999,940: Motorhead - Don't Let Daddy Kiss Me

Heavy metal has never been about subtlety of any stripe. When it comes to social awareness, metal tends to treat serious issues the same way as everything else – by blowing them up into high drama, played for maximum emotion, with very few blanks left to fill in. Perhaps the definitive song about child abuse is Suzanne Vega’s “Luka,” which is written with deceptively simple language from the child’s point of view. With the character unwilling to reveal much, most details are left up to the imagination, and the abuse remains the dirty secret it so often is in real life. And then there is Motorhead’s “Don’t Let Daddy Kiss Me,” a largely acoustic ballad from their 1993 album Bastards (which is generally held in high esteem by devotees). Clearly we are talking about something beyond mere physical violence, as the song’s title rather bluntly expresses. Where Vega keeps us on the outside looking in, Lemmy plunks us right in the bedroom, setting most of the song in the aftermath with Daddy and his little girl laying side by side. We get the smells (“She smells his lust and she smells his sweat”), the sounds (“And she listens to him breathe”), and the thinly veiled euphemisms (“His seed is sown where it should not be”). It’s a delicate subject handled the only way heavy metal knows how – by playing the horror to the hilt. But in this case, Lemmy wants listeners to know that he disapproves, so he piles on the sentiment as well, repeating lines about the girl’s prayers to God going unanswered, and crying out in anguish during the short bridge section “Why?! Tell me why! The worst crime…in the world.” Granted, heavy metal has often been misinterpreted as glorifying what it merely aims to dramatize (because it sounds awesome), so Lemmy’s impulse is understandable. But the marriage here between blunt horror and sentimental melodrama is an uneasy one, and when you add in the surface delivery of the song, its crushing awkwardness becomes inevitable. Here, perhaps, is the disconnect: Vega’s hushed, thin vocals can convincingly portray the inner life of a wounded child. But if you could cast any human voice to sonically convey the terror and lost innocence of a female victim of childhood rape and incest…it probably would not be the hoarse whiskey-and-cigarettes rasp of a nearly 50-year-old Lemmy Kilmister. Speaking in her voice during the chorus, crooning “Don’t let daddy kiss me,” Lemmy is totally earnest, his heart on his sleeve, trying mightily to make a serious and emotional statement about a horrific problem that is all too real. And if his song ultimately doesn’t work, its failure makes it much more memorable than a standard-issue Motorhead rocker. (Note: There should be at least 50 awesome Motorhead rockers to follow in the Top One Million Songs of All Time.)