Laibach – The Sound Of Music

Mute

Laibach doing The Sound of Music. If those words hold any meaning for you, you’ve pretty much already heard this album. You’re probably already aware that this is a bunch of studio recordings inspired by a performance they did in DPRK.

Now. Obviously one of Laibach’s most enduring qualities is liberal-baiting. How did they get into the DPRK? They probably asked, and aren’t liberals. They probably don’t buy into the narrative that some countries are entirely verboten, and possible beg the question of why not DPRK but Israel-occupied Palestine (cf that jazz festival recently). Or pop junkets to Saudi. Or the fucking United States.

Playing a place isn’t the same as to entirely endorse it. I know a few Jewish Israeli anarchists who can recognise that that state is not without problems, but not worth cutting off entirely. I actually know very little about DPRK. And there isn’t a measure I can imagine that accurately states that “a state that kills and suppresses dissidents” (China, DPRK) is better than a state that is systematically racist (the US) or the second-biggest manufacturer of weapons (the UK).

States are big and complex things. Also, why the fuck wouldn’t you go to DPRK? There’s a song on here that has the line “How do you solve a problem like Korea”. It might be the most slight of explicit criticisms in what are otherwise relatively stingless tunes, but I can’t see any other band of any reknown (in Euro-US circles) doing that. I’m not saying that Laibach aren’t edgelords. But they’re consummate. The latest manifestation of their thirty-plus year project of precarious liberal-baiting.

So the thing with Laibach, in 2018, is that they’ve come to be a more important band than the band I liked in the 1990s for (ostensibly) taking the piss out of Queen, Status Quo etc, who introduced me to the NSK and arch windup merchant cum intellectual contrarian Slavoj Žižek. Laibach have been pretty clear, at least since the 1990s — the pop song is totalitarian. Their criticism of capital, tacit though it is, isn’t some model of socialist resistance from the 1920s or ’68, but rather a smarter one that realises that the fealties of cohort are easier punctuated by being in the moment of popular culture. Or: it’s not quite taking the piss.

To the music, then. This is the thing that Laibach possibly precipitated. Music is way less sectarian, mercifully, than it was up to the 1990s or so. More people have read about DPRK because of Laibach, and that’s partly due to… this obviously faintly ridiculous set of covers from The Sound of Music. My favourite bit is “Do-Re-Mi”, in which the solfege is rendered at the same pitch each time. I could say it’s evocative of the elision of difference in late capital, but mostly it’s just funny. The incessant “yodelling” on “Lonely Goatheard” is the closest to self-parody Laibach have come. “16 Going On 17” very obviously takes a line which illustrates quite how pervy and sexist that song is (and why wouldn’t it). But none of this is coming from a place without well-realised electro-industrial (ish) settings and production.

How do you solve a problem like Korea? How do you catch a cloud and pin it down? She’s a riddle, she’s a child. This album’s centrepiece. Which probably isn’t saying this, but made me think… well, the thing with DPRK in terms of diplomacy, is that they’re not playing by the same rules. Which is why the liberal west gets it wrong. Which is partly why Al Jazeera but not BBC World are allowed in there. Which is why someone radically not from that cloth such as the orange twat can punctuate the status quo. Not a problem for leftist thinking, but certainly one for the centrists who’ve been soaking up leftist goodwill like fucking vampires for a fucking century.

Basically then, Laibach are the modern heroes of pastiche. Just that close to the bone but still noxious enough to ward off the right.

-Kev Nickells-