Since nothings been going on here for quite some time (Jim, where ARE you?), I just thought Id post something with relation to the We, the headbangers, and how the outside world perceives us-topic. This comes from a German radio DJ. Ive translated a transcription of one of his features, and although he is dealing with alternative music in his job, he seems to have some metal anywhere in his background why else should he come to British grind as a topic for what seems to be dealing with nostalgia? Still, I dont know what to make of this
is it funny, pretentious, does it display sympathy for or aversion against Metal
? - Anyway, Ive made some annotations concerning the not-so-familiar names. Just read it and have a laugh
Spiral of Remembrance
Napalm Death You Suffer by Klaus Walter
Why do we listen to music? - You Suffer provides many, if not all answers to this question. You Suffer just has everything you can expect from a piece of music. I am consciously applying the term piece here, because You Suffer is oscillating between song and track. It has both the narrative qualities of a song and the non-verbal persuasiveness of a track. For all its narrative excellence, the piece remains beyond explanation. In the sense of Susan Sonntags Against Interpretation, it is resistant like every great work of art; and as such, it looks into the eyes of death starting with the band name.
The piece carries a notion of constructive destruction. Early on, Walter Benjamin[1] praised this dialectical aspect. The Stooges welded it into a famous song whose title Henry Rollins has tattooed on his back: Search and Destroy. As far as Benjamin is concerned, he wrote in 1927: What we used to call art begins at a distance of two meters from the body. He would have liked You Suffer hardly ever has art been closer to the body. The piece assaults the body with metallic strength and takes hold of it, just like the repetitive beats of tribal musicians have been doing it for millennia from pogo to Togo, from Ghana to gabba.
Like every great work of Pop music indeed, our piece IS pop You Suffer triggers mimetic impulses like singing along, imitating and denigrating, signifying and altering it, chewing it like gum or blowing it on a comb. Infants and children all over the world will mimetically respond to our piece; they will understand without knowing what it is about, since it speaks a universal language. By no means does it put up any semantic or musicological barriers it resists all formal categories and philatelist approaches of pigeonholing, as it is above them all or below.
It disrupts radio formats and music television with its length, so it is once more universal universally non-utilizable and not to broadcast. Some people might think this is subversive I think this word should be used only if needs be.
Another advantage of our piece is that it is perfectly fit to be played to people. Present it to art connoisseurs, and there will be a hail of comparisons, associations and links: phallic as well as deconstructing the phallogocentric[2] like Giacometti or Louise Burgeois[3] - Monochrome like Yves Kleins[4] blue, pixely and contingent like Jackson Pollock[5], lo-fi and dodging the art business like a Polaroid of Willy Brandt[6] taken by Warhol. You could go on talking that way, comparing the vehemence of our piece with that of a tsunami, its sex with Ava Gardners, its creators with the lower classes or high society you see: universal POP, conceived in less than a second; going around the world in the blink of an eye. To put it into cartoon-language: UUUUUAAAAARRGGGHHH!
You Suffer was issued as the worlds shortest single in 1989 by Earache Records, catalogue number 7 Mosh 12, running time 0.01. This means one second, but you will get 0.62 seconds at best if you time it yourself. The remaining free space on the black vinyl shows drawings and messages to all you crazy sick fuckers. The single b-side is not that bad either - Electro Hippies: Mega Armageddon Death Pt. 1, indicated running time 0.01 minutes, real running time 0.59 seconds.
The destructive character lives from the feeling not that life is worth living, but that suicide is not worth the trouble. (Walter Benjamin)
[1] Walter Benjamin (1892-1940): German philosopher
[2] phallogocentric: notion of traditional concepts of language being both word-centred (logcentric) and dominated by male characteristics (phallocentric)
[3] Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966), Louise Burgeois (1911): artists/sculptors of the surrealist school
[4] Yves Klein: artist/photographer, famous for his specific ultra-marine blue called IKB (International Klein Blue)
[5] Jackson Pollock: artist/painter, leading figure of Abstract Expressionism
[6] Willy Brandt (1913-1992): German chancellor from 1969-1974, Nobel Prize winner
Spiral of Remembrance
Napalm Death You Suffer by Klaus Walter
Why do we listen to music? - You Suffer provides many, if not all answers to this question. You Suffer just has everything you can expect from a piece of music. I am consciously applying the term piece here, because You Suffer is oscillating between song and track. It has both the narrative qualities of a song and the non-verbal persuasiveness of a track. For all its narrative excellence, the piece remains beyond explanation. In the sense of Susan Sonntags Against Interpretation, it is resistant like every great work of art; and as such, it looks into the eyes of death starting with the band name.
The piece carries a notion of constructive destruction. Early on, Walter Benjamin[1] praised this dialectical aspect. The Stooges welded it into a famous song whose title Henry Rollins has tattooed on his back: Search and Destroy. As far as Benjamin is concerned, he wrote in 1927: What we used to call art begins at a distance of two meters from the body. He would have liked You Suffer hardly ever has art been closer to the body. The piece assaults the body with metallic strength and takes hold of it, just like the repetitive beats of tribal musicians have been doing it for millennia from pogo to Togo, from Ghana to gabba.
Like every great work of Pop music indeed, our piece IS pop You Suffer triggers mimetic impulses like singing along, imitating and denigrating, signifying and altering it, chewing it like gum or blowing it on a comb. Infants and children all over the world will mimetically respond to our piece; they will understand without knowing what it is about, since it speaks a universal language. By no means does it put up any semantic or musicological barriers it resists all formal categories and philatelist approaches of pigeonholing, as it is above them all or below.
It disrupts radio formats and music television with its length, so it is once more universal universally non-utilizable and not to broadcast. Some people might think this is subversive I think this word should be used only if needs be.
Another advantage of our piece is that it is perfectly fit to be played to people. Present it to art connoisseurs, and there will be a hail of comparisons, associations and links: phallic as well as deconstructing the phallogocentric[2] like Giacometti or Louise Burgeois[3] - Monochrome like Yves Kleins[4] blue, pixely and contingent like Jackson Pollock[5], lo-fi and dodging the art business like a Polaroid of Willy Brandt[6] taken by Warhol. You could go on talking that way, comparing the vehemence of our piece with that of a tsunami, its sex with Ava Gardners, its creators with the lower classes or high society you see: universal POP, conceived in less than a second; going around the world in the blink of an eye. To put it into cartoon-language: UUUUUAAAAARRGGGHHH!
You Suffer was issued as the worlds shortest single in 1989 by Earache Records, catalogue number 7 Mosh 12, running time 0.01. This means one second, but you will get 0.62 seconds at best if you time it yourself. The remaining free space on the black vinyl shows drawings and messages to all you crazy sick fuckers. The single b-side is not that bad either - Electro Hippies: Mega Armageddon Death Pt. 1, indicated running time 0.01 minutes, real running time 0.59 seconds.
The destructive character lives from the feeling not that life is worth living, but that suicide is not worth the trouble. (Walter Benjamin)
[1] Walter Benjamin (1892-1940): German philosopher
[2] phallogocentric: notion of traditional concepts of language being both word-centred (logcentric) and dominated by male characteristics (phallocentric)
[3] Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966), Louise Burgeois (1911): artists/sculptors of the surrealist school
[4] Yves Klein: artist/photographer, famous for his specific ultra-marine blue called IKB (International Klein Blue)
[5] Jackson Pollock: artist/painter, leading figure of Abstract Expressionism
[6] Willy Brandt (1913-1992): German chancellor from 1969-1974, Nobel Prize winner
