From The Rutles to 2006’s Butchering the Beatles—A Headbashing Tribute to Alice Donut’s wonderful trombone-fueled take on “Helter Skelter,” Liverpool’s Fab Four have seen their fair share of parody acts and twisted covers. There must be a kazoo Beatles tribute LP out there, but I’m too lazy to look. I will say this, however; you will find no stranger a take on the Beatles’ oeuvre than Laibach’s 1988 cover of the Beatles’ 1970 Let It Be LP.
A Slovenian industrial “Kollektiv” founded in the former Yugoslavia in the same year that Tito died, Laibach are best known for their totalitarian-looking military uniforms and Wagnerian bombast, to say nothing of concerts that resemble political rallies. Their flirting with the imagery of social realism, Nazism, and Italian Futurism forced Laibach into dissident status in Yugoslavia, and led them to be labeled fascists by folks who don’t know an anti-fascist parody when they see one. Indeed, Laibach were actually driven to declare, “We are fascists as much as Hitler was a painter.” One writer, in on the joke, praised Laibach’s “ridiculous lust for authority,” as personified by their many militaristic trappings and big operatic sound.
Me, I think they’re the funniest band to come along since Killdozer. Like Killdozer, Laibach are an acquired taste; you’ll either laugh along with them or turn them off post-haste. With their proclivity for transmuting pop songs into military marches complete with manly choirs, Laibach are best described as Phil Spector meets Wagner, and just because John Peel liked them doesn’t mean you will.
On Let It Be, Laibach gleefully set about deconstructing the penultimate LP of the world’s most famous band by turning it inside out. Laibach take the Beatles’ attempt to capture that raw rock’n’roll spirit of their early days and transform it into the musical equivalent of Hitler architect Albert Speer’s gigantism, and by so doing manage to produce the most bizarre Beatles tribute ever conceived. This ain’t rock’n’roll, it’s musical genocide, and I for one will never hear the Beatles in the same way again.
Before I set about discussing the songs, a bit of ground keeping. First, Laibach omit Let It Be’s title track, perhaps because they dislike the album version of “Let It Be” as much as I do. And second, their cover of “Maggie Mae” isn’t a cover at all, but a combination of a German folk song and a song from Carl Maria von Weber’s early 19th century opera Der Freischütz.
With its thumping martial beat and big male choir, “Maggie Mae” sounds like a variation on “The Horst Wessel Song.” As for “Get Back,” which features vocalist Milan Fras’ growl and a male choir, it’s at least recognizable as a cover, as is “Across the Universe,” on which the women from the band Germania sing. This one is, amazingly enough, actually pretty, which makes it an anomaly in Laibach’s oeuvre.
Some cataclysmic drumming defines “Dig It,” while on “The Long and Winding Road” Laibach give up all pretense of covering the tune in favor of about two minutes of mass chanting and cheering. You’ll be excused if you’re reminded uncomfortably of the Nuremburg Rallies, or of a Trump Rally for that matter. “One After 909” offers up a snippet from Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water” and kinda actually rocks, albeit in a monumental and herky-jerky way, thanks to the sound of an actual electric guitar.
Laibach render “Two of Us” unrecognizable by disposing of melody altogether in favor of an industrial beat and some operatic singing. The same goes for “Dig a Pony,” which you would never confuse for the Beatles’ rough and ready original thanks to Laibach’s humorous conflating it with “The Song of the Volga Boatmen.” Fras and Company torture the song in favor of covering it, ignoring the old dictum that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Meanwhile, some women belt out the tune in the background, and it’s not hard to imagine them wearing horned Viking helmets. And Laibach defenestrates “I Me Mine,” thanks again to a male choir over which Fras croaks, “I! Me! Mine!” True, this one is more recognizable than many of the others, but only because Laibach are careful to sing the song’s title and actually hold on to a bit of the song’s melody.
Meanwhile, on “I’ve Got a Feeling” Laibach again provide some maddened crowd chanting in tune to a big guitar and some even bigger thumping, while Fras repeats, “I’ve got a feeling/Deep inside.” Then he lets the crowd sing along. It’s not so different from Queen’s totalitarian anthem “We Will Rock You” really. As for “For You Blue,” it’s a relatively quiet and even soothing affair; you can almost recognize the Beatles’ original under all those strings, and when the glockenspiel and horn come in you can definitely recognize it, although Laibach have gleefully rendered it into a rather banal Yuletide song.
Laibach’s confrontational flirtation with the trappings of totalitarian is, I think, less a joke than a reminder that we’re all still unfortunately susceptible to the lure of Big Brother. You can write them off as a joke band, but theirs is a queasy-making joke with a very bleak kernel of depressing truth in it. As H.L. Mencken once said, and this goes to the dark side of the election of Donald “Bring back waterboarding” Trump, “Most people in this world want security, not liberty.” Bottom line? I suspect Laibach know this, and it scares the shit out of them.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A-
