Is it wrong to listen to Nazi bands?

[luckyjimm]

Just started watching a documentary on those two girls, Prussian Blue

http://www.channel4.com/culture/micr...pop/index.html

Prussian Blue, I'm sure, make crappy music of no merit or interest. But what happens when bad people actually make good music? Could you forget the politics and still like it; or listen to it without subscribing to the politics?

As a Gothic teenager I listened to several bands who flirted with Nazi or occult imagery. Specifically, Death in June:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_In_June

who, alongside other "apocalyptic folk" bands like Current 93 used Holocaust and white supremacist imagery in some of their songs. Their politics and their place in the punk and UK political scene are intelligently dissected here by Stewart Holme: http://stewarthomesociety.org/dij.htm

I listened to Rozz Williams / Christian Death whose songs were very dark and, of course, anti-Christian

I listened to Radio Werewolf, a band set up by Zena LaVey, whose father founded the Church of Satan:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Werewolf

and a singer called David E Williams: http://www.myspace.com/davidewilliams

who is a fantastic lyricist and composer (albeit with an odd singing voice) whose albums contained beautiful love songs, but also other songs which have intentionally vile (yet ironically cloaked) supremacist / psychotic sentiments.

I recently downloaded and listened to his music again and found, as when I was a teenager, I very much liked his love/anti-love songs and just didn't listen to the extremist/sadistic ones. (I am the same when it comes to Billy Bragg). I found and have been listening on repeat to a duet he did with Rozz Williams - a cover of Abba's The Winner Takes it All. It was one of the most beautiful covers I ever heard.

So, could you forgive yourself for listening to good tracks by bad people? Perhaps what you do is form a judgement on what use they're making of the imagery. It's all about context. For example Sylvia Plath's famous poem Daddy makes very strong use of this sort of imagery:

http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/404.html

but what she is doing is condemning her father by casting him in the role of a German, and herself as a Jewish victim - incredibly powerful and shocking, but in no sense is she endorsing the extremist views. She's just using it as a metaphor, the most powerful weapon in her stock of imagery. By the same measure of authorial intent you might condemn T.S. Eliot poems which appear more like a sincere expression of his anti-semitism.

So, the two considerations I believe are a) the artist's intent, and, b) genre. For example the comic metal band GWAR have some horrible lyrics about serial killers, but it's part of a death/glam metal genre and you realise it's part of an act. Similarly with the goth bands, their Occult/Nazi references are part of a scene's "dark" image and not really reflecting their beliefs.

How do you decide what you should or shouldn't listen to - is it just what you like, or do political considerations come into it?


I suppose I think that listening to genuinely Nazi bands like Skrewdriver or Prussian Blue, who come out of the white supremacist movement, cannot be justified on any grounds, musical or otherwise. But if they're part of the goth or metal scene, they don't really mean it and you can listen to it. Is this a cop-out?