Laibach/Killing Joke

LAIBACH
WAT
Mute

KILLING JOKE
Killing Joke
Red Ink/Sony

Laibach forces me to rethink my position on the uses of irony in music. I’m against it, most of the time, because it became indie rock’s way of lowering the stakes, cushioning their aesthetic laziness by shrugging off meaning. This tactic was/is particularly poisonous when manifested as indie bands taking on the tropes of hard rock and/or metal, effectively (given the socioeconomic roots of indie rock vs. those of hard rock/metal) ridiculing their social inferiors for the amusement of their peers. Not cute.

Laibach’s irony is of a much higher, and darker, order. By seizing upon the visual and sonic signifiers of fascism, and mingling them with high art in ways most rock fans were unlikely to get (It’s a sign of my own woeful ignorance that I attended the Kasimir Malevich show at NYC’s Guggenheim Museum, and upon spotting his famous Black Cross painting, jumped back in shock at encountering the icon which had adorned so many Laibach records), they managed to shock and horrify the right and left at once. Only those who got a thrill from transgressive fascist chic stuck around after first encountering the band. Eventually, though, a fair amount of people began to "get it," and the group now has a sizable cult following.

Early Laibach records like Opus Dei and Occupied Europe Tour are astonishing in their impassive hostility. They concede absolutely nothing to the listener; the band doesn’t seem to care if anyone "gets it." Over time, though, that stone face has cracked. The twin tipping points were the Sympathy For The Devil and Let It Be albums, wherein Laibach claimed they were attempting to hurl the twin pinnacles of Western rock culture from their pedestals (with some success—their version of "Across The Universe" is the best one I’ve ever heard), but it was also a quick and easy way to bring crowds in, as "Sympathy" was something of a novelty dancefloor hit in goth and industrial clubs. Now, the transformation is virtually complete. Early pronouncements like "art and totalitarianism are not mutually exclusive" have given way to a kind of jackbooted boosterism, as Laibach insist they are all about the betterment of mankind, satirizing our worst political instincts in order to cultivate our best ones.

The biggest weakness of Laibach is the essential multimedia-ness of their presentation. A Laibach song, heard out of context, is just a weird Teutonic techno track. The full impact only emerges with a close reading/examination of the CD booklet, the video, the press release, the book…you get the idea. And it’s gotten worse in recent years, as Laibach have embraced kitsch, both musically and philosophically. The sonic extremism of their early recordings, which literally sounded like marching music for some Eastern European army of the damned, has been replaced with a smooth hard-techno sound. The orchestral flourishes and choirs that remain are few and far between, and they’re deployed only on the choruses, like an entry from the Eurovision Song Contest. And the lyrics are no longer as consumed by blood-and-fire pseudo-nationalistic rants (pseudo, because Laibach famously declared their art group, Neue Slovenische Kunst, to be its own nation), and are now more often than not mere boasts about the band’s own potency. They’re as watered-down as KMFDM these days.

WAT (which apparently stands for We Are Time) is a fun record, but most if not all of the subtext, and the political satire, that used to make Laibach genuinely chilling, and divisive, is gone. Still, I have to wonder if they’re not in a better position than Killing Joke, who’ve released an explicitly political album this year. The Joke have come out quite explicitly against the Iraq war, filling their self-titled disc with tracks like "Total Invasion" and "Blood On Your Hands," along with more typical post-punk agitprop cuts like "You’ll Never Get To Me."

It must be said up front that Killing Joke is the band’s hardest-rocking album since 1990’s Extremities, Dirt & Various Repressed Emotions, so anyone wondering whether they’ve still got it musically—they do. It’s in the lyrical realm where they’re falling down on the job. KJ frontman Jaz Coleman’s worldview is simplistic post-punk leftism, reflexive and unreflective. "Big money" bad, "the people" good. It’s no more complicated than a Kucinich campaign poster, and demands no more thought from the listener. But boy, when it’s blaring through speakers or headphones, it’ll sure make you wanna jump up and down and break stuff.