Slovenia is a Land of Contrast

I remember Bruce and I once had a conversation about how little satire was left in Industrial music. Aside from Snog, and the occasional Foetus release from Thirlwell, it seems like the genre is pretty devoid of any clever social commentary. That is to say that if random EBM group A writes a song about a social issue or what have you, I'm not expecting them to have much to say about it other than "Sweat Shops are bad!" or whatever. Anyways, during the convo, Bruce pointed out quite rightly that the all time kings of Industrial satire Laibach are still going strong after a quarter of a century at work. You'd think that a band who made their name doing militaristic covers of pop songs might have run out of creative steam some time back, but those wacky slovenians are still hard at work using our silly songs to make points about european politics and the contradictions inherent in western democracy (for real!). Seeing as their use of imagery is so central to what they do, I figured a quick video rundown would be fun.

Life is Life (from the album Opus Dei)


This is what I'm talking about. Cover of a lame reggae song, made over into an ultra-fascist anthem. So ultra-fascist in fact that one questions how anyone could have ever doubted it was parody. I could say something about how this makes a salient point about lyrical context, but you already knew that right?

Sympathy for the Devil (from Sympathy for the Devil)

I don't really have much to say about this, except that I saw this on TV when I was a kid and it scared the hell out of me. This was back when Much Music showed videos, and not reality TV shows. Although I must admit combining the two for a Laibach reality TV show would be pretty slick. Anyways, I gotta admire a band that makes a video where they march right into hell like it ain't even a thing.

Anglia (from Volk)

From last year's Volk, an album where each song had a theme for a particular nation, including elements from those nation's national anthems. This is a little more direct then you might otherwise expect from them, but it's still pretty neat. See if you can figure out which country this is about!