By Sean Flinn and Casey Fitch | March 22, 1997 (republished Spring 1999)
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| Laibach: No, they're not fascists. |
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On March 22, 1997, Sean Flinn and Casey Fitch interviewed Laibach in San Francisco, California, in advance of band's performance at the now-defunct Trocadero Transfer. Although Fitch and Flinn intended to broadcast the taped interview on KDVS, 90.3 fm for their radio program HeadcleaneR, the poor sound quality of the recording made such a broadcast undesirable. The interview has remained unheard and unseen until now. Choler has opted to print the interview now in light of the current -- and continuing -- tensions in the Balkans.
Laibach hail from Slovenia, the Balkan nation which voted for and fought to secure its independence from Yugoslavia in the Summer of 1991. Although the band tries to keep itself separated from the more intricate processes of politics, it nevertheless retains a strong sense of its geographical and historical roots. Their utopian art state, the Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK) declares independence from territorial and geographical ties (thereby embodying the technical translation of "Utopia" as "no place"), yet Laibach made several prominent concert appearances in and around Sarajevo at key points during the Bosnian conflict, playing one particularly noteworthy show on the date of the Dayton Peace Accords. In doing so, they entrenched themselves in Balkan iconography. Even their name pays homage to their culural history, as the band's spokeman explains to Sean and Casey. Regardless of Laibach's attempts to extricate themselves from the narrow view of spatially-oriented geopolitics, whenever the world's eyes turn toward the Balkans, they turn too toward Laibach. With world attention focused on the implementation of peace in Kosovo and Yugoslavia, and given President Clinton's recent visit to Slovenia, Choler felt it would be prescient to examine the sentiments of one group of Slavic artists in the wake of an earlier, similar Balkan conflict.
Sean Flinn: Your name is Ivan, correct?
Ivan: Yes.
And what role do you play in the group?
Almost any.
[Laughter all 'round]
Almost any? I guess the first questions we have involve some trying to obtain some information on the current tour you guys are doing [in support of the Jesus Christ Superstars album]. How has it been going so far? How far into it are you?
We're getting close to the end. Actually, there's only like, four more concerts including this one [at the now defunct Trocadero Transfer in the South Market district of San Francisco], and then we go back to Europe, where we're doing ten more concerts in Germany and possibly some concerts in Russia. And then we're kind of concentrating on several projects in Slovenia. We're doing a big event with the Philharmonic Orchestra of Slovenia. They are going to play some of our early music, [which was] more theatrical, experimental in sound.
Casey Fitch: Like MacBeth?
Yeah. And a few more projects and a few more concerts around Slovenia.
SF: Have you guys played in Russia before?
Oh yes. We played in Moscow, in Minsk. This time we shall be playing in Moscow, in Leningrad. And we had some other invitations as well…like from Siberia, to play in Winter time, which is a bit of a problem.
How is America reacting to Laibach on this particular tour? Are you getting a good reaction so far?
Actually very good. I mean the reactions were of the audience, which was there was excellent. I do not know what the thing is in America, why Americans always want to know how Americans react to what you're doing, are they confused, and so on. And the fact is, they actually react much better than in Europe, in general. I have a feeling that what we're doing at the moment fits much better with a certain sensibility which is over here.
Yes, and some of the music you've interpreted has been…well, have you done any American music before? You've done the Beatles, you've done the Rolling Stones, you've done Andrew Lloyd Weber, so that all pretty much British, but it's all music that Americans are extraordinarily familiar with …
No actually we did do some American groups as projects…we did Prince...[seems to lose train of thought at this point].
We wanted to ask you too about the recent album, Jesus Christ Superstars, and how you came to choose that as a Laibach project. How do you choose any of the works that you choose to reinterpret?
It always takes some time, really, and then suddenly it happens. It's very difficult to describe. I mean, actually the way the whole thing happened, it had kind of a pre-history. One of our records is called Opus Dei, which is titled after a kind of militant Christian branch of the Catholic Church. And we had an interesting experience when we were doing Opus Dei, because a German branch of Opus Dei was suing us for using the name. Nevertheless, religion obviously is one of the subjects that we're dealing with, the same as some other subjects, because, it is…how do you say?…It is all ove r... present
Omnipresent?
