My new favorite band ever.
Neo-folk is an offshoot of goth and industrial that is “folk” in the context of european military folk traditions. It’s usually dark and militant and creepy and beautiful… and fascist. Or “I won’t say I’m not a fascist…” And honestly, is it so much to ask that someone is willing to disambiguate themselves from genocidal racist authoritarians?
So earlier today I was bemoaning how a band I had just started liking was a bunch of fucking nazis, when my friend Unwoman turned me on to Rome.
YOU ADMIRE THE LIONS
YOU DESPISE ALL SHEEP
BUT FOLLOWING LIONS
MAKES NOTHING BUT SHEEP
YOU ARE ALL BENDING IN THE WIND
And also this one, that sounds like Leonard Cohen but even spookier:
Okay, so I feel like I made my point over the past month, that goth has always had rather radical elements in it, including many of the most prominent bands. So I’ll stop posting that series to birdsbeforethestorm. But I’ll keep exploring the intersection over at nurrgoth.tumblr.com, with perhaps a slightly broader focus, and not just music videos. And that site is rather easy to contribute to, in case you run across stuff that belongs there!
And Graceless: A Journal of the Radical Gothic is well underway and will be totally awesome.
Okay, turns out that industrial hip-hop didn’t stop in the 90s, and it has definitely stayed political. This song, by Meat Beat Manifesto, is from 2008.
Goth can (and used to more than it does currently, as far as I can tell) cast its spooky shadow across pretty much any genre. And at least in the 90s, there was industrial hip-hop, including the incredible The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, who derive their name from socialist literature and collaborated extensively with more “properly” industrial bands like Meat Beat Manifesto.
This is a fan video, but the lyrics to this song are pretty explicit too. I don’t know too much about Die Warzau, but they seem pretty political in general. A bit frightening, though, with an album titled Vinyl 88 (88 being code for “heil hitler” in places like Germany where you’re not allowed to be explicitly pro-nazi)… but near as I can tell this is intentional satire, as the band seems to make statements against racism with some regularity and the song “hitler’s brain” on that album is a collaboration with George Clinton.
Yes, yes, Wolves In The Throne Room is technically black metal and therefore, for some bizarre reason, outside the realm of “goth,” but that’s bullshit. This song is hell of goth. And you can’t get better than a black metal band that got its start at an Earth First! Rendezvous and is called something so blatant as Wolves In The Throne Room. I’m glad to hear a band with eco themes that never strays the slightest towards eco-fascism. And I’m glad to see cascadian culture so beautifully represented.
Black flag in the background? Check. Collectivist rather than individual approach to making industrial music? Check. I discovered Militia from a forum discussion about anti-fascist neofolk on last.fm. They’ve got an album called The Black Flag Hoisted and a book about eco-anarchism. From an interview:
In connection with your past and present albums I’ve found links to legendary Russian anarcho-theoretics Bakunin and Kropotkin. Can I ask you about your interest to Russia and Russian revolution movements? What was the general idea/concept for the release? Why is it so actual for you to talk today about the past, about revolution – today, in a time of total de-humanisation, mechanical rhythm of daily life, inner destruction of human individuality in modern megapolises? Can we talk about it?
FG: I think you’ve already made the right conclusions by reading about our works and listening to them. Indeed, we’re using MILITIA as a tool for spreading our eco-anarchic ideas about our society. They will all be explained in our forthcoming manifesto. We founded MILITIA to be a tool for the spreading of our eco-environmental views and our social ideas, which are based upon the anarchic philosophies of the Russian anarchists Bakunin and Kropotkin and the French ‘father’ of anarchism Proudhon. We combined certain elements of their social views with our own ideas regarding environmental problems, so we designed an alternative social form in which people can live in harmony with their natural environment, based upon anarchic principles. This means that we distinguish ourselves from the conventional left wing ideas – which believe in a society lead by a government – and form a strong opposition against the appearance of right wing ideas that seem to infiltrate the industrial music scene more and more.
In high school, someone dubbed me a copy of the ministry album New World Order. While reading a Vampire Freaks thread on environmental industrial, I found the guy from Velvet Acid Christ posting this song and pointing out that, yes, industrial has always been of an anti-industrialization critique.
Winterkälte doesn’t have any lyrics, but their song names say it all: “ban depleted uranium weapons”, “riot green elves”, “erosion”… they’re not actually very subtle. It’s good noisy stuff, too.
I’ve just started a Tumblr for Nurr Goth Isn’t Political, though I’ll continue to post some to this site as well until the end of the month since I’ve already got them scheduled.
A friend of mine just gave me a ridiculous number of recommendations for NGIP. I told him I’d never heard Snog, and he told me that that was criminal. I now understand why.
Snog: Empires
From the cadillac soup-kitchens
To the impoverished boardrooms
This orwellian nightmare
Is now everyman’s dream
Burn the empires down
There is no heaven
As we stand in line in your efficiency drive
A voice from the checkout screams
That this orwellian nightmare
Is now an everyday scene
