DAN LILKER doesn't regret any of S.O.D.'s deliberately offensive lyrics: “we knew what we were doing”
08-01-2025
In a recent interview with Screamer Magazine, former ANTHRAX bassist Dan Lilker spoke about his mid-’80s politically incorrect project STORMTROOPERS OF DEATH (S.O.D.) which also included ANTHRAX‘s Scott Ian (guitar) and Charlie Benante (drums),and M.O.D.‘s Billy Milano (vocals). Regarding the fact that S.O.D. garnered controversy even back in the day for the deliberately offensive lyrics of songs like “Speak English Or Die” and “Fuck The Middle East”, Dan said: ”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.”
STORMTROOPERS OF DEATH are commonly credited as being among the first bands to fuse hardcore punk with thrash metal into a style sometimes called “crossover thrash.” The track “March Of The S.O.D.” from the group’s debut LP, “Speak English Or Die”, was the “Headbangers Ball” intro song for many years.
STORMTROOPERS OF DEATH was formed shortly after Ian finished his guitar tracks on the ANTHRAX album “Spreading The Disease”. He would draw pictures of the face of a character known as “Sargent D,” and the pictures would be accompanied by slogans such as “I’m not racist; I hate everyone” and “Speak English Or Die.” Ian would then wrote lyrics about this character. He decided to form a hardcore band based on Sargent D, so he recruited Benante, Lilker and Milano.
The 30th-anniversary edition of “Speak English Or Die” was made available in November 2015 via Megaforce. The set included the original album as well as the demo recordings from the pre-STROMTROOPERS OF DEATH project CRAB SOCIETY NORTH.
In a 2018 interview with the “Let There Be Talk” podcast, Ian defended the lyrics on “Speak English Or Die”, saying: “You’ve gotta understand, this was a character — I was writing for a character. This isn’t how I feel, as Scott Ian. I created a guy named Sargent D, who I was writing a comic book about and I wrote songs based on it. And if you don’t get it, go fuck yourself. I will never apologize, because that’s where it comes from.”
Lilker‘s 2014 book, “Perpetual Conversion”, recently saw its reprint, which includes a new foreword by Tomas Lindberg (AT THE GATES) as well as an all-new, full-color section containing previously unpublished photos, flyers, and ephemera. Author Dave Hofer describes the project as, “a zine-format biography dedicated to Lilker‘s ongoing, influential career.”
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