BOC: Swastikas and Me.262s!

[Andy Gilham]

Thinking about "Me 262" (the song, that is, not the plane :)...  I think it
would still be a good song even if it went "I wanna rock you all night long",
okay, but what makes it a *great* song is the lyric - which is wonderfully
subversive!  It presents a scene from World War Two, and invites us - and
it's intended, really, for a US audience, but it works in Britain just as
well (if not better) - to identify with "the enemy"; to be open-minded enough
to see things from their viewpoint.  This is *really* unusual - of all the
many WW2 films, for instance, I can only think of two, off-hand, which are
told from a German point of view (_Cross of Iron_ and _The Keep_, fwiw), and
in neither of those are they fighting western troops.  What the song's
saying, I think, is "the Germans are no different from us".  [Which is of
course an entirely different statement from "we are Nazis", but these nuts
with an irony by-pass will never figure that out.]

The symbol, too, is meant to be subversive - I always felt it was
deliberately not anything in particular, but reminiscent of all sorts of
things; but mainly meant to look *pagan*.  Together with the name of the
band, it conjures images of unspeakable rituals from the depths of
pre-history...  Which is really cool!  (But, of course, doesn't mean the band
advocate, or participate in, unspeakable rituals - you'd have to be pretty
simple-minded, or else in the moral majority, to think that!)

I guess the upshot is that by deliberately being unsettling and subversive,
they managed to upset some "squares".  Right on!

- Andy