We Are America, and We Play Rock ’n’ Roll

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, April 17, 2026

 

“We are Motörhead, and we play rock ’n’ roll.”

 

That was for many years the habitual introduction offered by rock icon Lemmy as his band ripped the skin off its opening number. Lemmy (conventionally called by only his first name) was a very English Englishman—born in Stoke-on-Trent, stiff upper lip, strong opinions about the Great War—who, like any proper Englishman with the means and the opportunity, lived most of his adult life in Los Angeles.

 

But there was a lot of American in Lemmy—it wasn’t just the cavalry Stetson. In one famous interview—one that I assume inspired his introduction—he was asked about his life fronting a “heavy-metal band.” Lemmy heaped scorn on the premise of the question: “We have long hair, so you call us a heavy-metal band,” he said. “If we had short hair, you’d call us a punk-rock band. As a matter of fact, we play rock ’n’ roll.” The singer and writer Henry Rollins, a longtime friend of Lemmy’s, makes it clear that Lemmy’s hell-bent-for-leather stage persona was no persona at all: “He did not own sweatpants, nor did he own sandals. That look wasn’t a stage get-up. He was in the hat and boots all the time. Those were the only kind of clothes he owned.”

 

If you wanted to meet Lemmy, it wasn’t hard to do. He loved the Rainbow Bar & Grill in Hollywood—he lived most of his life in a tiny, memorabilia-crowded apartment just around the corner from it—where he would drink Jack-and-Coke and smoke and play video poker and, if it came to that, shake hands and take pictures with those who sought him out there. It wasn’t hard to spot the people who were there to see Lemmy. His gruffness wasn’t a put-on, either—but he knew his people.

 

Rollins relates another telling conversation with Lemmy: “He said, ‘I remember a time before there was rock ’n’ roll, when you only had your mother’s Rosemary Clooney records.’” Before rock—that blew Rollins’s mind. “I asked him, ‘What happened?’”

 

Lemmy’s answer:

 

“We all heard Elvis Presley. And we never looked back.”

 

***

 

Draining the last of his chota peg—literally, a “small drink” but in this context a euphemism for a not-small drink—the Indian politician, a member of the ultra-nationalist BJP, summarized the theme of our conversation that evening: “Thank God for the British Empire, anyway.”

 

This was the late 1990s, when I was working in Delhi, and the gentleman in question was clear-eyed about what worked and what did not work in his country, including the value of its British legacy in law and civil service, and the foreseeable economic benefits of having a professional class largely fluent in English. Other than the 13-day premiership of Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the Indian nationalists at that point had never been in power in New Delhi, and it is easier to be critical of the government when your entire political identity is that of an opposition party. Another observation from the same sage: “We Indians are poor, but we will figure out how to make money. There are no poor Indians in America. The only poor Indians are in India.” That last part wasn’t and isn’t exactly true, but I got his meaning. But he also saw the downsides to the libertarian American ethos: “What would destroy us would be adopting American attitudes about family.” (I am relating this from memory, no doubt inexactly.) “That would turn us into Somalia.”

 

In vino veritas, though in this case the truth serum was Old Monk rum.

 

Even back then, I knew India was going to be okay. I watched small armies of laborers digging trenches with hand tools and laughed as their coworkers followed up with big yellow spools—laying fiber-optic cable, in hand-dug trenches, in a country where most people had still never touched a computer, much less used the internet. I saw teenage boys who sold tea and cigarettes in my newspaper office sneaking into the art department to use internet-connected computers they were not supposed to touch, and not for what you’re thinking about when you read the words “teenage boys” and “sneaking” and “internet”—they wanted to know about online stock-trading. My older colleagues were Anglophiles who lived like Upper West Side college professors, to the extent that they could afford it, while young colleagues were like Cold War Muscovites in their desire for American things: American clothes, American cigarettes (I can’t believe that smoking in Delhi was much worse than just breathing the air), American music, even American books. (Someone has to buy American books.) One of the most popular restaurants in town was a kind of ersatz American diner that served pretty bad fake American food. There was a Tex-Mex place around the corner where the miserable waiters were made to wear ridiculous plastic cowboy hats and draw Colt-shaped drinks menus out of holsters on their hips. It was called Rodeo.

