The Boogeyman

Lemmy Kilmister Identified the Real Monster

I first heard Motörhead in the mid-1980s and was instantly drawn to the band’s speed, raw sound, and rebellious energy. Frontman Lemmy Kilmister wrote songs that were confrontational, angry, and sometimes prophetic.

Lemmy’s worldview was most succinctly found in a tattoo on his forearm. It read, “Born to Lose. Live to Win.” It was an admission that we are born into a broken world stacked against us, coupled with a defiant attitude calling for resistance.

He wasn’t misanthropic, but he was keenly aware of the corruption of humanity and the futility of life in our fallen world. He saw that mankind is not just unkind, but ill-kind; worse than animals and worthy of damnation.¹ Motörhead was, at times, like the book of Ecclesiastes, but without the fear of the Lord. So what did Lemmy fear? He tells us in the song “Boogeyman,” from their 1987 album, Rock ‘n’ Roll.

First Verse

You know everybody’s scared,
Everybody better beware,
Scared of spiders,
Scared of rats,
Scared of being crossed by cats,
Scared of everything that moves,
Scared of things with cloven hooves.

Many of our common fears, irrational and otherwise, shouldn’t scare us. In this first verse, Lemmy highlights the creepy crawlers, superstitions, and alludes to the “satanic panic” of the 80’s as benign bugaboos. If we aren’t scared, we often create something to terrorize us. Cue his defiance:

Second Verse:

I ain’t scared, live my life all right,
I ain’t scared, to stand and fight,
I ain’t scared, ‘cos I believe,
Ain’t scared, to wear my heart on my sleeve,
Ain’t scared to show my hands,
But I’m scared of the boogeyman!

Lemmy is rock and roll personified. Rebel, renegade, and ready to fight. But the one thing that does scare him is the boogeyman, not the imaginary monster parents use to scare their children into compliance. This monster is a real danger. What is this terror? He tells us in the third verse.

Third Verse:

He’s hiding underneath your bed,
He’s hiding inside your head,
He’s hiding behind your eye,
He’ll be there until you die,
Ridin’ shotgun in your new Trans Am,
Slide over for the boogeyman.

The scariest thing we face is not an external threat, but an internal one. It’s us. It’s you. You are the boogeyman.

Lemmy wasn’t a Christian; he hated religion. But he understood something God has been teaching us for thousands of years: the boogeyman was never out there, but in here, in our heart. Long before Motörhead, the prophet Jeremiah spoke to this point: “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?” (Jeremiah 17:9).

In fact, another Motörhead song, “Brotherhood of Man,” reads as if it could fit into a chapter of Jeremiah or Lamentations.

Monsters rule your world
Are you too scared to understand?
You shall be forever judged
And you shall surely hang
We live and scrape in misery
We die by our own hand
And still we murder our own children
Brotherhood of man

We are worse than animals
We hunger for the kill
We put our faith in maniacs
The triumph of the will
We kill for money, wealth and lust
For this we should be damned
We are disease upon the world
Brotherhood of man

Jesus also pins the origin of evil in the heart of humanity when he corrected the religious leaders of his day who were obsessed with external purity. He told them, it’s not what goes into a man that defiles him, but what comes out: “For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person” (Mark 7:21-23).

“Born to Lose. Live to Win” is a cool tattoo. Though it is an honest diagnosis, it prescribes a placebo. We are born to lose, but we cannot live to win. We can’t rid ourselves of guilt or change our natures.² There’s no outrunning the boogeyman. We need deliverance, not defiance. Redemption, not rebellion.

The Apostle Paul felt this: “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?” (Romans 7:24). And this is where the gospel meets us; at the dead end of our efforts to win. We can’t save ourselves, but the Son of God can, and does. Jesus has conquered sin, death, and evil by his own death and resurrection.³

Those who are united to Christ by faith experience a kind of death and resurrection of their own. The old self has been put to death, and the new self has been raised in its place.⁴ Jesus called it being born again. Paul said, “if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come” (2 Cor. 5:17). And it is in this new life, with new hearts, is where God empowered defiance and rebellion are born.⁵

Not the old defiance. That is what we call the work of the flesh, or dead works.⁶ Ours is a rebellion of a different kind. It doesn’t give us victory, but is grounded in the victory already won for us by Jesus. We were, as Paul said, born as “children of wrath” (Eph. 2:3), but we’ve been born again as children of God. As such, we stand and fight. This is spiritual warfare.

When your heart accuses you, when the old self sits up and wants you to slide over so it can have the driver’s seat, your resistance is in taking every thought captive to Christ and finding courage in the promise of the permanence of Christ’s love for you.⁷

Sin is still present. The boogeyman is still inside your head, still behind your eye. But he is no longer your master — for in Christ “sin will have no dominion over you” (Rom. 6:14). And one day he will be gone for good. Until then, we don’t fight for victory; we fight from it.

For everyone who has been born of God overcomes the world. And this is the victory that has overcome the world—our faith. Who is it that overcomes the world except the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?

1 John 5:4–5

1. “Brotherhood of Man,” The Wörld Is Yours, 2010

2. Jer. 13:23

3. Col. 2:13-15; 1 Cor. 15:54–57

4. Rom. 6:6-14

5. Rom. 8:12-13; Gal. 5:16-17

6. Heb. 6:14; 9:14;

7. 2 Cor. 10:5; Rom. 8:38-39