The kitsch, the bad and the dubious: a 40-year-long question posed by Laibach
With pop song covers, military beats, and a stage turned into a battlefield of light and noise, Laibach has been fooling us for almost half a century only to be whatever we want them to be
In 2011, I presented Kunst ist Krieg. Industrial music and martial discourse )(in Portuguese) as my final work for my bachelor’s degree in journalism. In this research, I tried to understand why so many industrial music bands adopted a military and bellicist approach to their art. Though my focus ended up on the Austrian project Nachtmahr, I also observed what Throbbing Gristle, Einstürzende Neubauten, Boyd Rice, Front 242, Death in June (thus including neofolk to the list), and Laibach were doing in this sense.
In the case of Laibach, the Slovenian band founded in 1980 has already been extensively studied and approached in works such as Interrogation Machine by Alexei Monroe and on an essay by Slavoj Zizek. I believe Zizek made the most accurate analysis when he described Laibach and NSK (Neue Slowenische Kunst, the art movement founded by the band) as not a fascist enterprise, but rather an act of subversive affirmation as its adoption of totalitarian aesthetics was not “an ironic imitation”, but rather an attempt to frustrate “the system by over-identifying with its obscene superego underside” and thus “manipulating the process of transference with the totalitarian state”.
In his essay, Zizek cites Rob Reiner’s film A Few Good Men in which two marines kill a fellow soldier after a beating. While the military prosecutor claims this was deliberate murder, the defense suggests that the marines were simply applying what they call “Code Red”, this non-written law which “authorizes the clandestine night-time beating of a fellow soldier.” The tricky part is that, though this form of punishment is illegal, it still “reaffirms the cohesion of the group, i.e. it calls for an act of supreme identification with group values” as the Code Red is applied to condone an act of transgression.
“Such a code must remain under the cover of night, unacknowledged, unutterable — in public everybody pretends to know nothing about it, or even actively denies its existence. It represents the “spirit of community” in its purest, exerting the strongest pressure on the individual to comply with its mandate of group identification. Yet, simultaneously, it violates the explicit rules of community life.”
Zizek claims that such mechanics are inherent to society, and he even cites Mikhail Bakhtin when the theorist proposed that “periodic transgressions of the public law are inherent to the social order, they function as a condition of the latter’s stability.” However, the tricky part is that these transgressions could be as petty as teenagers drinking alcohol in secrecy and as dangerous as the Ku Klux Klan.
Zizek suggests in his essay that “a (white) man is easily forgiven minor infractions of the Law, especially when they can be justified by a ‘code of honor’; the community still recognizes him as ‘one of us’. Yet he will be effectively excommunicated, perceived as ‘not one of us’, the moment he disowns the specific form of transgression that pertains to this community — say, the moment he refuses to partake in the ritual lynching by the Klan, or even reports them to the Law (which, of course, does not want to hear about them since they exemplify its own hidden underside).”
It is about “solidarity in guilt”, an attitude that was also shared by Nazi communities when they “ostracized those who were not ready to assume the dark side of the idyllic Volksgemeinschaft, the night pogroms, the beatings of political opponents — in short, all that “everybody knew, yet did not want to speak about aloud.” One could say the same is being applied by contemporary extremists: it’s not only about having a right-wing political inclination, but signing up for a whole campaign against human rights and democracy — take the example of the invasion of the Capitol in the US and the more recent invasion of the congress in Brazil. It’s not only about proposing a take on masculinity, it is also about being a human trafficker, rapist, and take part of organized crime. It’s not only about free speech, it is about couping whoever we want to.
It is precisely between the said and the unsaid where Laibach find their playground. In Zizek’s words:
In the process of disintegration of socialism in Slovenia, they staged an aggressive inconsistent mixture of Stalinism, Nazism, and Blut und Boden ideology. The first reaction of the enlightened Leftist critics was to conceive of Laibach as the ironic imitation of totalitarian rituals; however, their support of Laibach was always accompanied by an uneasy feeling: “What if they really mean it? What if they truly identify with the totalitarian ritual?” — or, a more cunning version of it, transferring one’s own doubt onto the other: “What if Laibach overestimates their public? What if the public takes seriously what Laibach mockingly imitates, so that Laibach actually strengthens what it purports to undermine?” This uneasy feeling is fed on the assumption that ironic distance is automatically a subversive attitude.
What if, on the contrary, the dominant attitude of the contemporary “post-ideological” universe is precisely the cynical distance toward public values? What if this distance, far from posing any threat to the system, designates the supreme form of conformism, since the normal function of the system requires cynical distance? In this sense the strategy of Laibach appears in a new light: it “frustrates” the system (the ruling ideology) precisely insofar as it is not its ironic imitation, but overidentification with it .
