At least it’s not balloon animals.
But there are great things in the 80s too. It wasn’t all bad! 
And yeah, I like to hear German sung. I like German as a spoken language, actually. I know it has a stereotype/reputation for being a harsh language, but I like it and how it sounds, as a general rule. Honestly, I like to hear almost any non-English language, in just about any context, even when I can’t understand any of it. I can often make out a word or two in German and I suspect if I lived in Germany or Austria for a while, I’d start to get much better at understanding it and possibly speaking it, too.
Speaking of singing in German, have you heard any tracks off the new Laibach? They are back to singing in German again, and this track is especially lovely:
3 Likes
They’re the second item on the list.
Oh right, red balloon, red people… got it.
What is more interesting is the level of paranoia exhibited by small town LEO’s… Heck a white guy taking pictures for a news paper was shot by one of the trusted LEO’s last week and a Hospital Nurse was arrested by another LEO all claiming ‘Life threatening situations’ or ‘interfering’ from seemingly ordinary citizens.
Only the police get paid vacations for shooting unarmed, kidnapping citizens.
1 Like
I don’t get it. If i fucked up that hard on my job I would gtet fired if not brought up on criminal charges. Not paid vaccation or getting shuffled around. i would be seen as a liability that must be removed
3 Likes
Cops, the world’s original snowflakes.
Their fee-fees r ow-y cuz air bubblez is scary!
The only thing that can protect us from a Bad Guy with a Balloon is… well, a bunch of dysfunctional kids if I remember rightly.
1 Like
German industrial music is great. The lyrics they come up with - don’t understand them all, but the way they sound is beautiful.
2 Likes
Never really got to listen to Laibach, but some in my peer group did and were quite put off by political connotations, I recall. Thing is, I don’t know if it was the music, the visual aesthetics, or some statements or projects they did.
So nice to see that no one is over reacting to the cops not over reacting. Everyone is in on the joke…
1 Like
I’m not sure they quite understood them, then. Fascist pose, but not at all fascist. If you dig into their work and know the context, it’s evident, I think. But I can also understand how they can easily be misinterpreted as being what they seem to be on the surface. I mean, they wear uniforms, sing in German, their name is German, lots of fascist imagery, etc. But they come out of both the early Yugoslav punk scene as well as the Yugoslav and European performance art scenes of the 70s and 80s, so that helps to contextualize them a bit more. I mean, plenty of punks in London threw around swastikas, and certainly weren’t nazis (Ian Stewart being a real fascist, of course, but who cares about Skrewdriver…).
They’ve been incredibly subversive, though. For example, about a month prior to Milosevic’s speech in Kosova, which essentially kicked off the Yugoslav wars, (he had been giving very nationalist speeches ahead of this around Yugoslavia prior to this), they show up in Beograd and during the performance, one of the members gives a speech which mixed Hitler, Chamberlain, and Milosevic, in a combination of German and Serbian. The implication was a rather clear indictment of the rising tide of nationalism and where it’s appeasement could lead. They also played a show right at the end of the Siege of Sarajevo, where they handed out NSK passports. The tour was called the Occupied Europe NATO tour.
Taken out context, they seem just like a bunch of fascists, I think. But they employ themes of nationalism, fascism, and socialism in order to better explicate what they actually are and how they function in our mass culture. I kind of think they read that famous (infamous) quote by David Bowie from the late 70s, where Bowie said something about how “Hitler staged a country in the same way a rock star stages a show” and decided to make an entire career out of it. Seems to have worked.
2 Likes
This cries for an extensive and nuanced reply. Thanks for your input, it really made my head spin. Unfortunately, I’m going to work my arse of today, and until further notice. Imagery: ain’t got no time for that.gif
2 Likes
Yeah, sorry! They figured into my dissertation, so…
1 Like
It’s two in the morning local time, I just came home from a work meeting at including a racist and sexist MP who joked about why the fuck everyone worries about invasive alien plant but no-one about asylum seekers from a different culture, and that in this municipality the rule would be that a man would stand by his word, while a woman would stand by the dictionary. And I had to be nice and friendly and helpful and useful.
So I came here to unwind. And react to your post about Laibach.
Their whole concept, without being really qualified to judge on that, incidentally, seems to be to confuse people by appropriating style and aesthetics of the ridiculously far right and irritate people by that. Starting with the name, which still is considered to be offensive, as a friend from Lubiljana told me.
The beef my friends have with that is - again, if I recall correctly - that it just irritates people who are acutely aware of the connotations, and doesn’t really challenge the neo-fascists. Adopting the pose and style rather reinforces the stereotypes used and depicted instead of questioning them. Their ambiguity would be considered bad art, recreating rather than destroying the attitudes of cold superiority which fascists claim for themselves. Punks using Nazi symbols for their shock effect to express your disdain with the then-perceived fascism in our then-perceived hyper-capitalistic society of the early 80s is a completely different story from my perspective. Laibach is ambiguous rather than shocking most of the time, or am I wrong?
Anyway, given the current developement in many parts of Europe, I personally don’t feel inclined that we need this kind of concept band to help us spot neo-fascists in our societies. They are more often than not already out on the open, and very vocal. Also, in quite a few countries, they are already in charge, forming the government. From my POV Laibach seems to be just a joke to them, and it’s quite surely not one on them, but probably on us.
Did I mention that I came here to wind down?
Oh, well. Good night, and whereever you are, who or whatever you are: smack fascism. You may mock it, but don’t forget so smack. I couldn’t, today. I needed to be conciliatory.
2 Likes
You got some good stuff here that I’d like to reply to (probably would do that better tomorrow, though). So… how about I start a new thread, so we don’t derail a thread about things that scare cops?
[ETA] I started a new topic on this, but it wouldn’t let me do it from here.
1 Like
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
