“War On The Dancefloor”: The Reproduction of Power and Pleasure at the Amphi Festival in Cologne
Independent writer and music journalist
<http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2011.03.01.13>
Figure 1. Heading for the battlefield (2010). Photo: Erik Kjellman.
In the summer of 2010, I find myself walking along some abandoned railway tracks by the river Rhine. Together with 16,000 other black-clad visitors from Germany and countries worldwide, I’m heading for my second Amphi Festival in Cologne: a gothic gathering similar to the larger predecessor Wave-Gotik-Treffen in Leipzig, sometimes described as the Woodstock of “dark” music.
The Amphi Festival got its name from the Amphitheater in Gelsenkirchen where the first festival took place in 2005. Since 2006, Cologne’s Tanzbrunnen—a culture and leisure park created in 1928—has been the site of the two-day event for practical reasons. The festival features industrial, electronic body music (EBM), gothic rock and other subgenres within the darker electronic music field.[1] This year saw 37 artists on 3 stages, with more than 20 international DJs taking command of the party-area in the evenings.
Bands like And One and VNV Nation were the headliners on the open-air main stage, while the smaller stage inside the Staatenhaus am Rheinpark—a bowed building with huge portals and a red brick façade—presented the Canadian electro-industrial legends Skinny Puppy and Front Line Assembly. But the line-up also featured more controversial acts like the Austrian solo project Nachtmahr. The industrial club scene has often been criticized for flirting with political symbols, especially fascist imagery, as part of its aesthetics. This has sometimes led to misconceptions regarding bands working within this tradition, mostly from outside of the scene but also among fans and followers. As Ada Lovelace, for instance, comments on the blog The Gothic Imagination[2] (2009): “I’m always interested in finding new and challenging forms of music, but I have always steered away from stuff like Nachtmahr because of their utilisation of Nazism and fascism because I just don’t want to be associated with it”.
My reason for using the Amphi Festival as a subject for this essay is not just because I’ve spent my holidays here for the past two years, but also because the festival is a microcosm of this dark music scene, and therefore an ideal place to examine how the relationship between power and pleasure is reproduced with the club as some sort of combat zone. The title of this essay, “War On The Dancefloor”, is a song by Nachtmahr (2009) who is featured in the article, but above all it illuminates the power relation between the DJ and the crowd in combination with the militaristic aesthetics common in these genres. But let’s get back to that later.
Much has been written about the relationship between mass culture and the fascist spectacle. In Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Power, Lutz Koepnick—Professor of German, Film and Media Studies at Washington University in St. Louis—puts what Benjamin calls the “aestheticization of politics” (Koepnick 1999: 4) in a postmodern context. Noting that Nazi aesthetics remains fascinating today “because postmodern culture similarly desires spectacles and mass-produced representations”, Koepnick describes postmodernism as an “uncanny soulmate of the Nazi spectacle”, that “incessantly recycles images of the Third Reich as it seeks in its own ways to break down modern boundaries between politics and aesthetics and to turn life into a fantastic work of art” (1999: 2).
Thus the fascist fascination seems to have more to do with the conception of power rather than political contents and is not unique for subcultures such as the industrial and electronic body music scene. Yet Susan Sontag’s description of fascist aesthetics, as quoted by Koepnick, could almost be mistaken for an account of a dance floor, where the DJ takes on the role of “an all-powerful, hypnotic leader figure or force” and at the same time awakens a similar theme of domination and enslavement (1999: 32). Sontag’s words remind me of the song “Unbeugsam” where Nachtmahr’s Thomas Rainer sings about conquering the world and letting die Puppen (the puppets) dance according to his tune (2010b). Another Amphi act, Faderhead, gives straight orders with the song “Tanz Zwo Drei Vier” (2010), and the atmosphere of course emphasizes the similarities.
When I meet up with Ronan Harris, DJ and singer of the British/Irish duo VNV Nation, in the VIP area he describes the festival as “a fashion show”[3]—but perhaps more in the sense of a costume party than haute couture. So, imagine the desperation of the three Amphi visitors from Greece I met at the airport when they realised their luggage with more appropriate festival clothes was lost!