Yes… and after the last record, the NATO record, we did a tour in Germany and we played like, two big concerts in Eastern Berlin. A good friend of ours, after seeing the show, said to us, "the next thing you should do is the entire Hair musical." Because, it is, apparently, from his observations, the music which is the definition of certain processes that are happening today, which you could say is true for any of the musicals of the '60's: Hair. Jesus Christ… We forgot, of course, about that idea, and later on when we started to look for a new project, it happened that Pope John Paul actually arrived in Slovenia. He was there for three or four days or something, and it was a huge event, and the entire country turned upside down. Especially for Slovenia, because it is such a small country. And he did three or four or five masses in three days, and the entire country went completely mad. Everything was totally crazy. He spoke to five or six hundred thousand people in three days in stadiums and on TV, and it was absolutely crazy.
In America, when the Pope comes, because we're so overrun, I guess, by crass consumerism, they just come out with an entire line of Pope products. "Pope on a Rope" soap and so on. Does that happen at all in Slovenia?
Yeah, it happened as well in Slovenia. There's a strange history of religion in Slovenia because during the Second World War the Church had been divided. The minority of the Church was actually kind of helping the Liberation front, and the majority was actually on the side of the Occupation forces. So after the war, the Church wasn't completely suppressed, but it did exist. It did not collide with the State, and it was something which had its field of operation. People were free to go into the Church, but it wasn't - especially for a political person - a very good idea to practice openly a religion. Nevertheless many people practiced a religion of a different kind. It was always quite a liberal relationship. That's why after then end of Communism in Slovenia, the Church did not really gain much. The Pope's visit was as much a kind of advertising campaign for the Church, because it is trying to get back some Medieval rights - like, you know, lots of territory, woods and that kind of stuff - which people don't really very much.
Nevertheless, when the Pope visited Solvenia, we already had the idea of the record before, but that was just another push. And that's the time when we were starting to think about the way in which religion is used in certain popular conceptions, in popular culture, and actually the way in which popular culture is using religious attributes. Especially thinking of products like Madonna and her immaculate conception, Michael Jackson as the new Christ, Prince taking the form of, like, a godly symbol…and that's how we decided to do not Hair, but Jesus Christ Superstars. We also chose it because it was one of the major points of the counter culture in the '60's, and now the people who actually did it, they represent the establishment nowadays. They represent the moral and ethical force - the law.
Especially now that the composer of Jesus Christ Superstars, Andrew Lloyd Weber, is a knight.
Yes, and this particular musical actually described the relationship between popular culture and the entire popular industry - the record industry, the music business, and religion - extremely, precisely. And this is actually the subject of the record.
CF: So were you actually weighing between doing either Jesus Christ Superstars and Hair?
Well, we were just thinking that it would be an interesting thing to actually go into a form of something which is very iconic, very bizarre in a way, which music nowadays is. Have you seen the musical Evita? I can't really quite understand how it works, what kind of mechanisms support the thought processes. And the fact is that musicals are one of the most popular forms of entertainment. Just take a look at all the musicals going around, like Cats, like Chess, and half of them are written by Andrew Lloyd Weber.
SF: It's kind of amazing to me how theater has even survived even through the advent of television and movies. It seems like society is sort of devolving down to a point where we have a shorter attention span, and thus it's amazing that people will still sit through a two or three hour performance of something and it can achieve some sort of success.
Well the fact is that musicals actually, in a way, are a very pure form of what is happening in popular culture in general. Especially in certain musical fields, all the big groups are ripping off musicals…
Doing concept albums …
… and enormous shows and so on. And the fact is that popular culture is coming from religious rituals.
I guess that really facilitates, then, the process of religious leaders becoming almost pop stars in their own right, like the Pope.
Pop … Pope…it's quite the same. [Chuckles all around.]
