Today I had a case of music nostalgica going, probably because I listened to 1980's EBM music (I strongly suspect that I'm the only one that still remembers "A Split Second"...) on my iPod to and from work.
Now, I don't intend to make a habit of putting up random videos of stuff that I for some reason like, but I just thought it's about time that the old classic Laibach cover of Opus' song "Life is Life", deserves to be taken out of the closet (the German version is obviously better).
When I was a young pup in Sweden and learned German in high school (which is not unusual at all) I remember that our ancient sadistic German teacher (for some reasons all German teachers I have encountered has been sadists) one day pulled out a video for us to watch as a part of the learning program. If I remember correctly, the video was some form of information video about Austria and in the beginning of the program they not only used the song, but also large parts of the video to illustrate the beauty of Austria. Someone in the Austrian tourist agency must've completely missed all the controversy surrounding Laibach in the early '80s, but hey, I loved it.
Fast forward a number of years and I remember coming back to my student dorm in Sweden after a night of clubbing, me and my half-German half-Japanese hangaround coming back a bit earlier than the rest of the gang, opening up a few cans of beers and popped in Laibach in the CD player and started playing "Geburt Einer Nation" merrily singing along to the catchy Queen cover (he with extra gusto as his first language was German) when one of the girls living on the dorm screamed at our poor race-mixed asses that we were nazis and stormed out of the common room. We couldn't be bothered to put her straight since we were enjoying ourselves too much.
Good times and a classic song!
Thursday, September 11, 2008
I don't know what they were thinking, but I loved it!
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4 comments:
Und was war die Laibach-Kontroverse?
Holy cow, *that* song was famous? Yeesh.
I guess it's sort of the same as how Rock Me Amadeus rocked North America back in the day.
Penguin - Well, as you probably can see they played pretty heavily on fascist and nazi imagery. Also things like having a swastika on the cover of one of their albums (an artwork made by an anti-nazi jewish artist, but people usually didn't look that far) and answering accusations of being nazis with statements like "We're nazis as much as Hitler was a painter". For me, this is advanced humour!
John - You cannot even compare Laibach to stuff like Falco, Laibach is one of the greats!
Pleasure to meet you last night, sir. Did you make it back OK? :)
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