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guest makes a great point about the 90's era.
as far as im concerned, swans were perhaps the ONLY fucking band to do what i have wanted and expected from the undead corpse that is/was alt/extreme/underground music - which is to unflinchingly document the horror, decay and misery of contemporary life, the amorality and destruction, and to do so from a perspective that doesn't try to ignore it but rather allows us to live through it without having to blind ourselves to it to survive.
and i just dont get why swans are the only band i can think of that did that. it's really a horrible testament to the failures of supposedly alternative culture, when only one person can make music like this. there was nothing nietzschean about it unlike almost all other bands that make dark music. gira was never trying to raise some sort of defiant fist as if to say "look at me surviving and making my own way amidst all this shit! i'm so disgusted so im a hero!".
that era of swans was one lament for the sadness of humanity. a song about a man literally so lonely and fucked up he kills human beings just to be in the company of their dead corpses, while he watches war and death on the tv.
and this murderer asks the corpse of the person he's just killed if he should feel sympathy for the real people who lie dead behind these images of military dominance, then he asks him if he can kiss him.
this is the point where love is exposed as a sick pathology that offers no respite from the horror of the world, and in fact only produces it. and in listening we get to experience a kind of cold release from the despair of this, because the whole sick scene is kind of crooned so that its romanticism and its longing and its darkness all merge together.
the male prostitutes with their desperate need for money and love are killed by someone so utterly twisted by the world he can only come close to tender moments of human connection after he's murdered them.
and then gira brings us out of this specific scene into the perspective of the world itself, "hunger in the desert, missiles in the sky" - the same nexus of need and desperation entangled with violence and power, only now you're no longer fooled that either of these two opposites can exist without the other.
that's when you start to see the horrible truth, which is how even innocence and beauty feed off the most horrendous of realities, of how there's no respite from either.
this is a song in which our entire social pretense is humiliated by a serial killer who is depicted as the only person having any real compassion! our safe position behind the screens is depicted as more dehumanized and disconnected than someone who isn't afraid to confront and even, in a totally fucking obscene way, LOVE the dead bodies which we'd all rather not confront, but which we're all in a way responsible for killing.
this is OUR sociopathy and misery rendered by a true artist and sold back to us. WE live in these societies that wage brutal death from the skies while we sit behind screens as isolated, infantilized units in love with our own disgusting visions of benevolence and happiness. and maybe gira is the guy whose saying - don't you realize how your rage at the dissonance of having the latter image awkwardly confronted with the former is less noble than you think?
i mean, how many other artists can make a serial killer seem like a more loving and compassionate figure than anyone else in the world?
maybe only gira was able to get to this moment where our self revulsion doesn't either turn into frenzied rage at EVERYTHING or morose self pity.
someone operating around the same time doing something similar, and from the same industrial roots, was trent reznor. but reznor stops short of gira and just screams in disgust, or gets sad. what gira is doing is a lot more mature, desire/evil is lamented, but not projected onto some other, like reznor does.
this music gives us a release from having to live up to the impossible standards of our societies vanity, it exposes us as always being closer to victims or murders than we want to think. the human condition is one sick pathology and we're spared the humiliation of having to feel good about it. instead we can despair and as guest says, there is this kind of inverted transcendence where the whole world becomes black when the element of light is introduced to these horrible songs.
again - is there ANYONE else in music who came close to that?
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