#laiback lyrics

[cosmonautistic]

Sila! | Power!

Čez nas viharji divjajo | Storms rage over us Mesta gorijo in telesa | Cities burn and bodies (burn) Slast naš stresa | Lust flows through us Spet se cez polja | Again across the fields glasijo zvoki nase govorice | Echo the sounds of our speech ki nam molitev je in vrisk | that are to us prayer and exultation. Ne, ne dopusti vec, vesoljni bog | O almighty God, never let Da bi nasa sila potonila | our power fail again, saj je tako brezmejno sladka, mila | For it is so infinitely sweet, gentle... Slast nas stresa! | Ecstasy shakes us! Lust flows through us!

"So when they say "Slast nas stresa!", it’s not only sexual (though that's hinted) — it can also mean being shaken by pure force, pleasure, power, even divine madness.

Laibach deliberately leaves it open to multiple readings — power, violence, sex, and divine ecstasy are all mixed together.

The background grunts and moans you heard? They're totally fitting with this chaotic, overwhelming fusion of ideas."

i don't understand Slovenian but it appears to talk about war and bodies burning but also a sort of religious exultation while also have somewhat grunting type sounds in the background between the man and woman as they say force(?). i wish I understood Slovenian TT

So if you're into industrial or martial industrial, specifically, check out Laibach!

[cosmonautistic]

Laibach is a somewhat complex satirical project that is often misinterpreted as simply humorous, and while humor plays a role in some of their work, if you treat it as a joke you're missing out on some great stuff. Iron Sky is a fun movie, and I understand why they wanted to participate in it, but if you start from there you're gonna wind up with a slanted and misleading view of the group.

A lot of people are first exposed to Laibach through their "neue originale" (I think I'm missing some accents there) stuff, in which they cover popular songs in a militaristic, and often deliberately unpleasant style. Iron Sky features music from W.A.T., which is a lot more accessible, but isn't necessarily that interesting out of context, so let's start with some of their early stuff to give you an idea of what the band was originally about:

The second song dates from the band's first era, before the death of founding member Tomaž Hostnik. You can get a decent idea of what they were about in the early 80s from this stuff without understanding the lyrics- it's oppositional, deliberately difficult militaristic music that was being presented against a backdrop of Cold War/Iron Curtain oppression in Yugoslavia. That's a good place to start from to understand their interaction with controversy: Laibach's name, for example, is the German name of Slovenia's capital city, Ljubljana. Slovenia wasn't even its own country at the time, and while the name dates back hundreds of years, its most recent use was during World War II, when the Nazis occupied the area. Even saying the word "Laibach" in Slovenia at the time was loaded as hell and they knew would immediately piss people off, and couldn't even print the name on their flyers as a result. And if you know your Romantic era music well, you might notice that that their early work is full of samples from Richard Wagner operas, which are very firmly associated with German identity in general but also, pointedly, with Hitler.

So from all that, you might- as many people do- get the impression that the band was supporting Naziism. And they did a lot of other things contemporaneously that people interpreted that way, but it's a shallow interpretation. As the group developed and put out a bunch of literature and interviews to an international audience, they were able to clarify that they were really pushing the idea that a lot of the things people commonly associate culturally with Naziism- notably the concept of "totalitarianism"- are so omnipresent in every society and government in the modern world that we don't even notice them.

[cosmonautistic]

Cari amici soldati I tempi della pace Sono Passati

Dear soldier friends The times of peace Have Passed