Industrial Music and Fascism

ASSIMILRELEASEATE A Critical History of Industrial Music PUBLIC S. ALEXANDER REED FOR NOT 1 13. Back and Forth: Industrial Music and Fascism 1. Extremism as the Norm Industrial music’s pan-revolutionary streak isn’t just fond of extreme imagery; it relies on it. Te Debordian tyranny of the spectacle, with its aligned control machines and hegemonies, is perceived as so all-encompassing that industrial music ofen takes neoliberal moderation as useless. In particular, the genre’s imagery of totalitarianism is pervasive enough to have rightly become a recur- ring topic of curiosity, caution, prurience, and debate within industrial music’s communities of fans and commentators. Graphically in videos, performances, and on record sleeves; sonically in the music’s unforgivinglyRELEASE quantized march rhythms and samples of political events, news, and flms; and discursively in bands’ lyrics and interviews, industrial music borrows from, enacts, mocks, documents, and embraces signifers of political and ideological extremism from seemingly every corner of human belief. Tis makes a certain sense given that the purported enemies on whom the genre fxes its crosshairs take so many forms. Instead of surveying and cataloguing industrial music’s extremist rheto- ric, this chapter looks deeply at how and why musicians use these signs (both theoretically and functionally),PUBLIC as well as how audiences have interpreted them. Troughout its entire history, the industrial music scene has been home to socialist ideologues, Randian libertarians, anarchists, academics, mistrusters of western intellectualism, utopian mystics, racial purists, nihilists with nothing to lose, and a substantial crowd who either hold aestheticized and underdeveloped ideologies or denyFOR any interest in politics, culture, and the discourse thereof, and who just want to dance. With this apparent variety in mind, it’s useful to turn to Slavoj Žižek, a savvy theorist of extremist politics and mass culture, who says, “Te fundamental confict today is no longer Lef versus Right, but rather, liberal openness versus neoethnic closedness.”1 Tis perspective helps us move past some of the picky distinctions between one band’s particular brand of sloganeeringNOT and another’s. Nearly all industrial music falls to the “open” side of Žižek’s new division, advocating for collective transparency and individual free action, if not always for ideological fuidity and open-mindedness. Indeed, Jon Savage’s assertion that industrial is concerned with “access to information” 185 rings true across the genre’s history. From Trobbing Gristle’s insistence that the cut-up reveals hidden truths behind cultural texts to the 1990s’ glorifcation of the hacker fgure within cyberpunk and beyond, the music deals with expos- ing secrets hidden by the powers that be. Industrial music resists these powers, and it prioritizes resistance above the particulars of politics, a sentiment illustrated by Fifh Colvmn Records’ oxymo- ronic and only slightly tongue-in-cheek 1996 compilation album title Fascist Communist Revolutionaries. Industrial groups’ reactive resistance has frequently made them slower to ofer solutions than to point out problems—most notably that authoritarian powers of any stripe exert more control over us than we real- ize. It’s true that some unambiguously lefist acts call for specifc political en- gagement: the band Consolidated springs to mind, with their vegetarian advocacy, their use of second-wave feminist Barbara Kruger’s art on the cover of their Business of Punishment album, and their featuring of African American separatist rapper Paris on 1992’s “Guerillas in the Mist.” But Consolidated are the exception to the rule here, for two reasons. First, on the theoretical level, any positive alternative to a totalitarian regime or a commodity-based econ- omy risks being superfcially appropriated and defangedRELEASE by the system—recall Debord’s phrase “the recuperation of the spectacle.” Second, on a practical level, industrial audiences have historically rejected preachiness; Consolidat- ed’s album Play More Music kicks of with a recording of an audience member angrily declaring to them at a live show, “If you don’t like fascism, don’t play industrial music.” Despite the actual antifascist beliefs of most industrial musicians, then, how is it that a fan could conclude that “Industrial Music is Fascism,” as Consolidat- ed’s track title suggests? How isPUBLIC it that at a 2001 VNV Nation concert in Mon- treal, a fervent skinhead fan saw ft to ofer the hardline lefist lead singer Ronan Harris a Nazi salute in a mistaken presumption of solidarity (to which Harris responded with a communist salute)?2 Te frst part of the answer is in the afore- mentioned tendency of most industrial music simply to critique and tear down authority ratherFOR than to verbalize a utopian replacement for it. Te second part has to do with the fact that this critique comes coded in industrial music’s now familiar and ofen intentional language of ambiguity. We’ll return to the frst issue in some depth, afer this question of ambiguity has been addressed. NOT2. Silent Politics In an essay on industrial music videos, Jason Hanley expresses concern that fans might sometimes misunderstand musicians’ uses of totalitarian imagery. 