A Year of Music

Stuck in my head this morning: “Metal Dance” by SPK. Or, as the incredibly pretentious woman who sang it says, “Metahhl Dahhhhhnsz!” SPK is a perfect example of a group whose quality and credibility went straight off a cliff very early in their career (in fact, SPK neatly recapitulates the entire evolution of industrial from transgressive noise into po-faced clanky dance-industrial into Middle-Eastern tinged coldwave into Delerium-style synth cheez in one tidy package), and songs like “Metal Dance” are why. So cheesy! Yet so pretentious!

It’s hard to believe this is the same band that recorded “Slogun”, one of the noisiest, meanest songs recorded in the entire industrial era. Of course, the later songs are catchy, too, hence waking up with this stuck in my head.

One of the things that sucks about being an atheist is recognizing that there are people who are going to escape the cosmic judgment they so obviously deserve. While his crimes are minor next to the usual suspects (Hitler, Stalin, Reagan, etc), William Bennett’s bush-league ass-hattery should have earned him some kind of divine smackdown. If not for his rampant, flamboyant misogyny as the leader of Whitehouse, perhaps for his habit of gratuitously overdubbing Nazi speeches over the music he released on his various record labels (Come Organisation, Susan Lawly). I get the appeal of transgression and abjection – without which industrial music would not exist – but Bennett has made a life’s work out of crossing the line between artful, ironized misanthropy into being a boring, hateful dick.

It bugs me that Surgeon decided to adopt Whitehouse as his iconic industrial totem / spirit animal. Why not SPK? They were blatantly confrontational, even if they went downhill very quickly, and “Slogun” is arguably the original version of Surgeon’s personal form of harsh, stark techno.