Quote from: Bigsby on August 07, 2024, 06:17:05 AMI actually agree w/ this. But you see my distinction between a fictional film and a documentary w/, for example, racist intent? The difference between Solotroff and Brethren? Between exploration and demonstration? I think ZSS et all have entirely missed the fucking point of PE.
One could make quite valid assumption that ZSS belongs, sonically and visually, more to the pretty traditional industrial. Early SPK -> Genocide Organ -> and that variety of things. There is way less of obvious humor in SPK than in Whitehouse, for example. It would be odd to say he would "miss the point of PE", if he is not really doing PE in the way that. We can see same conclusions appear right from the beginning. GPO stating that Whitehouse missed entire point of industrial music, Whitehouse doing the same for Ramleh and just about any band after them. Some of the veterans concluding power electronics is dead, already by mid 80's. Several English guys saying germans as well as americans missed the point and 90's US PE, was like metalhead dorks doing electronic death metal without sense of humor and Germans not even doing PE, but bleak industrial beats. And so on and on. Damn, even Grey Wolves and such were at times called for ruining PE with their terror-sex-politics-nazi iconography. Needless to say it has happened ever since.
Same in Finland. Most bands that may have been lumped into power electronics, are that merely because word became the one to use for all that other stuff, that ain't "plain noise". Regardless is it really power electronics like sound was in UK in the first half of the 80's. It is something different. Something different from germans and americans and so on.
In most expressions, there is this conflict that people may demand that there must be all these similar qualities that former expression has had. If one delivers the same, it often sounds like copycat. Just recycling all the same without personal take. If you happen to add personal take, and not operating with enough similar ways, this shift generally gets the response "he doesn't get it". Of course, sometimes for reason. Most often we do see, that it is not question that artists would not "get it", but that he is not there following any particular genre guidelines or imitating culture of other nations. What a lame thing it would be if one would demand german bands imitate British humor, right? It would be perhaps even comical. Not to say there wouldn't be germans that could be like that, but.. heh...
Usually, the thing we tend to call power electronics is barely "over", it just keeps moving on, decade after decade there's always been new take on it, with still having enough of something why listeners file it under the same term.
As addition, I suppose there IS humor in ZSS. Not always obvious, but even in some of the ZSS booklet (released separately of music releases), there were even blatant jokes and comical caricature drawings and stuff like that. To combine to things that ZSS uses dirlewanger brigade banner as their logo, is like... well, it is pretty damn dark even on level of PE, where it is no longer vaguely about "nazi stuff", but there is even darker history. He got the wp biker culture material there and so on. I know some people simply don't see the richness of nuance in content of his work, since they simply are incapable to see it. Perhaps due not having any clue about any of the references. That may be one of the elements of current day, that even in moment of irony, sarcasm and humor, etc, if there is not smiley emoji or you are being told there is level of, a lot sarcasm goes unnoticed. In such case, one can often ask did artist miss the point of PE, or did the
listener miss the point?
(Like is it about "nazi stuff", if it goes under the dirlewanger insignia, hah...)