186 ASSIMILA TE Specifcally, Laibach built their reputation by declaring themselves to be a nation (Neue Slovenische Kunst—New Slovenian Art) and then staging their concerts and videos as unblinking state military rallies, driven with tactics that were all too familiar in Cold War Yugoslavia, such as constructivist graphic design, formation marching, and domineering one-way demagoguery. Te band’s embodiment of an oppressive regime “makes no attempt to subvert this image [so] it has the aura of authenticity.”3 According to Hanley, as a result, “Many Laibach fans began to revel in the evils of the band and to take their stage act at face value.”4 Hanley grants, “Perhaps that is what these bands are hoping for, that the origin of the sign is so powerful that it immediately connects with the audience, shocking them, awakening them, violently attacking them. Ten once the image has grabbed the audience, the band can do its work.”5 But as we’ll explore more thoroughly in this book’s fnal chapter, the fact of shock gives way to the content of shock with near inevitability—especially upon its less shocking repetitions—and so we oughtn’t fall prey to Artaud’s error of treating shock as an end unto itself. Te uniformity of Laibach’s provocation seems to insist that we grapple with fascism specifcally—or at least RELEASEwith the way that pag- eantry itself can dress up fascism and democracy with identical ease. Taken literally, “provocation” means inciting a verbal response; it asks questions. Laibach, for example, is referred to as an “interrogation machine” by scholar Alexei Monroe because their actions target the tyrannical and demand a response—to the degree that this reply (whatever it is) can be seen as part of the artistic work itself. Te nationalism they stage is so extreme as to become overidentifed, and it efectively calls a bluf: for example, the Yugoslav government in the 1980s either had toPUBLIC take a position afrming the band’s obviously dangerous national zeal (aligning themselves through silence or advocacy with unambiguous tyranny), or they could denounce it, thus revealing nationalism (and thereby the state itself) as limited and fawed. It can duly attempt to dismantle any patriotism born of listeners’ unspoken (even unrecognized) de- sire for totalitarianismFOR by “traversing the fantasy,” preemptively exorcising that longing. In the early 1980s, the Neue Slovenische Kunst outraged Slovenia’s government and culture at large. However, Laibach have since attained signifcant stature and commercial hef in their tiny home country; prior to the fall of communism, they were, in western countries, the top-selling EasternNOT Bloc band of any genre, and today their largest markets are in Germany and the United States. In 2003 they began receiving fnancial support from the Slovenian government. Te practice of anti-authority acts receiving government funding is arguably paradoxical, but within the industrial scene it dates back to COUM Transmissions, to whom the Arts Council of Great Britain repeatedly awarded grants. Back and Forth 187 Te context of industrial music’s extremism can ask other important questions too. Noise journalist Mikko Aspa convincingly argues that social shock is no more the goal for acts like Whitehouse or Brighter Death Now, who sing about murder and pedophilia, than it is for murderers or pedophiles themselves— which is to say not really at all.6 Rather, this extremist music instead asks the question of how ordinary people become such monsters, suggesting an under- lying paranoia that it could happen to anyone, that our free will is illusory. In a way, that’s what’s going on with Trobbing Gristle’s commentary on normality in “Very Friendly,” as discussed in Chapter 4. And if we listen carefully, we might hear that this music answers its own question, musically portraying op- pression and evil as the unforeseen fallout of a technologically modern, (post) industrialized world—a claim supported by the violence that pervades Futur- ism, the obsession with virus and addiction in the work of Burroughs, and the Sozialistisches Patientenkollektiv’s argument that mental illness is a symptom of capitalism. But it’s rare for industrial music actually to verbalize questions

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