Totalitär
I wrote an introduction to this blog in my very first post, but perhaps I can say more about what this all means to me. I want to say something in a moment about Totalitär, who are not for me just any old band.
When I was in college, I frantically produced a little punk fanzine called Voices Wake Us…, pretentiously named after a line in T.S. Eliot’s “Prufrock.” On top of my coursework and doing a weekly radio show, twice a semester I would write this little zine and slap it together with tape and scissors and stolen xerox codes, and send it off into the world. At first, at school, I didn’t have many friends, and this was a way of communicating with—who knows? Somebody. And as I kept doing it, it turned out that the people who were most interested were total strangers. So it was a kind of message in a bottle.
The current blog is something different. I’m not really still getting into new hardcore music—there are no “beginner’s mistakes” as were often to be found in my younger music writing. These are the opinions of a decade or more of thinking and listening and obsessing. New punk music certainly has my ear, but nothing will ever receive as much attention as Negative FX or None of the Above. I’ve sunk a lot of my time into those records: the name for that time being “my youth.”
I’m trying here to set down some things I’ve thought about for a while, and especially conversations that I’ve returned to over and over with friends. Music has a special relationship with friendship, I think. You invite friends over to listen to records, you go to shows together, you make top 10 lists, you trade, you go record shopping, you fight, and your tastes develop—all as friends. It’s hard to imagine such a social aspect to my love of, say, the 19th century novel. The most beautiful and passionate thing I’ve ever written is my dissertation, but I don’t expect any of my friends will ever read it. That’s ok; it’s for me.
A really great movie about friendship was just playing at Film Forum, “The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp.” I tried to get my closest friends to go see it, but I don’t think anyone did. They missed out. This is a moving story of friendship, whose message is: our friends are really our own courage to get through life. It’s not something I have, it is an imputed consciousness that resides in my friends and the people who love me. I think this is absolutely true. Friendship, in other words, is not so much a relationship: it is our own substance, lodged in someone else.
But friendships can also be lodged in other things: their substance is external, as it were. This is truest for me with regards to a few bands. Totalitär have a life for me, that is perhaps not empirically “there.” We think that our relationships with other people are shifting things, or compromise-formations, or subject to interests and selfishness and time constraints. But friendship is already situated a bit beyond the two people involved. This is why it can never disappear, but like a talisman something is held there forever. It is a private pleasure and occasional sadness for me to run through instances of this strata… in any case, one of them is Totalitär, a band who have meant a great deal to me in terms of friendship.
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Totalitär are the ultimate cult hardcore band. But this is not something you could tell just by listening to them. Unlike the Birthday Party, or Hawkwind, or Dead Moon, their music is not in itself strange or polarizing. That’s just it, though. The “secret” of the band is just the fact that you could mistake them for one of a dozen other Swedish hardcore groups who sound like Discharge (No Security, Meanwhile, Avskum). They are a cult band in the inverse sense of the Eleusinian mysteries: the way of access to their cult-ness is not barred or esoteric—it is rather an open secret.
I’ve written about Discharge on here before, and Totalitär themselves represent one of the great interpretations of Discharge. This is Discharge rendered in geometrical, bulky tones—there’s no “rock music” here, no guitar flash, no lo-fi haziness, no heavy metal creeping in. Only the very abstract, unmelodic difficulty of Discharge—the part of Discharge that moved the punk lyric into the starkest minimalism, the part of Discharge that put cabbage on the cover of punk albums. Call it “arty” if you will.
What Totalitär understood better than anyone was the deranged, mid-tempo Discharge song (“Religion Instigates,” “A Look at Tomorrow”): Discharge as weird pop-punk band. No one else has ever really grasped this (although the Mob 47 choice of Discharge covers is revealing).
Totalitär never toured, they played less than 20 shows in as many years of being a band, many of their records look like generic crust records, I don’t know any of their lyrics (all in Swedish), and their records will never be worth enough money to attract attention. I doubt a box set of their outtakes and demos is forthcoming.
A lot of hardcore is based on “image.” Discharge themselves had one of the coolest looks and most memorable band logos in history; arguably their politics were all image. It would be easy to think that Totalitär didn’t care about image, or that their use of cartoon skeletons and wallpaper patterns was just eccentricity. I think, on the other hand, that all these things matter. You were being told clearly: this wasn’t music for little kids, for someone whose criterion for musical taste was pictures of war victims, or who wanted their hand held.
If this sounds like Totalitär are somehow conceptual and abstruse, things couldn’t be farther from the case. They are catchy and bouncy and even pleasant (in a sense). But this is much more like Wire or Gang of Four’s catchiness and bounciness than (the next closest great band to Totalitär) Lama. It’s never “melodic,” is often just a pulsing patch of tone. The riffs are laid out like big hunks of meat left to dry, just slabs really. The d-beat is like a metronome. There’s something reserved, odd, and wry about this *as* punk music. Hear for yourself. Below is a video for my favorite of their mid-tempo songs, “Intolerans,” and then their entire first EP.
