Arguably the most obvious examples of apoliteic music—which reveals itself through music, lyrics, band names, album and song titles, cover art, style of dress as well as being subtly articulated in live performances—can be found in certain Neo-Folk and Martial Industrial works. From a ‘technical’ point of view, the two genres may seem musically different. The typical Neo-Folk artists sing melancholic ‘folkish’ songs to the accompaniment of acoustic guitars, violins and piano, while typical Martial Industrial acts create dark bombastic collages that usually feature various samples of military marches, battle noises or war-oriented speeches. The genres correlate—hardly surprisingly—with Evola’s interpretation of the idealized origin of now desacralized modern western music. From his point of view, as expounded in Cavalcare la tigre, ‘the most modern western music has been characterized by increasing estrangement from its lineage, both the melodramatic, melodic, heroically romantic and pretentious line (the last of which is typically represented by Wagnerism), and the tragic-pathetic line (we need only refer to Beethoven’s principal ideas)’. Although it’s unlikely that Evola himself would have enjoyed most extreme samples of Martial Industrial music, it is significant that both genres—no matter how ‘technically’ different they are—fit his description.
Apoliteic music is organically accommodated within Neo-Folk and Martial Industrial since their roots lie in revolutionary and national cultural traditions. While Martial Industrial clearly descends from Industrial music, Peter Webb and Stéphane François correctly assert that Neo-Folk, too, is an emanation of Industrial music. Industrial can be briefly and inevitably inadequately characterized as a fusion of Rock and Electronic music, mixed with avant-garde experiments and Punk provocation. Although the genre was ‘genetically’ born in the mid-1970s with the establishment of the Industrial Records label, Karen Collins has traced the first usage of the term ‘industrial’ as applied to music back to the preface of Francesco Balilla Pratella’s Musica Futurista of 1912. Luigi Russolo, another Futurist musician and Pratella’s colleague, was the author of a 1913 manifesto entitled L’Art des bruits (The art of noises) in which one apparently finds the first conceptualization of Martial Industrial. Considering the variety of natural and artificial noises that could be employed for the projected ‘revolution of music’, Russolo wrote: ‘And we must not forget the very new noises of Modern Warfare. The poet Marinetti, in a letter from the Bulgarian trenches of Ariadnople described to me … in his new futurist style, the orchestra of a great battle.’ Although Russolo’s Futurism did not draw him to Italian Fascism, Pratella and Filippo Marinetti did become—like many other Futurists—ardent supporters of Mussolini’s regime. Obviously, modern Industrial music has been influenced by other cultural and musical trends (Dadaism, musique concrète, Pop, Rock, Electronic and Post-Punk), but its emergence (or rather re-emergence) in the mid-1970s was a result of the ‘spiritual’ evolution of Futurist music.
Apart from general influences that shaped Industrial music, Neo-Folk draws heavily on national folk traditions. The first point of reference is a wave of the so-called ‘roots’ revivals that swept the Europeanized world a few decades after the Second World War, reaching their apogee in the 1960s and 1970s. Several major features characterized roots revivals: first, the revitalization and imitation of national traditional music; second, the adaptation of folk music to modern musical genres, especially to Rock and Pop; and, third, the politicization of folk music. As Britta Sweers argues, ‘in the context of the various twentieth-century folk revivals, the terminology [folk music] was always combined with political or ideological meanings, in particular with the idea of traditional or folk music as a counterpoint to popular (i.e., commercial) music’. Politically, most folk bands and singer-songwriters were influenced by left-wing ideas while ‘the events of May 1968’ had a strong impact on the development of roots revivals. The left-wing orientation of folk artists was particularly evident in Germany, where the roots revival encountered a problem of legitimacy since Volkmusik was ‘destroyed’ by ‘the “kurzbehoste” [those dressed in short trousers] of the German youth groups and the armies of National Socialist soldiers and supporters’ through their ‘aggressive usage of the songs and the tradition’.
Although the US and European roots revivals have—to a certain degree—triggered the emergence of Neo-Folk in the 1980s, apoliteic Neo-Folk bands apparently draw inspiration not from the 1970s left-wing protest folk songs, but rather from the previous folk revivals that took place at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. These revivals varied throughout European countries. In Britain, for example, the phenomenon was associated with folk song collectors such as Cecil Sharp, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Lucy Broadwood, who endeavoured—quite successfully—to raise public appreciation of folk music and to ‘secure’ a distinctively English folk tradition. In Germany, the roots revival unfolded within various clubs and movements such as Der Wandervogel (the bird of passage). This movement began in 1896 ‘in reaction to aspects of bourgeois life and music aesthetics and presented a counterculture to the ubiquitous, harmony-singing Männergesangsvereine (“male choral societies”) of the late-nineteenth century’; it ‘aimed to reclaim a national identity for Germany, based upon its songs’. In Italy, one of the most famous folk song collectors was none other than Francesco Balilla Pratella, who withdrew from the Futurist movement after the First World War and dedicated the rest of his life to the traditional music of his native Romagna, ‘much to Marinetti’s disgust’. Revealingly, by moving from Futurist music to Italian traditional folk, Pratella anticipated the 1980s rise of Neo-Folk out of the Industrial milieu.
- Excerpt From: Apoliteic music: Neo-Folk, Martial Industrial and ‘metapolitical fascism’, by Anton Shekhovtsov
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