I guess we'd like to know what you've set as ultimate aim of some of these re-interpretations. I mean, you take some of these icons of Western pop culture, especially '60's counter-culture, and you recast them in your own unique way. I'm wondering what you hope to achieve beyond just the production itself.
The entire process, the treatment is very usual. What we're doing is pretty much the same as somebody who decides to do his own interpretation of MacBeth or any of Shakespeare's other plays. This is a legitimate process except it has its stupid laws of…how do you call it? Royalties. Copyrights.
Paying for the privilege of performing someone else's work.
Yes, which is another bizarre point in the year of synthesis, the year of compilation, in the post-Communistic time. I mean it is completely bizarre, the problem of copyright.
You're seeing some of that being confronted too by another form of American pop-culture, i.e., hip-hop culture and sampling, where they're using albums and pre-existing recordings as instruments themselves.
But that's logical. You cannot claim originality if you use for instance, even the so-called "natural" sound of the piano. The sound of the piano is already there! The same with colors; if you paint with certain colors, you actually are using something that was invented before…
If you paint the same flower that another artist has painted, are you infringing on their copyright?
Yes, and you come to this basic point of discussion between Aristotle and Plato of mimesis and anti-mimesis and so on. Which is, "When you copy and original, what was it before?" Especially nowadays, it is still a very relevant question. I know that, theoretically, nobody's really interested in it anymore because everybody's just using it. The entire pop industry is reinventing something that has already been there before, like Oasis vs. the Beatles, blah blah blah, and all the heavy metal has been reinvented again and again. There's always something added of course, because nothing is completely similar all the time, but you cannot really talk about or claim total originality. And besides that, the real meat of originality, the wish for originality is actually the search for a trademark which will represent your economic base for trading, nothing else. That's what the signature on the painting is. It has become of course, by definition, a part of art, through artists like Andy Warhol and Marcel Duchamp, and so on, but in fact it is the tool of the trade, of a very basic something that has nothing to do with the content of the work.
It's also where ego runs into art. It's making sure people know that YOU did something.
Everybody's compiling today, doing cover versions without even admitting it. What we're doing is we are actually appears to be original.
I know before when you guys started out in 1980, there was a ban on your performances, and later on, a ban even on the use of your name. Correct?
Well, that was expected. It was again one of the strategies that we took as part of the whole thing…I mean, it wasn't a surprising fact for us. It was simply something that we had to deal with. It was actually for us, an interesting subject or part of the entire process, the working process, our entire public appearance. We took it as a natural occurrence.
Has any of that hostility persisted at all throughout your career?
We're still not very welcome in certain countries. Like, in France for instance there are still big problems. We did play in France before, several times, but suddenly there was one TV program on a kind of French/German art TV [channel] which was very intentionally showing Laibach as the most kind of evil seed of all this kind of neo-Nazi blah blah blah…as the kind of core of the neo-Nazi movements. Which is fine with us, we don't mind. It's their problem. Basically, the fact is that French society is extremely chauvinistic, and they're kind of canonizing their kind of chauvinism through these kinds of acts, through highly ethical, moral, politically correct regulations like these ones. It's not that we're officially forbidden, but it's simply very, very difficult, since that TV show, to perform there.
It's kind of like what they do to Zhang Yimou's films in Asia, where they don't repress or censor them outright, but they play in one theater in all of China.
Well, you know, there's even a certain form of censorship in America. The most subtle form of censorship is over here.
Yes, you get warning labels on records. There's also the fact that the consumer culture controls so much of the media.
Yes, the entire process is so complicated that …
There's very little room for innovation in American pop culture anymore. The emphasis is really on the familiar.
CF: The name Laibach - from where did that originate? Was it the name, that - I've heard - the Nazis's had used for Slovenia?