Among the more or less extraordinary outfits I spot everything from young girls in latex wear leading each other around in dog leashes to colourful cyber-goths and the usual EBM army with black clothes and combat boots. Harris points out that not everybody dresses the same but still seem to connect: “They’re showing off or they’re just feeling comfortable but everybody tolerates each other for the most part. They don’t split themselves into groups, which is a good thing”.
Figure 2. More pleasure than power on the bank of Rhine (2010). Photo: Erik Kjellman.
A certain part of the industrial scene has always had strong connections with the fetish scene, which has its element of uniform wearing. This is also where the fascination with military paraphernalia comes in, and with it the interplay with power. As Harris explains:
It’s like a man putting on a suit. I hate to say this but that’s actually the feeling that I get when I put on a suit. You walk differently. You feel differently about yourself. And the same thing happens when you wear a uniform. I used to wear British officer uniforms years ago just for fun. Just to go to these parties. I think Marilyn Manson has had a big influence in his parodying of the uniform wearing thing. It’s like shock humour.[4]
On the other hand, Harris describes playing with metaphors or images of this kind as a bit dangerous, stating he has reservations with people dressing in certain uniforms: “if you’re wearing a uniform because you think uniforms are sexy—that’s fine, if you’re wearing something that gives a political statement—that’s wrong”. But the distinction between what is acceptable and what is offensive might not be so clear after all. Uniforms are symbols of power that will always have different connotations for different people depending on their background and previous experiences. The styles of the dark scene have also differed slightly from country to country, as Harris recounts:
I remember we played in Lund many years ago and the [German] band Das Ich was with us. I had a lot of Swedish friends living in London. I mean, the English scene and the Swedish scene were very similar, the bands they liked and how they liked music. . . Germany was a very different place with a much more darker and a much more gothic kind of image. And it seems that all the styles from other countries have come in. . . I remember Bruno [Kramm] from Das Ich got really upset because somebody was wearing a Luftwaffe jacket.
Third Reich military paraphernalia is still highly taboo—especially in Germany—and what is taboo is always provocative. At the same time, it’s worth noting that this element of transgression is also essential in the subversion of power. Referring to the writings of Michel Foucault, who argued that modern western society is “a giant prison, where every structure and institution is there to tame and discipline us”, cultural philosopher Paul Hegarty describes industrial music as “a Foucauldian take on power” (2007: 119–20). This might explain why the genre often replicates the structures of domination—Hegarty mentions aggression, control and propaganda—in ambiguous ways.
And perhaps gatherings like the Amphi Festival could also be seen as a critical staging of power relations comparable to the role-play in a sadomasochistic relationship, where the theme of power and pleasure is sometimes regarded as a way of taking control of the balance between dominance and submission within a wider sociocultural context. This perception is not very far from Mikhail Bakhtin’s ideas about carnival as a “temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from established order” (1984: 10) that have been frequently explored in relation to different expressions of popular culture: from 1970’s punk to industrial music and rave culture. It should also be taken into consideration that musicologists Susan McClary and Robert Walser have stated in more general terms that “pleasure frequently is the politics of music” (1988: 287).
Figure 3. Vampires in the sun? The Amphi audience chilling out at the Beach Club (2010). Photo: Erik Kjellman.
Instead of a prison, the body rather becomes part of a symbolic battlefield. As Ronan Harris points out:
We’ll wear Prussian uniforms. We will dress in a Dangerous Liaisons-type style. . . .Steampunk style[5] is very much based on this World War I image, which I actually think looks really fucking cool personally. But we all deal with our pasts in very different ways.
When stating that followers of this scene are wearing these things “almost like a scrapbook of all of the pasts of Europe”, and not because they are representing the symbolic implications of these uniforms or accessories, Harris illustrates how meaning is produced in relation to collective, or cultural, memory. Assorted recollections of the past seem to become myth as the dark scene tries to deal with both icons of power and European history in particular—although in a non-political way. This might explain the strong and often very anthemic nature of the music and why people sometimes get the wrong impression.
Combining sentimental synthpop melodies with heavier beats, the style of VNV Nation is often described as futurepop, a club-oriented subgenre that is considered more danceable and upbeat than EBM. Older lyrics, mainly on the album Praise The Fallen (1998/2000), use the image of the battlefield as a metaphor for the personal struggle within one’s self. However, according to Harris, some people didn’t get it: “they only heard the fucking war reference”.
