Oh how I love Swans. Ten years ago, when I was a teenager, my art teacher (taking lessons outside of school) Steven Archer told me one week that my homework was to go out and buy the Swans album Various Failures. “Put in the second CD, put it on track 10, put the volume all the way up, and press play.” That was my homework. I didn’t have to paint something about the song, I just had to listen to it (the song was called Eyes Of Nature). It changed my life. Swans is what I listen to when people that I care about die.

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VAC makes some damn fine dance music. They’re also vegan and have a section in the links of their site to animal rights websites.

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Oh, how I love Bauhaus, like any good goth. But I hadn’t really known any of their songs to be political until my dear friend pointed this song out to me today for this series.

Bauhaus: Double Dare

I dare you, to be real
To touch a flickering flame
The pangs of dark delight
Don’t cower in night fright

Don’t back away just yet
From destinations set
I dare you to be proud
To dare to shout aloud
For convictions that you feel
Like sound from bells to peal
I dare you to speak of your despise
For bureaucracy, hypocracy- all liars

I dare
I dare
I dare- you- you

My friend just let me know about this band, a sort of supergroup of gothpunk and punk bands. And this is a useful place to point out that, regardless of the genre, being radical in some elements of politics doesn’t mean that you don’t have some problematic themes in your music.

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DAF, Deutsch-Amerikanische Freundschaft wrote this song as a sort of bizarre satire. It’s useful to point out because goth, as a subculture, is less afraid to mock fascism by pretending to embrace than, say, punk. But politics can be a lot blurrier in the spooky subculture, and of course there are those who do embrace fascism, though they’re very much the minority.

DAF also wrote a more traditionally political song, The Sheriff, against the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.

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Okay, I don’t really know what this song is about totally, but it’s about the earth being destroyed and how the earth will fight back, and that what we have is only borrowed from the earth. I don’t know what all the stuff about believers and secrets is about though.

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I’ve liked Rasputina for close to a decade… I’d heard them some, and then saw them play in Pittsburgh and liked them more still. The song above is about The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire in NYC in 1911 when 146 garment workers were killed, since they were locked into the building during work hours and they couldn’t escape the flames.

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Cop Shoot Cop has the best band name ever thought up. And yes, it was named for their anti-police sentiment. They were also one of the most original industrial rock groups around.

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Lexx Sinister turned me on to Birmingham 6, a danish industrial act that is named for the Irish falsely accused ex-prisoners the Birmingham six. They’re pretty blatantly political, with songs with titles like policestate.

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