 

It was not exactly right. But you could see what they were going for. And it was packed.

 

Foreigners may at times have some lacunae regarding the realities of American culture. Another Indian friend, a dark-skinned man from the southern state of Kerala who was a very prominent journalist, was planning to visit the United States for the first time and worried that his complexion might make him unwelcome—that his South and our South had different views about color. He remained skeptical when I tried to explain to him that he had two things Americans care about a great deal: a big public profile and a big paycheck. “You’re going to get harassed, possibly, by people who want you to marry their daughters.” American racists as a rule hate poor black Americans (and rich black Americans who attempt to exercise social power, or run for office on the wrong party’s platform, or complain), though anti-Indian sentiment has grown, predictably, with the success of the Indian diaspora in the United States. American racism is something that non-Americans often misunderstand.

 

But, for the most part, foreigners tend to have a pretty good grip on American culture, and there is a good reason for that: They have been swimming in it for the better part of a century, and American culture is a major component of local cultures around the world, particularly pop cultures. Punjabi hip-hop is a thing. K-pop is genuinely Korean, to be sure, but built on an American musical architecture. A whole generation of Indians grew up watching desi (“local,” approximately) films that were shot-for-shot remakes of mass-market American dreck such as (this one sticks out in memory for some reason) Unlawful Entry.

 

This American ubiquity is not an unmixed blessing to the world, to be sure, especially to the extent that certain forms of youth-worship—the invention of the teenager, the basic concepts of “youth culture” and “youth politics”—are of distinctly American origin. But then you think about Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, the would-be Maggie Thatcher of the Land of the Rising Sun, who played drums in a metal band while she was figuring out that free markets and a strong national defense policy are the way to go. You think about 1989, when German rock bands were composing schmaltzy power ballads about their fellow citizens tearing down that ghastly wall, the same year Chinese kids singing a rock anthem, “Nothing to My Name,” were gunned down or run down by tanks in Tiananmen Square.

 

I wish I could write, “They heard Elvis, and they never looked back,” but it is not that simple.

 

China is still under the grossest form of tyranny. Japan is an affluent liberal democracy, but it is not a happy place. Germany is reunified but still, after all these years, dysfunctional. It is not the case that “All You Need Is Love,” or rock ’n’ roll, or even our much-revered Constitution: Many countries around the world adopted constitutions modeled on ours—Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Colombia—and they did not get the desired results. Constitutions, as Americans are just now starting to learn the hard way, are not self-executing.

 

Americans are experiencing a great deal of social and political trouble right now because we do not know what we want, cannot agree about what we should want, and know only that what the other side wants must be the wrong thing. But if you travel around the rest of the world, it is easy to see what they want. The éminences grises of Western Europe, the Boomer welfare-staters,  want to be Portland, “the place where people in their 20s go to retire,” or, even better, to be Austin in the 1990s, where young people went to retire for a bit and then start tech companies that would make them billionaires. (The Europeans are really feeling the great missed opportunity of the turn of the century.) The elderly men who run China want to take over the American role as the world’s big dog. A bunch of graybeards in the Muslim world dream of a new caliphate or maybe some form of state-capitalist techno-monarchy that will give the Gulf states the dynamism and energy to finally do something interesting with all that oil money instead of building the seventh Louis Vuitton boutique in Dubai. But the young and the hungry around the world, from India to Ukraine, want something different: They want choices and agency and fun and freedom that may not look exactly like our version of it but that is freedom nonetheless. They want to rock.

 

***

 

