economy is dead
Economy is dead is a piece of music by the Slovenian band Laibach . It appeared on the 1992 album Kapital .
music
Compared to previous works, the music has "become more electronic, more metallic and composed of disparate elements, which is why it also appears more chaotic". The music is more accessible than on previous albums.
text
The time when the economy is dead was shaped , among other things, by the collapse of Yugoslavia, which "brought Slovenia's independence, but also the beginning of the Yugoslav Wars ", and that of the Soviet Union. Slovenia “ran into major economic difficulties in the early 1990s: GDP fell by more than a quarter, banks were on the verge of liquidity, inflation was over 200 percent in 1992 and between 1989 and 1993 more than 100,000 people lost their jobs ". Accordingly, “for Laibach [...] the preoccupation with Western ideologies comes to the fore”.
Music video
A music video was also recorded for Wirtschaft ist tot , directed by Peter Vezjak. The video “presents a production plant or machine room in cold colors. Laibach is playing with the Kraftwerk aesthetic here. This company also includes women who are reminiscent of a futuristic vision of the 20s and 30s. They are more machines than humans and practice an aestheticized Taylorism . ”The musicians“ first appear as android beings that are brought to light by a machine and transported by a gear. They wear wing helmets , have gilded faces and remain in rigid poses. In the control room, from which the entire machinery is controlled, they suddenly become human, lively, almost 'casual'. ”The“ kitschy farmer's chairs ”in this room,“ which seem decidedly out of place in this environment ”, represent“ a visual connection to the aesthetics of the earlier videos ”. "You seem to want to say that the organic has been sidelined, but that autonomous action is only possible from this."
Economy is dead "evokes a number of interpretive approaches and possible messages", the title or refrain, for example, "can on the one hand refer to the economic situation in Slovenia at the time, which could well be described as 'dead'". The aesthetics of "machine people or human machines" could be understood "as a reference to the 'producing of totems', i.e. monotonous work processes that (consciously) reduce people to the machine-like, but also the utopia or dystopia of the synthetic reproduction of people" . In connection with interviews with the band, the video could be understood as an illustration of the “unconscious lack of freedom”. The winged helmets actually a symbol for the Greek god Mercurius , can also be associated with the Nordic; Corresponding to its eschatological ideas, in combination with capitalism and machines, it is possible to interpret that economy is dead trying to "bring out the dream of capitalism of the destruction of the living by man".