30 Songs/30 Days: Day 7

September 7: Motörhead, "Ace of Spades"My former best friend who I'm now estranged from was a metalhead. I'm into into punk. He was a postmodernist. I'm a realist. We argued all the time, and it ultimately soured our friendship. But there was one thing we always agreed on: Motörhead was the balls.Unlike prog rock's annoying fascination with demons and mythical creatures, and its insistence on weirdness over substance, Motörhead focused on a a kind of live fast-die young nihilism that punks have loved from the beginning. Instead of sludge metal's slowness to the point of boringness, Motörhead was fast, loose, and raw, and loved the Ramones. Yet they still had the metal machismo, and could still actually play their instruments with skill without sacrificing attitude. For many punks, the first step to accepting metal is Motörhead. The Dictators and Black Flag tried to combine them, but "The Dictators Go Girl Crazy!" and "My War" are embarrassing when compared to even the average Motörhead song. The comparison is even more pathetic when compared to their best and most famous song, "Ace of Spades." The German documentary "Lemmy" is filled with multiple takes of Lemmy Kilminster (or God, to certain people) playing video poker and other assorted bar games. It's easy to see how the gambling biker lifestyle had a huge influence on "Ace of Spades," whose lyrics set up a brilliant parallel between gambling and life, culminating in the classic line "You know I'm going to lose/ And gambling's for fools/ But that's the way I like it baby/ I don't want to live forever!" And that says nothing towards the music, a full realization of both Motörhead's strengths and the future of thrash metal to come: blistering-fast but still complex guitar solos, a menacing, lightning-quick bass line, and drums walking on tight rope between rhythm and soloing at 250 beats per minute.The song has seen a resurgence in the last couple of years, and that's mostly due to its inclusion on the video game "Guitar Hero." It's also the featured song on the game "The Bigs", as well as in two movies separated by less than a month: "Superbad" and "Shoot 'Em Up." After playing "Guitar Hero", my dorm-mates would refer to "Ace of Spades" every time the card came up in our weekly poker game. I would say that all the overexposure cheapens the song somewhat, it's nice to see Motörhead, a band with just two gold albums in a career that spans 4 decades, finally get some of the credit they deserve.