Avoiding such misinterpretations was the motivation behind a new version of the anti-war song “Honour”, adding sound excerpts of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “I hate war” speech and also quoting these words in the background projections at live shows. Nachtmahr, on the other hand, use video technique in a more thought-provoking way. When we meet backstage, front man Thomas Rainer says he wants to set the stage for people to think about what they see and “to think twice about the imagery”.[6] With the visual side he provides a second layer of information to the band’s provocative image:
For example I use anti-war quotes that are projected in the back. There are slogans like ‘war is not the answer’ and stuff like that. . . But still in Germany there’s like this whole Nazi prejudice going on so I always get: ‘why are you showing Nazi soldiers in the visuals’ and it’s like: ‘It’s American soldiers’, so in Germany people, if they see soldiers, they ultimately think Nazi.
But perhaps not only in Germany, as Aspasia Stephanou—a research postgraduate student of Gothic literature and arts at the University of Stirling in Scotland—has also addressed the subject on the blog The Gothic Imagination (2009), making a similar (mis)interpretation of Nachtmahr:
If the sensation of fast beats, at times resembling ‘industrial’ military marches, capture the modern subject through the momentary excitement of digitalized entertainment, this resembles no pleasurable activity, but a controlled productive process. Thomas Rainer... becomes the industrial master, the factory’s director who during the live show points to the screen. The audience needs to be reminded of the message War is not the answer, followed by Nazi aeroplanes flying over fields with dead corpses.
Stephanou’s analysis is quite remarkable, in conflict with the ambitions of Nachtmahr but still striking as an account of the DJ—in this case Rainer—as an authoritarian leader. The Nachtmahr song “Tanzdiktator” even transforms him into a “dance dictator” (2009). So let’s return to the “war on the dance floor”, or perhaps the “battlefield of sin” (Nachtmahr, 2009), as Nachtmahr puts the slogan “Imperial Austrian Industrial” into action. The beat is pounding heavily in the former exhibition halls and among the props on stage are camouflage nets and four women in military attire with identical armbands (featuring Nachtmahr’s emblem: the letter “N”[7]) and side caps. “If I have girls in uniform on stage it’s because I like uniforms, nothing more”, says Rainer.
The industrial and electronic body music scene is very male dominated on stage, although the audience is more diverse. It could also be noted that many male and female participants in this dark scene—regardless of sexuality—play around with gender roles or “male” and “female” attributes, for instance men wearing makeup or girls wearing ties, depending on which particular subculture you address. This means the relations of power work on several different levels.
Hence Rainer’s fascination with “girls in uniform” seems to be quite a traditional “tits and ass” thing, where the women on stage are reduced to sexual objects: a decorative part of the Nachtmahr stage design. On the other hand, they’re wearing ties and military attire, and through their authoritative uniforms become part of the dominant, dictatorial imagery, as opposed to the submissive crowd on the dance floor, once again reproducing the metaphor of the sadomasochistic relationship. Whether we see the dance floor as a battlefield or not, the struggle continues, not least from a gendered perspective.
The one-man project Nachtmahr evolved out of Rainer’s background as a DJ, and the military image of the band was inspired by his past in the army. After national conscription Rainer came close to entering military academy, but then a musical career with his other band developed and he decided to become a musician instead. However, he discovered many parallels between army service and being a musician:
For example as a musician and a soldier you train, and train, and train, and train for one or two incidents that happen. Sometimes you train for years for one single concert . . . or for one single conflict. . . . I found the similarities very appealing so I said: ‘why not use this imagery to present ourselves as soldiers of—warriors of—sound, who shoot with bass drums instead of machineguns’.
Lately, Rainer has also incorporated the sexual component of military imagery, most prominently on the Nachtmahr EP Mädchen In Uniform (2010a). The artwork[8] is a homage to the controversial film The Night Porter (1974) by Italian director Liliana Cavani, where a concentration camp survivor (Charlotte Rampling) falls back into a sadomasochistic relationship with a former Nazi SS officer (Dirk Bogarde). To Rainer, the uniform is a simple but effective way of showing power and dominance because it’s authoritative: “You have to do what this person says and that’s where the sexual tension comes in. . . . And for the imagery of war I would say I use it to enforce the power of the music”.
