Fight Your Own War

Jennifer Wallis (editor) Fight Your Own War (2016)
This is a collection of essays on the subject of power electronics and noise music, which I'll admit I hadn't actually thought of as different and distinct things until reading this. I'll assume most of you understand what is meant by the terms power electronics and noise music, although maybe I'm assuming too much given the inclusion in this collection of an essay by some bloke from a group called Deathtripping seemingly aimed at those who've never heard of either and who presumably bought the book by accident. It's not about playing nice tunes on a guitar, our source helpfully reveals, and sometimes even though the noises you hear are unpleasant, they're also kind of interesting to listen to.

This extended statement of the bleeding obvious isn't the only thing letting the side down. There's also an essay on the Finnish power electronics scene which is actually just a very long list converted into prose by insertion of linking terminology such as and then or meanwhile in Helsinki; and there's a review of someone's album which proposes that whilst Black Sabbath and the like merely referred to dark forces in their music, the music of Psychic TV and others actually feature dark forces from beyond the veil, because ghosts and ghoulies definitely really exist; there's an unusually repetitive essay on how audiences react to live performance which says the same thing over and over and reads like an Alan Partridge monologue; and then - oh happy day - there's Streicher, named after Julius Streicher, much misunderstood editor of Der Stürmer.

As in many forms of media today, licence was taken to endorse and drive home a political opinion in accordance with the prevailing ideology. During the war he held no rank within the NSDAP, no military position, and participated in no killings. His sole 'crime', it seemed to me, was to publicly promulgate a vision which, in the witch-hunt atmosphere of immediate post-war Nuremberg, was not going to be tolerated.

I suppose the prevailing ideology to which our boy refers would have been that of the politically correct types who shut down the concentration camps and put everyone out of a job. Being a fully grown man, I'm old enough to understand that the politics of the art may be quite different to those of the artist, and that they may be proposed in furtherance of some point other than that which they appear to say; but if you're able to use the term witch-hunt in context of the prosecution of Nazi war criminals, basically you're a massive fucking cock regardless of whether you actually believe your own propaganda. Smirking it's just nihilism innit doesn't really make much difference, and neither do claimed philosophical credentials when said philosophy is expressed on a level of sophistication equivalent to your average motivational meme garnished with a few mentions of Baudrillard just so we know you've read him. Furthermore, whilst the notion of destroying the status quo of consensus reality by offending it into submission may be all well and good, when those transgressive things we're supposedly not allowed to think are actually being said out loud on national television to a daily schedule by those in government, you probably need to have a word with yourself, you complete fucking plum.

These objections aside, and that a couple of the contributors can't actually write, most of the collection is pretty decent - informative, thought provoking, genuinely interesting and illuminating as you would hope. Particularly welcome were those essays addressing various elephants in rooms by Spencer Grady and Sonia Dietrich, and I found Grady's likening a Sutcliffe Jugend performance to Benny Hill particularly satisfying.

The sense of historical detail is a little sketchy, and I could have stood to read a little more about at least Con-Dom and the Grey Wolves, but the broad focus is probably inevitable with this sort of collection. Furthermore, the inclusion of material by Streicher's Ulex Xane arguably serves as a refutation of his position, whatever it may be, so taken as a whole it might be argued that the collection documents without editorial comment, or without strong editorial comment, as is often claimed of the extreme imagery favoured by certain proponents of the genre; and best of all, unlike certain other laboured histories of supposedly industrial music, this one has been written by those who were actually there and can thus be taken as authoritative by some definition. As stated, I have problems with parts of it but that comes with the territory, and all which Fight Your Own War gets right greatly eclipses the negative.