Eastern Europe’s Laibach Travels a New Road to Rock

“Art and totalitarianism don’t exclude each other.”

Not your usual rock ‘n’ roll sentiment. But Laibach, the group that made that proclamation in a 90-page document issued upon its inception in 1980, isn’t your usual rock ‘n’ roll band.

Milan Fras, Ervin Markosek, Dejan Knez and Ivan Novak are from Slovenia, a region of Yugoslavia that has been influenced by both the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Third Reich, and they’re marching all over over the corpse of rock ‘n’ roll as they reexamine pop music’s most significant chapters.

Laibach is the musical arm of a philosophical and artistic movement called Neue Slowenische Kunst (“New Slovenian Art”). Besides participating in large-scale theatrical productions at home, Laibach has toured Europe and performed locally in 1987 with the Michael Clark dance company during the Los Angeles Festival.

Last year, Laibach accelerated its evaluation of Western pop culture by reinterpreting works by the two most important groups of the ‘60s, remaking the Beatles’ “Let It Be” album and releasing six different versions of the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil.”

In a phone interview from New York, where Laibach was beginning its first North American tour (the group will play tonight at the Scream Club in Los Angeles), Novak elaborated on Laibach’s approach.

“We found ourselves inside the pop music stage, where we have to purify the future and the past. The past, for us and this kind of music, is the Beatles. And the Rolling Stones were the Beatles’ opposite part.

“The Beatles finished up their era with ‘Let It Be.’ And they did it with an interesting statement about what they had been doing all those years, especially with songs like ‘Dig It.’ There was great confusion among themselves about what they were doing, about the position they were caught in. And probably, by finishing themselves, they opened up a new era of understanding inside the rock music generation.”

In Laibach’s reassembling of “Let It Be,” “Get Back” features Fras’ guttural growl against a Wagnerian symphonic setting. “Across the Universe”--with a Heidi-like choir sweetly singing Lennon’s metaphysical whimsy, the song maintains a spirituality you don’t expect from a group whose sound more often resembles a Luftwaffe raid.

Some might think the coming of Laibach to America ties in with glasnost -era communication. But Novak is quick to distance the group from political associations. “We’re not really interested in daily politics,” he said. “We are trying to find the relationship between art and theology. Politics is not something that interests us directly.”

But there is one unavoidable--and possibly disturbing--political component. In the past, the band has used imagery associated with the Nazis and a Reich ‘n’ roll sense of militarism in their clothing and sound. At the same time, however, the band has used anti-Nazi art on an album cover.

Novak obliquely dismisses any hint of fascist involvement. He said the use of the controversial images is part of the group’s examination of Slovenia’s cultural history. “Those connotations, jackboots and all, are almost romantic (to some people),” he said. “We’re not interested in that kind of interpretation. People who can’t understand (what we’re doing) simplify things. It says more about them than about us.”

What Laibach is interested in is what the group sees as the depersonalization of pop music and the mechanics of the American pop-music machine.

“Pop music has been turning in the same direction for the past few years--it’s the same patterns, the same faces, the same songs,” Novak said. “People are doing (old songs), making reductions, not even using instruments. Music has become less and less individual, more and more kind of anonymous.”