With its aggressive electro-industrial beat, “War On The Dancefloor” explores the role of the DJ in the lyrics on a metaphorical level (Nachtmahr, 2009). On the dance floor, the people are the soldiers and the DJ is the commander, according to Rainer, “because he [the DJ] can steer the people in the direction he wants”. For the band Faderhead, the club correspondingly becomes a “bunker” where the DJ is the “beatmaster” and where “the girls are wearing latex skirts” and “masks like there’s a bomb alert” (2010).
These descriptions are somewhat similar to the more common recognition of the DJ as a spiritual or religious leader.[9] The DJ can make the crowd “happy, he can make them sad, he can make them sweat, he can make them relax. He has the power over the emotional situation of this group of people for the night”, as Rainer concludes. But it’s also striking that he says that people “empower” the DJ “to lead them through the night”, implying that this still is a commission of trust that is built on consent and can’t be conquered by force.
In Pop Cult: Religion and Popular Music,musicologist Rupert Till explores whether functions formerly served within society by religions are now being addressed by cults of popular music and observes that a feature common to electronic dance music culture “is its separation from mainstream culture. Clubs are a place of escape, of transgression, of release” (2010: 141). A similar argument could be made about the industrial and electronic body music scene, incorporating the subject of both taboo and sexual fetishes to create a playground that both imitates and subverts the power relations and structures of the outside world.
The elements of confusion and illusion are part of this dark scene. Without the ambiguity, there would be no tension between power and pleasure. War images and uniforms are also part of the mainstream culture in everything from video games to the latest high street fashion, but the industrial scene takes fascist aesthetics to its extremes as a means of creating self-conscious and intellectual provocation. As the user ASPR (2008), for instance, commented in a thread entitled “Why do people think Goths and Rivetheads are racist?”[10] on the industrial music forum at Side-Line: “I believe it [the scene] should be highly abrasive, in all psychical contexts, while never manifesting itself in a negative physical way (ie [sic] violence, for example)”.
Figure 4. Ready for combat. Some obviously take the Nachtmahr slogan “Imperial Austrian Industrial” very literally... (2010). Photo: Erik Kjellman.
The tradition of playing with totalitarian imagery and symbols harks back to the industrial music of the late 1970s with controversial bands like Throbbing Gristle. The Slovenian group Laibach (who played at Amphi in 2009) continued the confusion in the 1980s, with a newer song, “Tanz Mit Laibach”, referring to both right wing and left wing totalitarianism in the lyrics by “dancing” with both Fascismus und roter Anarchie (WAT, 2003). Nevertheless, Aspasia Stephanou (2009) argues that:
Electronic Body Music and Industrial bands have always flirted with right wing, fascistic symbols but in a different way than punk bands have incorporated in the late seventies swastikas and other totalitarian insignia, replaying the Dadaists shocking and nihilistic tactics (Hebdige reads this as a desire to shock). Laibach have managed to confuse their audiences, but their agenda is specific. Shock is created, but politics is there underneath the surface.
Walter Benjamin would probably have agreed with Stephanou, while others—as media researcher Eva Kingsepp illustrates—have shown that this is not necessarily the case (2008: 246–47). The artistic means used within subcultures of this kind can always be interpreted in several different ways, as Till puts it: “Within EDMC there is no one author. The club is the text, and both the experience of it and its substance are different for each clubber” (2010: 132).
The fact that the industrial and electronic body music scene is very big in central Europe, with several larger festivals taking place in Germany, makes the picture even more complex due to the country’s historical past. But contrary to the audience, for instance, at the Nazi rallies, the visitors at gatherings such as the Amphi Festival do not only come here as spectators. In the spirit of Bakhtin’s notion of carnival they come here to participate (1984).
Still, it seems important for some to make a distinction between what is acceptable (sexy, provocative or an expression of shock humour), and what is offensive or could be regarded as a political message. The desire to separate these different intentions is not only expressed by the artists interviewed in this article, but is also evident in discussions on web forums. The idea of creating certain—even frightening—atmospheres as a framework for something similar to a role-play, as opposed to actual political expressions and violence, seem crucial for the reproduction of power and pleasure. By becoming a metaphorical combat zone, the club also affects the role of the DJ, who is given the status of a commander. And just as carnival and the grotesque are strategies to temporarily invert hierarchical structures, this dark electronic music scene changes the rules by using dangerous tools.