For the past 40 years, Laibach have been successfully dodging all these questions by landing in no place at all. The ball is still kicking in this kitsch pinball arcade that features military uniforms, pop song covers, and even dinosaurs. In fact, as Zizek suggests, what the Slovenian band does is manipulating the psychoanalytic process of transference. They know their public (and especially intellectuals) “is obsessed with the ‘desire of the Other’”: they must know if the band is really totalitarian or not. But this is something they can never answer, for their work is not an answer, but a question: what do you wish us to be?
Their latest tour, Love is Still Alive, is the epitome of this raison d’etre. It is metamodern in as much as it uses pop culture and nostalgia to convey a feeling of comfort through retro video game art, country music, 70s psychedelic sci-fi ambiances, only to take that back from you through bleak lyrics about how Earth has collapsed and humanity has taken refuge in space, having love as the last and only hope.
That is camp. That is kitsch. That is what Laibach always was, as much as Nazi art too. But the conversation does not end with you feeling happy that your favorite super heroes managed to save the universe, or even keen to follow more of their adventures. It is absolutely ingenious that they start their concert with a contagious space opera musical, give you a few minutes of intermezzo rest pinched with a looping scene of a Native American male depiction from an old Western movie, and then come back with deep and dark tracks that speak of “order and discipline”, of “death for death”, and how “you who challenges” should not hide but die a hero. The fact that the stage is bombarded with noise and blinding lights commanded by Ivan “Jani” Novak, which is also the bandleader and main songwriter, only adds more spice to the what Laibach is cooking.
For the encore, we watch classic Laibach covering pop songs such as The Future by Leonard Cohen and Sympathy for the Devil by The Rolling Stones with their dark and ambiguous style. After shocking the audience with loud music and imagery of war, violence, death, and darkness, they come back to say again that the future might be murder, but there is still hope in love. You might even hear the lead singer Milan Fraz singing “pleased to meet you, hope you guess my name” while video excerpts of Putin show on the big screen. Only to be followed by a jazzy, almost 007-like The Coming Race which reminds us that Laibach was also commissioned to write the soundtrack of the infamous franchise Iron Sky — the movie about the Nazis on the moon, and then about Hitler riding a t-rex.
What does that even mean when you have such strong commentary on politics building up through your career? I remember feeling outraged when I watched the first Iron Sky movie: why did Laibach do this to themselves? Only to carry on with the franchise for a second and almost a third title, which was shelved. But that is the whole point: when you are just about to be sure that they are sending a harsh message about war and politics, they will bless you with lovesongs like Getting closer and the musical album Wir sind das Volk, which adapts Heiner Müller texts and features a cover art by Gottfried Helnwein — an Austrian painter who was the theme of my Master’s degree dissertation and who also deals with national socialism and infancy.
Laibach is therefore not here to offer you comfort. Perhaps for a few songs, perhaps to make you dance with Tanz mit Laibach at the club. However, the fact that they do not play this song live anymore seems to be a nod to the way we have grown fond of this contagious song. Or perhaps they might start to play it live again just to do their trick with our minds.
As proposed by Zizek, Laibach is acting here as the psychoanalyst which incorporates the figure of the Great Other, the owner of the Truth, but, in fact, they are actually simply catalyzing the desires that we can’t put into words. They are transferring their responsibility for you to decide whether you are engaging with them because they are a caricature of totalitarianism, or because they make kitsch takes on serious issues, or because they simply leave you in the dark.
Some artists play more dangerously with the same topics only to say it was a joke or a metaphor, as if the disclaimer would revert and reset all that was previously stated. At this point, I must do a mea culpa: in my research, Kunst ist Krieg, I concluded that art could indeed be apolitical (or apoliteic), that when an artist dresses and sounds like a fascist, it is more about shock value and confrontation, not affirmation. But at this point, I no longer agree with that and Laibach seems to be a good way to prove that I was wrong.
You can’t possibly keep a prank going on for over 40 years only to engage both libertarian leftists and Kim Jong-un. It’s not like what Sacha Baron Cohen does with characters like Borat, which is a deliberate use of comedy to uncover dark aspects of our society. Put more simply by Richard Wolfson:
Laibach’s method is extremely simple, effective and horribly open to misinterpretation. First of all, they absorb the mannerisms of the enemy, adopting all the seductive trappings and symbols of state power, and then they exaggerate everything to the edge of parody… Next they turn their focus to highly charged issues — the West’s fear of immigrants from Eastern Europe, the power games of the EU, the analogies between Western democracy and totalitarianism.
Though Laibach may not state clearly what they are, this is by no means an apolitical stance, for everything is political, even when you can be that deceitful and appear to the viewer however they want to see. Watching them live was the final proof that I was horribly wrong (and naive) in the conclusion of my research and that they are possibly one of the biggest tricksters of contemporaneity.
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