Dan Lilker Doesn’t Regret Any of S.O.D.’s Offensive Lyrics (Nor Should He)
Look, I’m the first person who’s going to call someone out for using offensive lyrics that they obviously mean, but I also understand the rock and punk rock tradition of saying offensive and provocative things — not because you mean them — but to challenge the status quo and evoke a reaction. When Eric Carlson of The Mentors died last week, I saw some people discussing their offensive lyrics, but I always understood that to be satire and not a real celebration of violence. While there are a lot of legitimate reasons to criticize Danzig, none of my complaints about him are related to me thinking he really eats babies and rapes mothers. And no, I don’t believe that Anthrax-offshoot Stormtroopers of Death (a.k.a. S.O.D.) really wanted to eliminate the Middle East because they were annoying or really wanted you to speak English or die. And Dan Lilker isn’t sorry if you misunderstood them.
In a recent interview with Screamer Magazine (that was transcribed by Blabbermouth), Lilker talked a little bit about his time in S.O.D. and their offensive lyrics:
”There were some people that we did wanna piss off a little bit, but if you couldn’t tell that we were kind of being just obnoxious and provocative… People weren’t looking at the big picture. We also had a song on the record about being hung over and having no milk in the fridge. And you had to step out a little bit. And by the way, ‘Fuck The Middle East’ is still relevant. And we wrote a song about a guy in a movie with impossibly long fingers who would fucking slice your throat off with. So, sure, calling the record ‘Speak English Or Die’ — and we’re not gonna get into the cancel culture conversation, by the way. I know that [the S.O.D. album] couldn’t happen today, and we all know that. But let’s just say that we knew what we were doing. I don’t regret any of it. I know some people might’ve thought, ‘That’s over the line,’ but then we weren’t really like that. We were just being perhaps a tiny bit reckless, but S.O.D. was about the music. The lyrics were just kind of like — I was gonna say icing on the cake, but it’s more like salt. I don’t know.”
Yeah, I didn’t think those lyrics really meant anything. Although, whenever an old person says “You couldn’t do this today,” that’s usually bullshit. You can do a lot more today than people think. I really don’t think there’s a lot of people who believe in “cancel culture” who also lack a sense of irony so much that they think S.O.D. was anything but harmless fun. Yeah, you could probably still make Speak English or Die right now.