Wrong. Laibach is a legal German name for the city of Ljubljana, which was invented in the tenth century. It was the first - the original - name of Ljubljana actually, written as we know it. It appeared in written form. After that, a different kind of Slavic, Slovenian form began to appear slowly. And Ljubljana has a Roman name as well, which is Amona, and then it has an Italian name, which is Lubiana, and so on, in different forms. Vienna, for example, in Slovenian terminology, we call Dunje which is the Slovenian name for a German, or Austrian, town. So it just the same thing, in opposite. Of course the fact is that Ljubljana, under German occupation, has been called "Laibach" obviously, the same as Austria, or Vienna, if it was occupied by Slovenians, would be called by our name for it. And it was used as Laibach during the Second World War, obviously, when the Germans entered and before when it was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. So it's just a historical name, really. But, using it …
SF: … seems to have had some real unpleasant connotations for certain people.
Yeah, in the '70s and '80s it was. But it has become a kind of symbol. The funny thing is that, nowadays, they don't want to use it because of us. Because, suddenly, using it officially, you know, touristically…it's legal…but tourist agencies are using all the other historical names but this one, because it has become our name.
SF: So when they say "Laibach," they don't think of Ljubljana, they think of the band. That's pretty great.
CF: Could you talk a little bit about the NSK?
The NSK was established in 1984. Simply there were several people in the same place at the same time who had similar ideas, and they worked in different areas of culture: in theater, in painting, etc. So it was a certain group who started to appear in the '80's around Laibach, and who had kind of similar ideas about life and art and politics and so on. And as we met - because Ljubljana is not a big place, it's easy to meet - and as we started kind of to see each other we basically decided to get together and do something which was bigger than each of us. And that's how the NSK started. We formed all the so-called departments, and it started to become, in a way, an aesthetic movement. Not only that, but it has slowly started to become more important, almost as a political action and social model, a living sculpture. And as it has developed as such, we did certain bigger projects together, and did some direct actions…all kinds of stuff. And as it has developed, it has slowly started to turn into something that we couldn't really control any more.
We decided, after the fall of Communism, after the break up of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, to actually form our own state out of NSK. Now the reason why was a very simple one. We were always interested in the relationship between so-called "art" (an expression we don't like to use very much, but let's just say art) - what we are supposed to do - and ideological systems (the state, religion, the market, anything that is ideologically based). So the relation between art and rules -- Social, public, political rules -- We were always interested in that relation. If we simplify it, we can say the relationship between the artist and the state. And we were always defining it to a certain extent.
While Yugoslavia was still together, in one piece, Slovenia did not exist as a state. So it did represent a Utopian form of the state, which is a perfect relation between an artist and a higher, bigger mechanism of rules and so on. So we kind of coped with that fact; that we are actually representing a Utopian form of the State, which was Slovenia. That's why our first few years were spent defining the national paradigm. And as long as Slovenia has organized itself formally as a state, we decided that we cannot really represent something which is not Utopian, that we cannot go into a pragmatic relationship with a real, existing state, but that we have to actually find another relation with something that does not exist - which is Utopia, the perfect form of the State. And that's why we actually decided to turn ourselves into a state. Also because, practically, we could not control NSK anymore as a kind of organization. So basically, we said, "Let's turn it into a state, and everybody can become a citizen of this state." It's a virtual state, it does not have territory, it does not have borders, nationality and so on. It's a social sculpture. It is bigger than NSK. It can last forever, it can be as serious as you are taking it, and the only form of identification is passport. Originally we wanted to kind of build up a kind of currency and constitution and so on, which is still possible, but the fact is we realized that money has no value in our state. That's why we shouldn't go too deep into pragmatic things.
SF: Once you go into economic issues you get into a whole new ballgame.
It does not try to become a kind of organization again, but it is something that everybody can do with it as much as they are able to do, capable of doing. So we decided to give away these passports, and in some cases, they were used in very different ways, in very creative forms. In some cases they were used in a very pragmatic way: many people were able to get out of Sarajevo while it was occupied and they couldn't get out with Bosnian passports. We gave them NSK diplomatic passports, and they went out with those. There was a French solider who just saw a diplomatic passport and let them go through. We are using it whenever there's a chance to cross other borders, sometimes successfully, sometimes with less success, but you know it actually works. Some people are only using them to get different kinds of stamps from the concerts, which is their value of the passport. The passport actually has as much value as you assign to it.