Johanna Paulsson is an independent writer and music journalist. She has a BA in Musicology and Literary Studies from Stockholm University and is currently a music critic for Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter. Her articles and reviews have appeared in magazines like Nutida Musik, Axess, Sonic and Merge.
Amy. 2011. “Goth’s closest relative? Rivetheads and the Industrial subculture”. The Ultimate Goth Guide. 16 January: <http://ultimategothguide.blogspot.com/2011/01/goths-closest-relative-rivetheads-and.html> (accessed 19 April 2011).
ASPR. 2008. “Why do people think Goths and Rivetheads are racist?”. Side-Line. 4 September: <http://www.side-line.com/forum/threads.php?id=35105_0_20_0_C> (accessed 19 April 2011).
Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984 [1965]. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Hegarty, Paul. 2007. Noise/Music: A History. New York: Continuum.
Kingsepp, Eva. 2008. “Nazityskland i populärkulturen: Minne, myt, medier” [Nazi Germany in Popular Culture: Memory, Myth, Media]. Ph.D Dissertation (Journalism, Media and Communication), Stockholm University. <http://su.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:199724/FULLTEXT01> (accessed 19 April 2011).
Koepnick, Lutz. 1999. Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Power. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Lovelace, Ada. 2009. Response to “Nachtmahr: Beware of the Empty, Vitreous and Fascist BwO”. The Gothic Imagination. 5 December: <http://www.gothic.stir.ac.uk/blog/Nachtmahr-Beware-of-the-empty-vitreous-and-fascist-BwO/> (accessed 19 April 2011).
McClary, Susan and Robert Walser. 1988. “Start Making Sense! Musicology Wrestles with Rock”. In On Record: Rock, Pop, and the Written Word, eds. Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin, 277–92. London: Routledge.
Stephanou, Aspasia. 2009. “Nachtmahr: Beware of the empty, vitreous and fascist BwO”. The Gothic Imagination. 4 December: <http://www.gothic.stir.ac.uk/blog/Nachtmahr-Beware-of-the-empty-vitreous-and-fascist-BwO/> (accessed 19 April 2011).
Till, Rupert. 2010. Pop Cult: Religion and Popular Music. London: Continuum.
[1] When using the term “dark” (electronic music) scene in the article, I refer only to the genres represented at the Amphi Festival, and to industrial and electronic body music in particular.
[2] The Gothic Imagination is a website based at the University of Stirling, Scotland, with the ambition to provide an interdisciplinary forum for lively discussion and critical debate concerning all manifestations of the Gothic mode.
[3] Ronan Harris (VNV Nation), interview with the author (Amphi Festival, Cologne) 24 July 2010. All subsequent Harris quotes are from the same conversation.
[4] When, for instance, German duo DAF—Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft—started adopting this kind of aesthetic in the early eighties, they basically took it from the gay scene: “The gay scene was always very interested in having strong male images: policemen, construction worker . . . let’s say the Village People”, concludes Gabriel “Gabi” Delgado-López with a laugh. Interview with the author (Hornstull Strand, Stockholm) 5 June 2010.
[5] Steampunk is a subculture glorifying the steam power and machines of the Victorian era, often recombining old technology and accessories such as pilot goggles with modern styles.
[6] Thomas Rainer (Nachtmahr), interview with the author (Amphi Festival, Cologne) 25 July 2010. All subsequent Rainer quotes are from the same conversation.
[7] Nachtmahr doesn’t use any predefined symbols. Consequently, a lot of the designed emblems used in this scene seem to have more to do with general archetypes of power than with political statements. As Ronan Harris explains about the logotype of VNV Nation, he wanted something that became like a trademark, a corporate brand or an emblem for an organization: “Because to be honest the whole idea of why I used the word ‘nation’ sarcastically is that we are a nation of individuals that will never be a nation but we find each other through this music...”
[8] In the sleeve notes the artwork is referred to as “fine military erotica” (Mädchen In Uniform, 2010).
[9] See for instance the comparisons made by Rupert Till in Pop Cult: Religion and Popular Music, chapter 8 “God is a DJ: Possession Trance Cults of Electronic Dance Music” (2010: 131–66).
[10] The epithet “rivethead” is often used to describe a person associated with the industrial music scene. “Industrial goth” is a somewhat simplified synonym but offers a hint about the style. For a comprehensive comparison see Amy (2011).