And rock, as Johnny Rotten knows, is both a product of affluence and a route to it. It is not exactly a swindle, as the Sex Pistols insisted, but there is a kind of swindle at the heart of it: Rock is a rebellious pose for the rich kids of the world. It is not a product of rebellion, nor is it, in the American context, an instrument of rebellion. It costs a little money to rock. The Gibson Custom Shop will sell you a nanometer-by-nanometer copy of Greeny, the famous 1959 Les Paul Standard owned by Peter Green, Gary Moore, and currently by Kirk Hammett, a guitar that has been played on everything from Fleetwood Mac records to Metallica anthems. It’s great. And it’s 30 grand. That’s high-end stuff, but, at a certain level, rock and capitalism are the same thing: The post-punk band Fugazi was famous for refusing to sell T-shirts and other merchandise and for trying to keep ticket prices at five bucks or less (adjust for inflation), but the band’s most famous member, Ian MacKaye, was, and is, a businessman, one who started an influential record label as a way to do the things he wanted to do in the world the way he wanted to do them. That’s where the rock thing really intersects the bigger American thing: Freedom is about having choices, and, unromantic and adultified and boring and Protestant and old-fashioned Republican as this particular piece of wisdom might be, money gives you choices. Private-plane money gives you a lot of choices, but even punk-rock, DIY-type money—the kind of money that allows you to make music or art or whatever without having to hold down a soul-sucking hourly job to pay the rent and keep ramen in the pot—that gives you choices, too. People in rich countries have a lot more leeway when it comes to choosing their own course in life—or in history. 

 

The world wants what we’ve got. That is because the world has been paying attention to America—whether the world wants to or not.

 

Jay Nordlinger tells a funny story about running into the Indian superstar Amitabh Bachchan, very possibly the most famous man in India for many years, flying coach like a regular person—but not in India, where his face and name recognition were practically 100 percent. I don’t know that we have a comparable celebrity, but imagine that John Wayne and Elvis were the same person, and imagine that mega-celebrity traveling economy-class at the height of his career, anywhere in the world: It would have been a mob scene. The world knows America. Quick: Who’s the president of Switzerland? How many of you could pick a German celebrity such as Helene Fischer out of a police lineup? Is there anybody in the world who doesn’t know the American president or Taylor Swift by sight? Sure, someone dwelling in a remote mountain forest somewhere. Maybe a monk or two in the Himalayas.

 

No, the world knows America, and what the world knows is that life as lived by ordinary people is awfully good here. Whatever our national convulsions may be, and whatever self-inflicted torments the entrepreneurial-homicidal American soul is dreaming up for this generation, life here is, more than anything else, comfortable.

 

There’s a woman at my gym who wears a T-shirt that reads: “Comfort Is a Lie.”

 

But she looks pretty comfortable. (And fit!) Almost everybody at my gym looks pretty comfortable: Many of them are college students and faculty, at least one is a trust-funder, one is a roofer, one is a Christian minister. There’s a middle-aged couple with an adult son who has a mental disability that does not seem to keep him from doing his regular laps on the indoor track, and, while I very much doubt that their lives are easy, I also very much doubt that there is a better place to live lives that include those kinds of challenges. I think it would be a hell of a lot harder in Indonesia or in Switzerland or in Panama. And I think that one of the things that people in Indonesia and Switzerland and Panama really understand about the United States—better than many Americans do—is how profoundly true that is.

 

Comfort is not a lie. Comfort is a fact of American life—usually for the better, though not always.

 

Various totalitarian regimes have found out the hard way how appealing that American comfort is. In the 1980s, the Soviet Union was quietly infiltrated ... by bootlegged copies of the American nighttime soap opera Dallas. Some of the Soviet bosses apparently turned a blind eye to this on the theory that the unsavory doings of the corrupt oilman J.R. Ewing and his clan of schemers and sexual misadventurers would provide a salubrious lesson on the wickedness of American capitalism. What the poor shivering Muscovites actually saw was that the gardeners and other servants in the Ewings’ orbit in Texas enjoyed a higher standard of living than did the typical Soviet college professor or senior manager. The Russkies should have known better: In 1948, Joseph Stalin allowed showings of the Henry Fonda film version of The Grapes of Wrath, also on the theory that it would provide a useful lesson on Western wickedness. But Uncle Joe had been up in the dacha too long and had lost touch with the real-life situation of that poor bastard known as New Soviet Man. The Russians were, in fact, very powerfully affected by The Grapes of Wrath—but not in the way Stalin had expected: These are the poorest people in America, and they have ... their own car? Are you kidding me? These poor peasants can just pack up and go look for work and a better life when local economic conditions do not suit them? How come nobody is demanding that they show their papers?