CF: So how many people, would you say, have these passports?
I don't know, but all the time it's going up. We're definitely bigger than the Vatican.
That puts it into perspective as far as the growth of the movement.
SF: Do you guys hand them out at concerts?
Yeah … well, not exactly passports because it's too complicated. You have to type it and so on. But there's special people dealing with that, and there are forms which people can fill out.
Is the NSK ever going to become more political?
Well, we said very clearly at the very beginning when we got into Laibach and later NSK, that we are not a political group in terms of daily politics. We are basically not standing behind any ideology, any ideological movement, and we were constantly neutralizing ideology. Killing it, basically. Defining it, neutralizing it.
Which works well for a state that has no borders, too. It's constantly erasing divisions between people.
Yeah. One of the rules of the state was, again, one of the early Laibach rules: that we actually unite opposites -- antagonists and protagonists, as we said at that time -- in an ecstatic proletarian cry, which is a conflictual situation where you are not able to react because the conflict is too big, it is neutralized. That's happening at our concerts actually. All sorts of different social groups are actually coming together. In any other normal situation, they would get into a conflict. Like, I don't know…we've had skinheads, and at the same time with blacks, with Christian fanatics, and Muslims and all kinds of stuff.
CF: And they all come together at the Laibach concerts?
They all come together and they all identify, to a certain extent, or at least they think they can identify with something. In the end they probably find out that they cannot really identify with anything, which is fine, because we are not selling anything - we don't sell anything, nothing, in fact.
SF: Can we talk about Laibach's future? Have you guys been developing any new concepts while you've been on the road?
Well, we don't like to talk about the future. "Our today's future is tomorrow's past…" You know.
Well, you've been together for, what, 17 years now?
More or less.
Which is pretty good longevity.
We come with a lifetime guarantee. [Chuckles all around.] No but it's a living organism. People actually circulate within the group. We are working with many younger people all the time. And the fact is that, even if the original members would slowly kind of vanish or go back somewhere, the trademark will continue in a way. The whole thing is becoming larger than we are. We cannot stop it, even if we would want to. We cannot justifiably stop it, because it's not just a kind of usual product, a usual rock 'n' roll group or something - nevertheless we work in that area as well.
Do you see that, even with groups like the Beatles…they broke up how many years ago? And they're still very much a vibrant part of pop culture, even releasing new albums and documentaries. They've become bigger than just the four people in the band.
Or Kraftwerk, for instance, who, even though they don't do anything anymore, they're constantly being absorbed, and used.
I think Kraftwerk may be a little more overtly influential in Europe. America picked up on it early with the whole hip-hop scene …
And the fact is that the whole techno scene and industrial scene pretty much came out of them.
I wanted to talk too about the way that you guys are portrayed or genrefied. A flier advertising your concert also mentions that the after-party is taking place at a gothic / industrial club. I don't know if you've noticed that happening across the country or …
Well, in some places it was like a pure techno club, and in others it was at a heavy-metal club. It's just another sign that we might be completely universal. It's all right with us. It's not that we seriously prefer any of these options more than any other ones, but we definitely are not interested in…
Genres?
Well we are interested in genres, but in the same way that a child is interested in toys, putting them together, and playing with them.
CF: What do you think of America so far. Obviously this isn't your first time here, but what are your impressions of it this time around?
That's a tough question. I don't know it's…it's a very beautiful country. It is an interesting place, absolutely, because, if nothing else, it is so huge, so big. It is a fake, but it is a reality. Especially here in California, it's something else completely. You don't really live in a - well, I don't know how you can feel it, but in California, it's a different kind of reality.
SF: You feel it.
It is a kind of ghettoized option of life, which life is not. Everywhere you go you have your bad parts and good parts, good things and bad things. You take it as it is, basically, or you try to change it.
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