In Lester Bangs' essay collection, he quotes Patti Smith as saying that part of the appeal of the Velvet Underground was their "fascism," or something like that.
Given the Velvet Underground/Andy Warhol connection, maybe this ain't such a stretch. Interview Magazine's embrace of fascist chic is legendary.
But really, in practical terms, there was nothing particularly fascist about the Velvets or any other underground rock group. Most fatheaded baby boomers with selective memories about the 60s probably have only the vaguest recollection of who the Velvets even were. These boomers are the same idiots who conflate the counterculture with the New Left (and most of them were probably members of neither). If one measures fascism by the impact it has upon the majority of the population, then fascist the Velvets weren't.
Far more interesting to me is the Slovenian performance art/rock band Laibach. These guys remade The Beatles' Let It Be album in its entirety, but in an overtly fascist way, with 'Get Back" done as a goose-stepping march with orchestral sweeps. The theory behind this, according to Laibach, is that all Western pop music is inherently fascist and serves as a promotional vehicle for capitalism. Now, I've always sort of hated the Fab Four, so I got a cheap thrill out of hearing them denounced as fascists by this crazy bunch of Slovenians.
Laibach also did an EP of different versions of the Stones' Sympathy for the Devil, and their album Kapital has a version of Queen's One Vision, sung in German, with heavily modified lyrics ("Gibt mir ein leitbild!," loosely translated as, I think, "give me a leader"). All of these are also done in the fascist/marching vein. I imagine how this joke could start to wear thin after a while, but I think it serves as a good antidote next time some complacent boomer starts to regale you with his (mostly imagined) accounts of the good ol' days.
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