One thing about Laibach should be clear to us by now: they are always right.
Such is the case with the new album Musick, which comes out just in time for May 1, International Labor Day. The record tells us that the only music left that still makes sense is pop music. Today, it offers the ultimate twenty-four-hour escapism and accelerated oblivion from everyday troubles: it's real background, for our rapidly disintegrating world.
Pop music is based on predictability. You know where the chorus goes and where the melody goes. You know in which tonality the song sounds happy. It is known which rhythm is used and when. Pop music also has its rituals. You know when a hit single comes out. You know when new videos and photos arrive. You know when a star goes on tour. You know how to dress then. Lyrics are known by heart, they are learned before going to a concert, in order to sing in unison, in a community of happy users.
Once these mechanisms were hidden, part of the secret management science, and today they are transparent, accessible to everyone, part of the strategy for selling music products on a wide market. All this makes pop music, in a narrower sense, a reflection of desirable events in society, and sometimes a tool of social engineering. Pop culture hides the very heart of totalitarianism.
TODAY WE LISTEN
POP TOTALITARIANISM
"Laibach" accepted these theses at the end of the eighties of the 20th century. Their albums Opus dei (1987) Let It Be (1988) and EP Sympathy for the Devil (1990), offered us insight into the totalitarian mechanisms that are part of the DNA of the entertainment industry. While some thought that Laibach was solely concerned with demystifying communist totalitarianism, they were simultaneously and very consistently uncovering the layers of the same repressive mechanisms in capitalism, finding a startling sameness.
This criticism of pop culture from pop culture came at the right moment, when with the end of the Cold War, the structure of the world as agreed upon after the Second World War also came to an end. Many did not want to understand all this at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall, but "Laibach" - like no other Yugoslav band - had the opportunity to be informed firsthand. Having become intimately acquainted, through his English publishers Mute Records, with the ways in which engineering works mainstream in the West, "Laibach" concluded even then what will mark their activity in the following years: the understanding that the cynicism with which business plays with music - and in the last case us - greatly transcends ideology.
WE'RE LISTENING TOMORROW
TOTALITARIANISM OF THE CLERGY
On his first true author release in over a decade (Spectre from 2014, on which there is also the track "Eurosong", with the chorus: "Europe is falling apart"!) - "Laibach" deal with music as a theme. Their thesis is strikingly similar to our thesis, which you could already read on these same pages: of all the genres, only pop music remains to bear witness to the world as it is today.
Hyperpop is therefore a genre that we often meet here, and the digital thrash aesthetic prevails. The tracks have nothing to do with their famous ones industrial I will chime in and it will probably shock some old fans. What "Laibach" offer us here is a musical essay on the cheerful nonsense of the modern world in ten compositions, which do not lack high-class wit while dealing with the very commonplaces of contemporary pop culture: the single "Allgorhythm" dictates the conclusions with its cheerful lyrics. We must keep moving on./ The past is dead and gone./ No matter what you do/ No one cares about your point of view/ What matters is the algorithm works for you; in the hit operetta title "Musick", the narrator is even more direct as he tells us that he cannot live without music, that he constantly dreams of it, but also that he is sick of it. In the style of modern pop projects, almost every song is a duet with someone, and in "Love Machine" we meet Senidah herself in the role of a disco-soul diva, and in "Keep It Reel" Manc Trampusch from the alternative group "Koala Voice" as a wild rap-metal vocalist. There are as many quotes as you like, from "Kraftwerk" to Mozart, and "Luigi Mangione" uses the dramaturgy of spaghetti westerns, "Resistencia" the dramaturgy of Bad Bunny-type Latin pop, while "Singularity" turns electro-pop into a case study commenting on the current dead end of pop culture: It's a world of echoes we can't break/Every tune is a copy or remake..
Album Musick Laibach want to tell us that there is no more music, to expose its non-existence. And in this way, as always, we are confronted with the key dilemma of today: the lack of meaning in everything that happens to us.
In response, they offer what they have always offered - with a total deformation of pop aesthetics, they want to tell us how we should admit and accept our own vanity, and understand that a higher power has broken us long ago. The cracks in the pop music mirror that they show us speak volumes about that. But "Laibach" - eh you mischievous "Laibach" - still believe in something! That something is the music - however trivial it may be - as offered to us here. Life is as trivial as she is. Everything that should to do everything we can we can to do in order to exist in peace with ourselves is to accept it as it is and give up aspirations for something higher. And so we can do nothing for ourselves.
And that is the deep humanistic message of "Laibach" for this time.
As we said: "Laibach" are always right.
