at times it was almost as if he were trying to put himself together out of some bizarre jigsaw
by @ROGAVKA
https://letterboxd.com/ROGAVKA/
Post #227
39
Дэвид Кинан разъебывает по фактам Гайбов в предисловии к легендарной England's Hidden Reverse: A Secret History of the Esoteric Underground:
It's interesting to contrast other musical and artistic responses to genocide and mass murder, to the horrors of the 20th Century. Take the notoriously self-flagellating left-liberal Canadian instrumental rock group Godspeed You! Black Emperor. On their 2012 album Allelujah! Don't Bend! Ascend! there is an 18 minute track named 'Mladiç', a title that would seem to reference Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb military commander accused of genocide and crimes against humanity. The music is epic, cinematic, with dramatic swells of guitar and rocking rhythms alongside a vague Balkan-esque folk melody just so you know where you are. This is the James Bond-ification of horror, the Hollywood-isation of terror, the aestheticising of suffering. Why are people not more appalled at this? When I interviewed Godspeed for The Wire back in 1998 they described the venues they played at, with no sense of irony, as being like death camps. The disparity in the reception of pieces like Buchenwald by Whitehouse and 'Mladiç' by Godspeed You! Black Emperor underlines the hypnotic power that context - or lack of it - exerts over content. If Godspeed's commitment is to transcending entertainment to the point of a clarion call or a mourning for the victims of 'the machine', which would seem to be their deal, then shouldn't the form reflect it as much as the rhetoric? Shouldn't it be as ugly, violent, dangerous and difficult as the subject matter?
