophobic tirades, quoted in the book, juxtapose his flagrant appropriation of African-American Blues in a way that stinks of colonialism. Contrast him with David Bowie, who called out MTV for discriminating against Black musicians. Clapton rode both his racism and cultural borrowing to massive success and even scored a hit covering “I Shot the Sheriff” by Bob Marley, who was Jamaican. Yet strangely, Clapton is one of the few artists discussed who did not directly invoke Nazism itself.
This Ain’t Rock and Roll is copious about the details, the “what?” of rock’s flirtation and fascination with Nazi imagery and Nazi chic, a phrase Rachel eschews. It does not, however, delve into the “why?” nearly as much, and when it does, it is not entirely satisfactory.
So: why? Is it to convey power? Drama? Shock? Spectacle? Yes, of course. Can ask why? Again: why do these images continue to convey power, drama, shock, and spectacle differently, in different contexts, for different people? Which versions mean which things? When is it a persona, even if dubious, or a work of art, even if bad art, or a wretched political statement? Rachel leaves this up to the reader. I don’t want a book on this topic to leave it up to the reader.
Perhaps there is no reasonable explanation. Such an impasse, an aporia, to use Freud’s term when confronting the human death drive, seemingly at odds with everything he understood about our drive to live and experience pleasure, is a potentially interesting analytical framework as well.
Ozzy’s three-plus decades-old comments about Hitler do not, in the end, compare with Ye’s more recent, far more vitriolic work: an actual song called “Heil Hitler”. He bought a Super Bowl ad to advertise a website selling exactly one product: a t-shirt with a swastika on it—which does not include the word “Destroy” or any potentially complicating images. He denies the Holocaust, attacks the “Jewish media”, and aligns himself with Confederate symbols and white-power hate groups, even as Ye himself is Black.
Ye’s and Ozzy Osbourne’s relationships with Hitler, then, are vastly different, not just in degree but in kind, distinctions that This Ain’t Rock and Roll chooses not to make. Ozzy’s old ideas really seem like a flirtation, one long ended. Ye’s is a lifelong commitment, more fascistic than fascination, the worst kind of ideological monogamy.
Even Alex Jones—noted conspiracy theorist, lunatic, and billion-dollar libelee—of Info Wars amazingly tried to distance himself from Ye’s remarks on his show: “I love Jewish people, but I also love Nazis,” said Ye. Jones replied, “I don’t think Hitler was a good guy,” to which Ye added, “There’s a lot of things that I love about Hitler. A lot of things.”
Rachel quotes the exchange without comment, but it is a given that Ye’s massive influence and current cultural relevance are the most egregious examples in the book. Siouxsie Sioux said some amazingly awful things, but she is not, and has never been, a household name, and she did not win 24 Grammys over 75 nominations.
Yet, reading Rachel’s book in 2026, I can’t help but wonder if all of these images anticipate not just the rise of fascism and the Alt Right in America in the 21st century, but also their tactics, their rope-a-dope rhetoric. Like the rock stars described throughout This Ain’t Rock and Roll, when confronted with their flirtations, their fascinations, today’s shit-posters, including the Shit-poster In Chief sitting in America’s Oval Office, mock the viewer for being concerned in the first place. The Nazi imagery is just a joke, a gag, an attempt to rile you; you’re imagining it, and look, you fell for it.
On the very day I’m writing this, Donald Trump “posted what appeared to be an AI-generated image of a large, golden eagle affixed to the Truman Balcony of the White House.” It sure looks like a Nazi symbol. No, his defenders are quick to note, you’re crazy! It’s clearly an American bald eagle!
If Rachel is right—and, despite what I’ve written here, I can’t help but wonder if maybe he is—this, for certain, ain’t rock ‘n’ roll. I certainly hope it’s not genocide.