 

America is not only comfortable for the rich and the soft. I am writing this from a Holiday Inn Express about halfway between Dallas and Wichita Falls, and, as I have written before, one of the great glories of American life is the business-traveler hotel. No, it isn’t Villa d’Este or the Palace hotel in Montreux or any of my other happy places, but, for just over a hundred bucks a night, you get a clean room with a comfortable bed and a breakfast that is, I have it on good authority, nutritionally adequate to see you through to lunch, with pretty good coffee to boot.

 

I knew checking in that this was going to be a quiet hotel, because it was a Tuesday night and the parking lot was full of working trucks, and there were well-used boot brushes at the door for the convenience of men who drive working trucks and do the kind of jobs that leave their work boots muddy enough that they’ll want to scrape them off a bit before going into the Holiday Inn Express to crash. I won’t speak to Friday night or Saturday, but guys who stay at hotels like this in places like this on Tuesdays are there to work, and they sleep at night. They aren’t here for beer drinking and hell-raising. The rooms have blackout blinds to keep out the morning sun, but they aren’t needed. I’m an early riser, and in the part of the morning where the first number on the clock is a 4, there’s me and one other guy downstairs looking for coffee. He is one of those guys for whom tattoos are a real big part of his life—he wears a black tank top that helps to show off his ink and that carries the logo of his favorite tattoo parlor—and he has complicated facial piercings and all that stuff. There are two kinds of guys who are getting coffee at 4:42 a.m.—the ones who are up late and the ones who are, like this guy, up early. He is a heavy-haul trucker on his way to Colorado and then back to the Carolinas, and the work he does involves real responsibility and pretty good money. He’s not some poor feckless Joad trying to scrape out a living as an Okie exile in Depression-era Bakersfield. He likes what he does. Getting up at 4 a.m. is just part of the deal.

 

By the time the sun is up, the parking lot is almost entirely empty, all those working pickups (no platinum editions here!) having been driven off to job sites. The only people in the breakfast room when your favorite correspondent goes to fetch his fourth coffee on the way to checking out are a few Spanish-speaking women in a knot around one table. Go to a hotel like this in the oil patch or some other place where the economy is booming, and you’ll see the same thing: There are basically no men to be seen in restaurants or coffee shops or hotels—as workers or as customers—in daylight hours. They’re out working. It’s real work, and it isn’t easy, but it’s a good life, too, driving your truck and brushing off your boots and putting $2,000 or maybe $2,500 a week in your pocket when there’s a lot of work to be done, sleeping that good sleep you get when you’re 33 years old and physically tired and you went to bed sober because that Holiday Inn Express breakfast is going to be way in the rearview mirror by 7 a.m. You hear pop-tops popping here and it’s all big cans of Monster Energy.

 

The soundtrack they’re working to is mostly a mix of hip-hop and what passes for country music in anno Domini 2026. But it’s still rock. You know it when you hear it.

 

It is the soundtrack you want when you do cool stuff and invent things and make things and pile up insane stacks of money, and there are a lot of billionaires who started off sleeping on someone’s floor and a few billionaires who will go back to it before the end. It all goes together: the Sony tech-bro nerd who served as vice president of technical standards responsible for “interoperability norms” of products such as the Blu-ray disc? That guy, James Williamson (no relation), was the guitarist in the Stooges. Not some weekends-and-summers dad-rock cover band—the Stooges, with Iggy Pop, playing on Raw Power, no less. How did that happen? “My sister was bringing home Elvis records,” he told Clash magazine, “and so I thought, ‘I gotta have a guitar.’” He heard Elvis, and he never looked back. Or how about a tugboat captain, of all unlikely things, who got a doctorate in medieval literature at the University of Texas at Austin, writing a dissertation on the poems of Cynewulf? Sterling Morrison had a job before all that: He was a guitarist in the Velvet Underground. My friend Charles C.W. Cooke, the erudite, Oxford-educated National Review writer and all-purpose Florida man? A touring rock musician as a youngster, and a pretty good one. Charlie is as English an Englishman as Lemmy was—he lived for a time in a house that had once belonged to Oliver Cromwell—but he will tell you that he has always been, for as long as he can remember, a kind of American-in-waiting. The world is full of them. It is a big glorious mess, as freedom must be—even well-ordered freedom of the Anglo-Protestant variety that we have goaded into so many mutations over the past 250 years.

 

“We are America, and we play rock ’n’ roll.”